CCL Analysis

[Alfie]

Hi Christian,

I think Zionworx is a terrific product. All credit to you for providing it for nothing - it's easily as good as the competition.

A wish that I have is a way of analysing which songs we've used for the CCL feedback at the end of each year. They require a return from us in which we let them know every song we've displayed that year - so that they can calculate royalties I guess.

It would be excellent if Zionworx did it for me! I.e. I can get a report of all songs used and displayed in a period of time.

Cheers,

Alfie.

[intuitas]

Hi Alfie,

This may come with changes to the database for V 3.0 or later.
As a stop gap, since most of us only use a fraction of the songs available in the various database collections can I suggest you move all your database files to a new directory (say \database within the zionworx directory) then restart zionworx which will create a new empty songs.dbf database file. Then import and create songs as you need to use them. If you have Access or another dBase compatible database manager (even Excel will do) you could then generate a report of the accumulated files to provide CCl with their required list.

Goc Bless.

Paul

[Christian]

Hi Alfie and Paul,

CCL reporting is something that's come up a lot. As Paul suggested, we are hopng to build this into v3.0 with other database changes, although time is flying by and I can't guarantee it will happen soon...

Another approach which someone suggested (Paul?) a while ago was 'offline processing' of Service List (.bin) files. This would be quite simple to do and I could write something small to do that job after v3.0 is released.

So in the meantime, I would recommend keeping your Service List files safe, and also make sure that your PC clock is correct so that the files have the correct date stamp

If anybody has any other ideas then please share them...

[Alfie]

If you are prepared to release details of the format of the BIN files, I would be very happy to write something that would analyse a directory's worth and produce appropriate reports if that would save time and assist you. I'd be happy to make it available to others too.

I spent most of my working life as a Software Engineer in various languages before becoming a full time pastor!

Alfie.

[Christian]

Cheers Alfie!

Now that's the kind of response I like!

I'll be in touch asap...

[intuitas]

Sounds great.
I did provide some feedback on the Service Lists but it was more related to ensuring the integrity of the database and the service list (ie. that songs in any 'live' service list were actually in the database).

My suggestion about separate routines or standalone elements was for a separate (small and ZionWorx specific) DBMS which might be used 'off site' by anyone without the need to either have ZionWorx running or for the user to be competent in Access, Foxbase etc.

Until the 'shape and structure' of the database is determined this might be wasted effort.

On the issue of CCL Analysis specifically - my rector believes that we only need to notify CCL of 'new' reproduced material in our report. By 'new' I have been given to understand that if we have purchased overheads these do not need to be reported but if we have 'made and used' overheads or electronic copies during the year they should be reported. I must check with them about this as we may need to report annual usage, whether it is new or not.

It is also possible that the rules here in Australia are different from UK etc.

Regards,

Paul

[iainm]

This 'wish' seems to be getting attention, but I just thought I'd put my two-bobs worth in...

From my point of view, this is one of very few reasons we can't/won't use Zionworx at the moment. We currently use a 'home-grown' database which has few features on the presentation side of things, and isn't amazingly stable, but is able to generate reports for the licences and for the church (about which songs are used how often in what services etc), and we're not prepared to lose that for the advantages in presentation.

The only other problem is that we use two copyright licences and ZionWorx (as far as I have seen) is incapable of putting different licence captions on different songs at this stage, though I would assume this will come with v3.0 if the database stuff comes through.

[Christian]

Thanks for your input Iain...

Please could you elaborate on your double licence requirement (are they both CCL licences?) and whether this requirement is specific to Australia?

If v3.0 could generate reports for you, how much detail would you require in the song usage report? Or to rephrase the question, what information does your current custom database generate for you that is vitally important to you?

Look forward to your reply!

[iainm]

No, they're not both CCL.

We have a CCL licence, but this doesn't cover all the songs that we like to use in our worship, so we also have a "LicenSing" licence. As far as I know it's a much smaller licencing company, so doesn't cover as much, so I think many people may not have it. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it is not a requirement to have the two licences in Australia, and as far as I know just about anyone in the world could get it (its at least available in the US and Canada), so anyone could be in the same situation as us.

As far as the capabilities of our current database goes, it simply logs each time a song is used or copied (in a text file) along with the date and which service it was used in. This then allows it to retrieve information for any given period by importing the text, and we have set it up to display a list of songs used in a particular service in that period, a complete list of the songs in the database (sorted by title or first line) as an index for our filing system, and it generates the reports for both our licences. Obviously some of these are a little specific to our situation, so I wouldn't expect you to necessarily implement all or even any of these, but I thought I should at least let you know why we can't/won't use Zionworx, in case anyone else is in the same boat. The only really critical thing is the two licences, which I wouldn't have expected would be too hard to include in future versions, but then I may be wrong

[webmaster]

What is wrong with putting the two numbers in the same box.

i.e.

CCL12345 , OTHER12345

Would this be better than to limit yourself to not using Zionworx.

I use the syetm for two areas on the Salvation armys ministry.

If I am doing one for one church it would be number 12345 and number 56789 for ther other so I don't have to change the numbers every time I just have both numbers mentioned.

[iainm]

That might just be possible, but not really sure.

You see, we have people at the church who need us to do all the licencing stuff correctly. That means displaying the whole blurb, not just the licence number, which is 3 lines for CCLI, 2 lines for LicenSing, so a 5 line chunk down the bottom of every song isn't great. Plus I'm not sure whether its really "OK" to put the licence number on a song that isn't under that licence.

Thanks for your ideas though.

Cheers

[intuitas]

Hi Iain,

Just resuming contact after a rather hectic month.

What is your database written in?

It may be possible to link the index of your songs with the index in the Zionworx songs.dbf file. I have just done this for our access database since we maintain two (CCLI) databases one of which we has physical overhead transparencies if we need them.

God Bless

Paul

[kat78]

Hi Everyone,

My church also uses "LicenSing", and at the moment I've just put that manually under the copyright information - but that means that both appear, and I'd prefer to be able to do it cleaner. Also - the vast majority of songs we use are licensed under CCL so I value the CCL functionality provided as default.

My wish would be that the functionality would be added to have multiple licensing options which you select per song (defaulting to CCL) - because if that is not a possibility then I guess my preferred option would be to stop using the CCL default functionality and enter the Copyright information manually.

Thanks guys!

[Jordan]

Our Church has had a similar dilemma. One route that we are going down is the following:

Saving the playlist after each service.

The only language I know is PHP and SQL. So I am currently writing a PHP5 script that reads all the XML playlist files and inserts them into a MySQL database. Also if you get the CCL database and open it in Excel you can save it as an XML file, and then import that into a MySQL database.

Then when you need to send the report off, the script will match up all the songs that you have played and output it in the right CVS format for CCL.

That's the plan anyway. One problem I have come across so far is our terrible database of songs. A lot of the titles aren't the real song titles so matching up the titles become a nightmare. Then you have the problem that a lot of songs have the same title but different authors etc. So I am not too sure what I will do about that.

If I ever produce a working version then I will post it up for your guys to download (as long as you have apache, php5 and mysql installed on your computer it will work).