A while back Songselect dropped the usr file and the only way I have found to use their site is download songs as text and cut/paste into new song panel. OpenLP seems to be able to directly download song straight into setup along with authors and license numbers so no editing is necessary and song
goes directly into database. Any progress on making things easier in Quelea ?
Afraid not - there is an API for it, but CCLI won’t release it to free programs like Quelea as they want to charge for its use. I believe OpenLP uses screen scraping, which is a bit dubious for copyright reasons and requires constant changing every time the website code changes, so not something that we’d use in Quelea I’m afraid.
My personal thoughts on this aren’t exactly secret - I (rather strongly) feel that since people pay for Songselect licenses, the API should be bundled as part of that license, and CCLI shouldn’t be trying to make a quick extra buck by charging for its use. Unfortunately that doesn’t change the state of play of these things!
All I can suggest is to contact CCLI and ask them to make their Songselect API freely available - if enough people do, then they’re more likely to consider it.
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After double checking I can see what you mean. No license needed to download SongSelect through OpenLP . And putting user license number in setup seems to be only to show on screen without showing the actual song copyright number. The usage tracking is just for show.Any chance we’ll be able to show user license on screen or track usage on Quelea in future versions?
FYI…
OpenLP V3 uses an internal browser window to allow you to log in to SongSelect and import a song.
It may be worth looking at as an alternative to scraping or paying for the API.
JJ
That sounds interesting - do you have any more info on this? Or is it just an internal browser window where people can copy / paste into OpenLP? The last I’ve seen was this forum post (https://forums.openlp.org/discussion/5480/songselect-import) which doesn’t mention it, though admittedly that’s on the 2.x branch.
I don’t have information, other than using it.
It works well, though.
It only imports the lyrics, though, not the chord charts.
Download the v3 beta, if you want to see how it works.
I’m sure they would give some direction, if you wanted to implement something similar.
JJ
I just download the chordpro and edit it, then import it as plaintext.