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Setlist is a project I created to help my own covers band (check us out!) keep organised. It started as a simple tool to build setlists for gigs and rehearsals, and manage our practice sessions. But as I enjoyed the development experience so much it quickly grew to provide a central place for us to manage songs, vote on favorites, leave comments, organise events and more!

Like most bands, we’d tried loads of approaches, from spreadsheets to sticky notes, shared calendars and the like - and we still couldn’t keep track of all the great song ideas we’d had or easily respond to the question of "Can we make a gig on this date?". And we also kept forgetting things we’d all agreed on at rehearsals, like how to start or end songs! There are plenty of well-established commercial offerings out there (and you should check some of them out, too - I have no money-making angle here!) but as I have a long background in web development I decided to build this as one of my fun side-projects.

As we found the project really useful I decided to open it up to the public. It's been "live" since 2025 and we've been using it ever since. I'm also really happy that there's now 100s of users also signed up and making use of the project, planning gigs and organising their rehearsal sessions. The feature set is deliberately kept small and focussed - and the project's scope is limited by what I can create or build myself in my spare time - but I hope you'll find it useful and fun too 😊 Plus, it's totally free (more on that below) and you can also export all your data at any point, so give it a go and let me know what you think!

This is a method my band found very effective when deciding which songs to add to our setlists. Songs can be in different states:

• Approved: Songs you're currently playing or have all agreed on
• Practicing: Songs you're working on
• Rejected: Songs you're no longer performing, or you tried but they didn't work out
• Backlog: Songs that have been suggested but not yet approved

The idea is that new songs first get added to the backlog. Bandmates can then comment on them and vote for their favorites - or down vote any they don't like (although we try to limit the downvotes unless we really can't stand something!)

You can then sort, select and move songs to the practicing state. Once you've tried them out and agree you all want to play them, they get added to the approved state where they form your core library of songs and can then be added to setlists.

Band admins can toggle this behavior in the Band Settings.

Each song has a Links section where you can search for lyrics and tabs, or add your own custom links. From the song details page, click Lyrics to search Genius or Tabs to search Songsterr for multi-instrument tabs and sheet music. You'll get a list of matches to choose from, and the selected link will be automatically added to the song's links section.

You can also add your own links to external resources like tutorials, chord charts, or anything else that helps you work with songs. Click the "+ Link" button to add a URL with a description. Links open in a new tab when clicked, and you can edit or delete them using the pencil and trash icons next to each link.

If you use the online lookup feature to fetch song data and artwork from Apple Music, a link to the Apple Music page will be automatically added.

Also, if you add any YouTube links (music videos, like performances, tutorials etc.) they will get shown in an embedded video player.

An Auto Setlist is a setlist that builds itself from a set of criteria you define (e.g. "all approved songs tagged #encore", or "anything I haven't played at The Kings Head yet"). Songs are pulled in automatically and the list stays in sync as your library changes - so you don't have to remember to update it when you approve a new song or move one over to practicing.

Every band gets three Auto Setlists by default, one for each song state (Approved, Practicing, Backlog) - you'll find them under the new Auto pill on the Setlists page. See the full Auto Setlists guide for the available criteria types, operators, and a few worked examples.

Setlist includes a scheduling system designed for gigging and rehearsing bands. It's been built from the ground up after years of experience playing in part-time bands and includes:

• Shared band calendar - you can create events (gigs, rehearsals etc.) with useful band-focussed details like separate times for "Soundcheck" and "Load-in", attached setlists and more...
• Personal calendar integration - event invites sync to external services like Google/Apple Calendar, Outlook and others. Email integration is included, and RSVPing from your email client updates in the app automatically
• Availability blocks - band members can mark dates they're unavailable, so you can see if everyone's free before booking a gig
• Venue management with maps - save your regular venues with address and contact details, and see them plotted on an interactive map
• Gig history - attach setlists to events at each venue to build up a record of what you played and when, so you can keep things fresh for repeat audiences. You can also comment on gigs which is useful for attaching notes or discussing how the event went afterwards!

