In preparation for having our team playing more regularly with click tracks, I’ve been checking out various programs that get the BPM for songs for you. Metronome operates as advertised, as does BPM Widget. They’re pretty standard metronomes, you can click along with a song. Two even more helpful programs have been BeaTunes and Tangerine, which go through your whole itunes library and figure out the beats per minute for you. I opened the demo of both, and had BeaTunes run my whole library. There’s debates on sites about how accurate they both are, but it seems like BeaTunes did pretty well.

If you regularly play with a click track, I’d love to hear what setup (computer/metronome/in-ear) you use.

For WordPress users, RefTagger is a great tool to automatically hyperlink Bible verses.

CNN has an article today about Connexions, a website where teachers can post content on specific subjects.  The article highlights one music teacher who has a music theory course on the site that has had over 7 million hits.  She must have done a pretty good job!

Here are some of the useful online tools I’ve become aware of in the last few weeks:

Web conferencing: dimdim is a new site that lets you share your desktop, chat, and videoconferencing with  someone, for free.  Copilot is also a helpful tool.

Time Tracking: I started tracking the amount of time I spend on different projects at church, and wanted a tool where I could easily enter that time and view it by day, by project, etc.  14Dayz and Freshbooks are both free (depending on your plan), and helpful in this regard.

Database: Dabbledb is a powerful way of organizing a lot of data that is shared by multiple people.  I’ve been trying it out on one of our projects, and really like the functionality.

Logic Studio: Apple has rolled out a new version of their high end recording software, and it includes an interface for playing your software synths off of a laptop live.  I’d be interested to see how it compares with Ableton’s Live.  (Let me know if any of you spring for it.)  Expensive, but probably a lot cheaper than a new synthesizer…

HT to Ehub for most of these.

Planning Center Online is a tool for creating service orders for Sundays, as well as sharing files and scheduling musicians.  As I’ve considered using a system like this for our team at Covenant Life, it’s the best one I’ve found so far.  A number of them have come out in the last year or two, all with different strengths or weaknesses.

I’d be interested in knowing if any readers have had experience with any of these systems?  If so, you can put a comment here or send me an email.

Similar systems out are Worship Organizer, Worship Schedule, and Worship Team.com.  I’m grateful for those who have put these out, serving this niche need for many churches.

Amazon.com has created createspace.com to let people self-publish books, CDs, electronic downloads, and more.  Each product is created on demand, rather than in pre-produced quantities, which saves you from making 1,000 CDs when you’re only going to sell a couple hundred.  You get the barcode, and everything else you need.

TuneCore (not sure if this is new) is a service that lets you put any music you’ve created onto itunes and other download services.

The fees seem very reasonable for both.

(HT: Between Two Worlds)

Here’s a pretty cool idea: iConcertCal is a plugin to your itunes that searches your library, and tells you when there are concerts in your city, based on your itunes library.

For those who have primarily church-related music on their itunes, it may not help you fight the “worship-artist/rock star” mentality, but it is a good tool, nonetheless.

(HT: eHub)