We are really excited to introduce to you today a project we have been working on over the last several months, Planning Center Online Music Stand.
When we launched our API last year we were excited not only to see what kind of things others could do with the Planning Center framework, but also what other products we could develop. One of the first thoughts we had was to make a digital music stand using the PDFs you've already attached to your songs. And since each plan already has all of your songs in order, there's no other setup necessary!
Web Based Music Stand
Using any Mac, Windows or Linux computer you can just go to your plan in your browser, hover over rehearse and then click "Music Stand". All the song PDFs are loaded in order and are shown either one or two pages at a time, depending on the size of your browser window. Click on the left or right sides to go to the previous or next pages, or use keyboard shortcuts or a usb footpedal. Adjust the page sequence to follow any repeats or skips in your music, and when available, choose which PDF to see for each file. Plus, if you are using attachment types to assign different files for different positions, Planning Center will load the correct files for each user by default.
The uses for this are pretty limitless, but here are a couple of great ideas:
Home Rehearsal. Don't want to fumble with downloading PDFs to rehearse? Just start music stand and you can rehearse right at your computer.
Use any portable or wall-mountable monitor or computer as your own personal music stand.
Connect a computer to a large monitor angled on your stage floor for a shared music stand.
We recommend using Google Chrome** ** as your browser for displaying Planning Center Music Stand on your stage because they have great support for full screen web browsing, and have a great PDF display engine..
iPad Music Stand
Even before the iPad was announced, we already had our gears going, but when we finally saw it we were so excited that it would be perfect for our Music Stand!!! So we went to work on a fully native iPad App, and I am glad to tell you it is available in the store right now!! It has all the features of the Web App, but with a touch interface made specifically for the iPad. Check out a walkthrough video of the iPad Music Stand here.
iPad Music Stand: The Clip
As you can see from our video, we have a nice little clip that is holding our iPad. We have been working with an engineer and are awaiting the final prototype before we go into full production. We are estimating that we will be able to ship this in June for around $29 a piece.
** Simple Pricing**
Planning Center Music Stand is available for an extra $10 a month and can be activated by your site owner on the site settings page. Once it is activated, any user in your account will have access to all of the features including the FREE iPad app! We will not charge anyone until your payment is due in June so everyone will have at least one month free with the Music Stand.
The $10/month goes to covering the costs of splitting the PDFs into separate images and transferring the images because it takes a lot of extra bandwidth, storage and processing power to do these tasks.
More to come!
We have great ideas for this product, but we need your help to figure out which feature we should implement next. So, if you are interested in the Music Stand please go here to fill out our survey.
Interested in developing for us?
We are really excited about the future of this product and would love to get some help! We are looking for a developer who is willing to take the Music Stand iPad and Planning Center Online iPhone apps to the next level. Also, this person needs to be ready to create our Planning Center Android application. If you are interested please submit your resume to jobs@ministrycentered.com.
Thanks!
*Jeff Berg Owner/Developer Ministry Centered Technologies *