Your song library is the heart of Setlist. Here's a quick guide to get you started adding, organising, and managing your band's collection of songs.
Click "Add Song" on the appropriate state tile (I'd suggest new songs should start in the Backlog - see below) to add a new song. You'll enter the artist name, song title, and optionally any other details. Once saved, you can then view the full details and use the online lookup feature to automatically fetch artwork, duration, and other information from an online service. You can also add tags, comments and other details - see below for a further explanation.
Songs move through different states to help organise your library:
The typical workflow is: a member adds a song to the Backlog, bandmates vote and comment on it, then an admin moves it to Practicing once the band agrees to try it. After rehearsing, it moves to Approved and can be added to setlists.
Or, you may find that after trying it out it just isn't working for whatever reason. At which point, you can simply move it to the rejected pile and document your reasons. This is handy if you keep having "why did we drop this song again?"-type discussions!
Band members can upvote or downvote songs to indicate their preferences. This is especially useful for backlog songs - sort by votes to see which suggestions are the most popular, then tackle those for your next rehearsal session. You can also cast a neutral vote (needs to be enabled in band preferences) or remove your vote entirely.
Each song can include:
Each song has a Links section where you can add URLs to external resources. You can also use the built-in lookup tools:
Also, if you add any YouTube links (music videos, like performances, tutorials etc.) they will get shown in an embedded video player.
Tags are custom labels you can create to organise your songs by genre, mood, or anything else that makes sense for your band. For example, my band uses them to indicate songs that require a different tuning, or an instrument change. This can be useful to make sure that we don't include too many guitar swaps or awkward pauses next to each other in our setlists. I've heard from other users that are using them to identify "high energy" or "chilled" or "set closer" songs - feel free to experiment!
You can also attach them to setlists, which can be useful to identify rehearsal/practice sessions for example.
Custom fields let your band add extra details to songs beyond the standard information I've included like artist and title. Band admins can create fields to track things like key, tempo, tuning, or anything else that's useful.
When creating a custom field, you can pick from three types: Text (for free-form input like "Key of G", "120 BPM" etc.), Single Choice (a dropdown where you pick one option from a list), and Multiple Choice (checkboxes where you can select several options).
Custom fields are managed from the Custom Fields page and appear on every song's detail view.