Peggy,

 

I use Excel. With the "find" function, it's easy to see if a title is in my library. You can enter voicing, instrumentation, appropriate holiday, or scripture, to assist with those parameters. It's not perfect, but it's cheap and easy:)

 

Amalie W. Hinson

 

Try a free trial of Charms at charmsoffice.com. I've had my library on it for three years and I love it!

 

Mary Jane

A database program like Access would be your best choice. It would allow you to create queries to immediately extract your music for any given instrumentation, voicing, period, etcetera.

I use FileMaker Pro, a database program. It works very well for me and I like it a lot.

The best I have yet to find is called "WorshiPlanner" written and distributed by Jim Faull. It allows you to create a database for your library, create and design your worship service order, has song lists from many hymnals and songbooks that keeps track of the dates you used those hymns/songs and plugs them into your worship order. There is a database for your enrollment by group that also keeps attendance records, allows you to print lists or labels of the groups or list birthdays/anniversaries by group by month, etc. It's a powerful tool that I have used for several years. It runs on Access, and he's done all the work for you. Contact Jim at MusicandWorshipSoftware.com. Well worth a look.

Joy,

Wayne Miller

I have used "Church Music Master" for about 20 years and have data entered church music libraries for three different churches with it as the software.    Strongly recommend it!   It's available for about half what some of the other music library software programs cost, and it does everything.

I worked for a school once that used the Charms program and the previous director let the program lapse. The entire database was lost and charms had no way of recovering it. Beware programs administered by a third party (there's a new program like this called "prelude music planner" through Augsburg Fortress, but it does a lot more than just hold your music database).

 

An old Choralnet post discusses this as well. http://www.choralnet.org/view/221883 They mention Chuck Riden's program. He was a member of my church in Arizona. I had a separate choir volunteer who mostly worked with it, so I don't remember it much, but I think it was effective.

 

Paul

Peggy, I believe that every Microsoft Windows package comes with the free Works trio of word processing, spreadsheet, and database.  I have used the Works database to set up my own "index file" of church choral music and it is pretty straightforward; plus, assuming you're working from a Windows operating system, already on your computer.  Bill Sherrill

My church library is now on a Google spreadsheet, which means that it is accessable from any computer any place I am, and is also accessable to multiple people. Also, free. 

 

Reginald Unterseher

I looked for several years and finally chose Bento (a simpler and cheaper version of FileMaker).  In addition to allowing a spreadsheet view, you can also set up a file card template, so you can look at information about each piece in a file-card-like format that you set up yourself.  (it's pretty easy to do and fields can be added or the arrangement of them altered at any time.  It also allows a field to be put into a pull-down menu format if you wish.  (For example I used a pull-down menu for the field that has the seasons of the church year, and also did one for voicings.)  In addition you can give a field a date setting that has a calendar pop up so you can choose a date without having to type it in. (I use that to note when the piece was last performed.)   Finally it allows for multiple libraries, so you can have a database for your adult choir, for example, and another one for your youth or childrens choir.  I've found it to be pretty inexpensive (less than $40) and easy to use.  

 

Good luck in finding the program that's best for you.  

Thank you so much for all of the wonderful suggestions.  We will look into all of them and see which one would work best for us.

 

Peggy

There's also a program called the "Church Music Library" by RCI Software, available at http://riden.com. Disclaimer: I host that website for a friend, but don't make anything off of sales of the software.

We use an Access-based relational database system here at The Music Library.  It is quite versatile and currently is tracking almost 20,000 titles for us at www.themusiclibrary.com --- Please go to our site (we are ACDA members, too, BTW) and see if we have any titles that you would be interested in.  Our system is also used to create the website catalog that you can view at www.themusiclibrary.com.  If you go there and see something that you want, please email or call us anytime.