Import OpenSong songbase possible?

OpenSong stores it's songs in an XML format, and so it should be fairly trivial to write an importer for openlp.org. I just haven't had the time to do that yet.

I have a few scripts that import songs from various formats, and I will look into modifying one of them to import OpenSong XML files. Note, some information will get lost (e.g. chords/style info/tags that identify verses and choruses). I will also try and make it obey the 'presentation' order, but depends on how much time I have.

Note to Raoul/Derek: It might be worth at this stage 'reserving' some special characters for holding information such as choruses. I wouldn't expect you to implement anything that could use them at this late stage, but just to strip them out and ignore them for now.
Possible examples (there may be better alternatives, just noting these quickly):
; (at the beginning of the line) - comment
[?] (at the beginning of the line) - ? being a verse/chorus indicator
<?>...</?> (anywhere) - Reserved for future formatting options. e.g. italics, bold, superscript or colour change etc.

Ok, today after Church I decided to quickly write this utility. I'll upload it a bit later tonight, and you will be able to download it from the utilities page.

Some other, no doubt welcome, news is that I've embedded the import utility into openlp.org, and it should be available in RC4.

Darn, you finished yours first, I'd pretty much completed mine before I went to Church this evening! :-)

Well I guess you'd be silly not to use Raoul's version incorporated into openlp.org, but everyone likes choice, so you'll find an alternative import via the first link on the aforementioned utilities page ;-)

Well, I think for the moment they're better off using yours gushie, mine doesn't import the authors correctly, so they don't show up in openlp.org, although they *are* in the database. I'm only gonna get back to looking at that bug later this week.

OK in that case I'd better test mine a bit more rigorously then :-) Just in-case anyone has downloaded my first attempt, an improved second attempt is now available, which also attempts to obey the 'presentation' sequence and more gracefully handles OpenSong's embedded command sequences within the lyrics.

Ok, I've updated mine, but it doesn't do any of the fancy things that gushie's does... it just pulls the songs in straight, and inserts the author if it needs to.

gushie, we actually are planning to do something like this, but it's not gonna work the way OpenSong's currently does.

Hi guys. Thx for making the importer. Gonna be a great help for many I think. Raoul,had a problem with your tool until I realised that the cache file that was part of the song folder caused the importer to crash. Also seems like one of the songs that was empty ie no lyrics, also cause it to crash. Once I removed them the import was no problem. Maybe there's a way to make the importer ignore files it doesn't know what to do with? Anyway, thanks a lot! I'll be running OpenLP live for the first time this weekend thanks to your importer. Appreciate it. EDIT: Raoul, songs are also imported with tags (V1,C etc) and a space before each line (as in OpenSong convention). This means that every song will still have to be edited by hand. Tried Jonathan's importer and that worked perfectly for my needs i.e it removed the tags and spaces.

This was just a quick attempt written one Sunday afternoon. The importer within openlp.org should hopefully have better parsing and things, if I get the chance to work on it.

RE: cache files. I did try to exclude them, will have to look into that again. I'm excluding "_cache" files. Is your  cache file called something else?

just checked and mine is _cache. not sure what happened? Please note that my comments are intended to be helpfull in tracking issues. I'm gratefull for any effort made in making it easy for users to come accross to OpenLP.

Hi raoul, I have installed the new softwre that I downloaded yesterday 13 Feb 2008 and tried importing my existing opensong database! It keeps coming up with an error and then starts the whole process over again! I also cannot stop the process once it started, do you have a solution for this?

 

Werner 

One option would be to temporarily move the song it's failing on out of the OpenSong folder (Probably the one alphabetically after the last one that gets saved into openlp) and try again.

Alternatively try my script at http://ricepudd.googlepages.com/myopenlputilities#opensongsongs

do any of these tools support multiple authors import the way openLP likes it?

i just quickly wrote a script to convert songs from the german VG Musikedition -Database (something like the english CCLI) to opensong-files.  The only problem remaining is, that I dont know how to delimiter authors from each other so these import tools work (I tried the internat with , ; / and \n). If that is not possible at the moment i would request that feature :) I will publish the converter as soon as this import problem is fixed.

regards,

patrick 

My script in the comment you replied to does split authors. It looks for a "," as separator.