Having an organized song library that can be searched by almost any criteria can help you plan worship sets more effectively, and the main Songs page has been completely redone to take that to a new level. It is now easier to add new songs through the popular recordings search, find existing songs with new filtering features, and keep them organized with bulk editing.
Add New Songs
When it's time to add a new song, you can now search by Popular Recordings (powered by RehearsalMix), All Songs (powered by SongSelect), or create a custom song (powered by...you). The new option here is Popular Recordings which lets you listen to an audio preview. When you choose a Popular Recording, a lot of its metadata is set, like length and beats per minute.
Automatic File Import
Planning Center doesn't provide you with song files, but if you've set up integrations with PraiseCharts, RehearsalMix, or SongSelect, you can now choose to have their files imported right when you create the song.
Top Songs
Another way to find new songs is to see what other churches are doing, and with over 55,000 churches using Planning Center, you have a great sampling. The Top Songs box shows you which songs are being used the most across all of those churches for the next 5 weeks, and how each song's ranking has changed since last year.
The new additions allow you to see last week's results, or search any week by title, theme, author, or copyright.
Search and Filter
As your song list grows, having tools to help you choose the perfect song from your library becomes increasingly important. The filter sidebar gives you more flexibility and improves on some of the filters, especially the lyrics filter, which removes any chords you might have within the lyrics to give you a true lyrics search.
Pinned Filters
When you apply a filter, it adds it to the filter bar, which is now interactive. You can edit your filters directly from the filter pills in the toolbar. If you have filters you always want applied, you can pin them. This is especially helpful if you want to switch between seeing fast songs and slow songs, or if you normally want to filter out seasonal songs, but show them when it's time.
Bulk Editing
If seeing some of these filtering improvements gets you itching to organize your songs in a new way, bulk editing can help you make your changes quickly. Once you've optimized your Tags, you can update multiple arrangements all at once by adding tags, removing tags, or archiving the song or arrangement.
Bringing it All Together
All of these features come together to make every part of managing your songs easier than ever. Later this year many of these changes will be integrated into a new version of the plan page. For now, we hope that these changes allow you to think about technology less, and manage your song library with ease.
Visit our Help Center for expanded details on all the changes to the Songs page.