Kent Did Some Work On Stanza!

That is all. Thanks for reading.

   Ok, seriously. I originally started this post that way because it seemed as if not much had been done on Stanza in the past three weeks, and that it was a miracle that anything was done at all. Perhaps it wasn’t, compared to our first few months of work, but the more I wrote the more it seemed that there have, indeed, been some things going on. So I had to come back and rewrite this intro. Anyway.

   We can report that Kent has indeed done some work on Stanza. He has, in his own words, “a fancy new UI in progress for contract addition.” We’ve (read: Kent has) had a lot of headaches over our contract system. I can’t explain or even fully understand the complexity of the contract issue, but I’ll put it forth as best I can. At our current size and number of songs we don’t have a big issue, but in the future we will need to accommodate a huge number of songs from large copyright holders, be able to divide royalties between multiple copyright holders, and be able to easily track and manage everything. So we want to build the right system in our admin panel now rather than trying to fix the issue later when it becomes a lot bigger. This is what Kent has been laboring over for the last while; alas, he does not have unlimited hours to devote to Stanza, so it’s taking time.

   We are happy to say that we are very close to being able to start beta testing. The main thing keeping us from it is the aforementioned contract and usage tracking issue, and Kent is fairly confident that it won’t be too much longer before that’s straightened out. We’re not going to have a very big group of testers, though. We initially thought a hundred people, but we think that’s too many, so it will be something less than that. I can’t give you an exact number right now; hopefully our next blog post will be full of details. We are excited to be able to put Stanza into the real world and start having people test it out!

   I must remind you again that, sadly, it will only be the iOS app going into beta at this time. I’ve said numerous times before that we are working on hiring an Android developer, and we have now found someone who wants to work with us as soon as he can. We haven’t officially “hired” him, but we will before long. Android users rejoice!

   I will also remind you that our library is not yet as huge as we would like it to be. We are up to 1,324 songs at this time, which is awesome, but it’s nowhere near our goal (Ideally, every shape note Gospel song in existence. Attainable? Perhaps not. A good aiming point? Certainly.). So the beta app won’t provide the same panoply of songs that the eventual users will have, if that helps to salve any disappointment some may feel at not being able to be a tester.

   One more development while we’re speaking of vast amounts of songs: Stanza has officially agreed to buy the Song Index data from Clint and Gaylene Koehn. This is the Song Index that has been sold in CD and book form at Gospel Publishers for many years, and which contains the title, first line, and book information of about 33,000 songs. Once we incorporate it into Stanza, users will be able to find information on any song, whether Stanza has it in the library or not. We think this song search will be a highly useful function of the app.

   We know that this winter hasn’t brought just a lot of cool updates and great changes, but we have come a long way. Good things are just around the bend with the contract system and beta testing, and Stanza is well on its way to completion! Thank you all so much for your patience and support. We’ll continue to keep you posted.