See also the Calendar Invites & RSVPs guide for a walkthrough of how calendar sync works, or read the full FAQ entries below.

The Rehearsal Room is where you go to practise songs that have audio attached. You can find it from the Rehearsal Room tile on your band's homepage, or by clicking the play icon next to any song with audio in the song library. It shows a waveform visualisation of the song with playback controls, and lets you split a song up into sections, each of which can have individual speed and loop settings.

See the guide for more details including screenshots, or the video tutorial for a full walk-through.

Please ask! A huge number of features and improvements have come directly from user feedback - everything from big additions like the Auto Setlists feature, down to smaller layout and workflow tweaks. I genuinely love hearing from users and it's one of the most rewarding parts of running the site. Check the Changelog when logged in to see all the recent updates, many of which started as a comment from a user!

That said, I am just one person building this in my spare time, so I'm focussed on things I can realistically deliver and maintain - and have fun doing! Requests like "Can you make a mobile app" or "Can you add a detailed finance tracker and invoicing" will most likely get a "Sorry, no" as they're either outside my skill (or interest) set, or something my own band would never use and I therefore can't properly test.

But if it's technically feasible, within my ability and a useful addition, I'll absolutely see what I can do - you can email me, or use the built-in feedback form to send your ideas or comments :)

I did! Here's my personal website. I'm a musician and IT professional (working mainly with modern apps & cloud platforms) and I play in a local covers band. I've been building websites and infrastructure since the late 90s, and have been playing bass for about as long. Having experienced the challenges of trying to organise a hobbyist band and keep track of song suggestions and performance details, I decided to build this site to help us. I'm also a massive geek, and was looking for an excuse to get back into web development as well 😃 You can read more about the tech stack behind it and how I built it in this article.

As we found it useful I decided to open it up to the public. It's been a really enjoyable experience combining my passions for music and technology, and it's been great seeing all the new users join up too!

Much of this site relies on the fantastic work of the open source community and other projects. Special "shout-outs" go to:

• Ruby On Rails - The framework behind this site. Makes developing web apps an absolute joy!
• Wavesurfer - Waveform display and playback in the Rehearsal Room feature
• FFmpeg - Swiss-Army-Knife of audio processing
• StreamlineHQ - Great colourful icons!
• FullCalendar - Fantastic JS Calendar component

If you're looking for a commercial offering that does a lot more than my app with a long-established history and developer behind it, I can recommend Band Helper from past experience. There's native apps and it even handles things like controlling stage lighting! A member in one of my old bands used it and it was really slick.

I've also recently been made aware of OnSong - this looks really cool. Lots of features, compatible accessories, native Mac/iOS app and more. I haven't used it myself, but I hear lots of good things about it.

You can export your entire band data at any point from this site, so it should be pretty simple to switch to an alternative. If you have any other suggestions in this space, let me know!

The short version is that it's for the same reason I (and I guess most musicians, too) make music: Because I enjoy it. Because I want to share it with other people. Because it takes my mind interesting places and it gives me a creative outlet. If I started charging for it, it would cease to be a labour of love, and would instead become an obligation. I'm fortunate that I can make music on my own terms, and I want the same thing for my other projects.

Longer (rantier) version: Firstly, building a site like this is, frankly, not that hard. Especially if you stick to the basic core features. True, there were interesting challenges along the way (processing calendar email responses was... not fun), but nothing insurmountable. It's really just a basic CRUD application with some domain-specifics tacked on, which made it an ideal target for exploring a web framework I wanted to re-learn.

Secondly, because in Internet timescales, I'm what is technically known as "an old fart". I remember how things used to be - I've been writing code for nearly 40 years now, and creating websites and building web infrastructure professionally for over 25 years. I got my first email address at university, was around for the first dot-com bubble and spent the first few years of my career preparing for Y2K. I remember the early, quirky Internet before it got drowned in AI slop, plastered in adverts and mined for data.

People would build cool things all the time, and give them away with no expectation of compensation - we did it just because it was fun. It's in that spirit that I've been blogging and building things over the years, and although I'm probably in a shrinking minority now, I still hark back to the good ol' days and a return to the "small web".