StrumMachine does a great job of letting me share lists of songs between myself and my friends I play music with.
It does a great job of allowing me to enter a new chord chart and share it with friends I play music with.
The one place it falls down on being our group songbook is allowing me to share lyrics.
If I enter a reference to the lyrics online, that reference doesn’t share, it’s entirely personal.
If I enter the lyrics in the notes, those notes don’t share because they’re personal.
I like the product. It’s got a beautiful simplicity to it. This is just the one feature that’s missing that would allow us to ditch the paper songbook our local group maintains.
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Hi Shabbir,
Thanks for bringing this up. Yes, notes are not shared because it’s assumed that different folks will want to have their own notes. But I can certainly see the utility of having a “shared space” where folks can all see the same notes – not just for lyrics but for other band-related or group-related notes. Same with sharing reference links. Of course, you’d only want these to be visible to your bandmates.
It seems to me that the only way I could make this happen is to introduce the concept of a “social group” to Strum Machine, where you and your friends would “join” the group and then have a shared section of the Notepad on every song, shared visibility of custom References, and perhaps other things I haven’t thought of, like a group comments feed on each song or other communication options.
This is a pretty big feature, though, with probably a ton of tricky details in the implementation, so I haven’t given it a lot of thought yet. Not sure when I’ll be able to tackle it head-on. But I welcome your thoughts (and anyone else’s thoughts) about the subject!
Luke,
Thanks for taking the time to respond to me directly and so quickly. I see the challenges you’re bringing up, and I agree, that would make it more complex. What if instead we made the use case easier? What if we had a “public notes” field that was visible to anyone you shared the song with? I don’t really care if others see my public notes when I share a song because it will mostly just contain lyrics that are public information anyway. And as long as I know it’s public when I put information in that field, I’m forewarned.
I really don’t need a feature that allows me to share some notes about the song with just my bandmates and nobody else, and implementing the code for that group would be more challenging, I agree.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to listen to my suggestion. Thanks for a good product.
I see there is an about field that is similar.
The problem is that when you share a song, you’re sharing a link that isn’t tied to your account. That is, everyone who shares a song in the public library is sending the same URL, the same link. So there’s no way to grab your notes based on that link. I suppose I could add that association to the URL, but that adds more complexity too because now you have to make it clear that this is happening, and it makes the URLs longer, and what happens if someone saves the song to their own library?
Similarly, say you have a public song on a shared list. You couldn’t just make the notes visible to anyone who can see the song, because strangers wouldn’t want to see other people’s notes. So what do you do? Attach the notes to the list? Embed something in the link? How does that work with lists?
I’m only posing these questions a) to think out loud a bit, and b) to offer some details as to why it’s tricky to implement. The more I think about it, a “groups” feature might be the simplest way forward, in fact! But I haven’t thought this through entirely either, so I may be missing something.
The About field is meant more for transcription notes, song authorship notes, etc… it’s read-only for public songs and limited in length. I still wonder if this should have been combined with the Notepad… or even the References area as well… 
It is a very complex process to make something that ends up as simple as possible. 
I appreciate your thoughts and feedback!
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No sweat, thanks for giving it so much thought.
Thanks again for thinking through these issues. Strum machine is really useful to the few bluegrass folks I play with and so we’ve subscribed to support the product. Hope you never let your foot off the gas.
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I would like to add my vote for this feature. When I share a song with a friend, I’d like an option so that friend can (1) change it, add notes, lyrics, references, whatever, and (2) see the references that I use for the song (lyrics, video examples, etc). I understand Luke’s statement that it may come with unanticipated consequences. My counter argument is I’m not sharing sensitive information in a song. My version of a song is a working document that is intended to be used in group collaboration.
Thanks for your input. This is definitely still on my list of things to look into in the future…