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Briallan
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re: Installing and Using the Songbook

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The band uses the songbook plugin to help us coordinate playing songs together. While there is a lot of information about plugins and the songbook, you often need to view information from multiple places to put all the steps together, so I have written this post to try to summarize all the information you need in a single place. This guide is written for absolute beginners and is geared toward using the songbook for playing multi-part files with our band.

I should point out that Siltharan has written an excellent tutorial to the LOTRO music system here which covers most of what I am discussing in this thread as well as other issues, so you may well prefer to use that tutorial instead -- actually I think our posts complement each other, since the focus of each is slightly different. So why did I write this? This post is step-by-step guide; it focuses on the exact steps and the exact order you need to do things if you are starting from scratch and want to go from there to playing a song with the band. It includes a few notes that may help you avoid some common problems that occur during setup and playing.

Step 1 - Create the Music and Plugins folders

For Windows 7 or Windows 8 users, navigate to your "documents\The Lord of the Rings Online" folder -- for example c:\users\courtney\documents\The Lord of the Rings Online

In this folder, create two folders called Music and Plugins unless these folders already exist

Step 2 - install the songbook plugin

download the songbook from http://www.lotrointerface.com/downloads/info380-Songbook.html and unzip it. Inside the folder you unzip it to will be a folder called Chiran and a file called lotroplugin.xml. Move this folder and file underneath the 'plugins' folder.

When you are done with steps 1 and 2, your should have the following files and folders (you may have other folders and files in "The Lord of the Rings Online" folder as well):

 documents\The Lord of the Rings Online\Music (a folder)
 documents\The Lord of the Rings Online\Plugins\Chiran (a folder)
 documents\The Lord of the Rings Online\Plugins\lotroplugin.xml (a file)

Step 3 - install some music

You need some ABC files to play. If your Music folder is empty, you can add some files some ABC files from various sources. Here are some multi-part ABC files that our band has played in the past: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/c3op6u7b8t12td0/buIQoKCJvW/winterstock%20Monday

Step 4 - setup the plugin

Go to the folder documents\The Lord of the Rings Online\Plugins\Chiran and execute the program songbook.hta. Follow the directions when the program runs; this makes the ABC files in the Music folder available to the songbook. You need to run songbook.hta everytime you change the ABC files in the Music directory.

Boot up LOTRO, go to the chat bar and execute the command /plugins refresh (this is needed to let the plugin manager know that you have added a new plugin). The chat window will now show available plugins, and the available plugins should include Songbook (0.92). You only need to execute this command one time, unless you update to a newer version of the songbook.

Type the following commands into the chat window (you will need to execute these commands each time you log on to LOTRO and want to play music):
/plugins load songbook
/songbook toggle

At this point, the songbook should appear on the screen with the list of songs that are in your Music folder

Step 5 - using the songbook

Equip an instrument (put it in the middle ["ranged item"] slot at the bottom of your character panel)

Press the M button on songbook -- little notes should come out of your instrument on the screen -- this puts you in "music mode," and now you can play any song

Select a song in the "songs" window of the songbook

Select a part of the song to play (usually the part corresponds to the instrument you have equipped). One way to select the part is by using the second button from the right at the top of the songbook (the button will say something like x:2 on it). Another way is to select the part from the Parts panel of the songbook (if the parts panel is not visible, you can make it visible by clicking on the settings button of the songbook, clicking the song part list visible check box, and then clicking the save button

Press the >| key (the fourth button from the left at the top of the songbook); a message should appear in the chat window that indicates that you are ready to play the selected part for the selected song.

Once one of the band members presses the |> key (the fifth button from the left at the top of the songbook, all band members will start playing their parts at the same time.

typing /songbook toggle in the chat window will show or hide the songbook, depending on it's current state

Step 6 - Advanced Topics

When playing in the band, sometime the songbook may misbehave; the quickest way of resetting it is to execute the following commands in the chat window:

/plugins unload

/plugins load songbook

/songbook toggle

See this post for how to put these on your quickslot bar for quick access.

 



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Raventrick
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re: Installing Songbook

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I have spent weeks trying to make Songbook work on my Mac. Partitioned and installed Windows 8 and...Songbook doesn't work! The plugin appears and loads but no songs are listed. Set up music folder and I can play the songs using the \play command however, they aren't loading into the plugin. I get an error message "Unable to save Songbook settings. Internal error." Any ideas?

Ice Weasel
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re: Installing and Using the Songbook

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There is a trick concerning setting some sort of reference for the "My Documents" folder structure that the Songbook fillers look for.... I can't remember the details though.  I will look in my old notes.  (I don't run a Mac, but had a kin-mate who did and had problems.)



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Ice Weasel
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Briallan
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re: Installing and Using the Songbook

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I am not a mac user either, but I did find this post in the LOTRO music forum which seems relevant to your problem. Ths issue here, as I understand it, is that the songbook.hta utility that I refer to in the instructions won't work on the Mac. There is a workaround discussed in this thread which might work for you. Another idea is that there is another songbook filler besides songbook.hta .. I believe this is one .. which Siltharan mentions in his guide .. maybe there are others that will work.

If none of this works for you, I would post to the thread I linked to in the first sentence and explain your problem, since I don't think any of our currently active band members use macs :(



Last edited by Briallan on Thu May 15, 2014 9:54 am; edited 1 time in total


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Raventrick
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re: Installing and Using the Songbook

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I'm actually running the whole program on Windows 8 in Bootcamp specifically because plugins won't work on OX. It should work perfectly! Argh!

Briallan
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re: Installing and Using the Songbook

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Hm okay. Well here ae some thoughts/questions:

(1) What action that you do is generating the message 'unable to save songbook settings..' (since I don't see that error message in either the songbook.hta code or the songbook code itself)?

(2) did you try songbookfiller.exe as well as songbook.hta to fill the songbook? what error message (if any) does each of these give you?

(3) Sometimes the reason you can't play music is that your ABC files are actually named something like some_song_name.abc.txt but that you don't realize this because you aren't seeing in windows explorer what the actual file name is because, in your window explorer options (tools/folder options.../view), the option "hide extensions for known file types" is checked -- this is actually the default setting when you install windows8, but it prevents you from seeing what the actual file name is. You should uncheck this option, and then see if the song names actually end in the extension .abc or .abc.txt -- they should end in just .abc



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Raventrick
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Just in case someone else has this problem, it seems to be a firewall issue. I had to request access to the "plugins.dat" folder before it would create the "songbook.dat" file...Once the file installed, the program worked perfectly. Windows 8 seems to have a lot of safeguards built in to keep you from messing around with your own data files.

Briallan
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re: Installing and Using the Songbook

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Hah. Yes Windows does do that -- combination of keeping you from doing something by mistake and keeping a bad guy from doing something to your system -- but it does often makes it inconvenient to use these little noncommercial tools.

Well, cool! Maybe you can play with us at the Spring Racing Carnival this weekend!



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Ice Weasel
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Woo-hoo!!



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Raventrick
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Sure! If it's not too late! I've already downloaded the Spring Racing Carnival folder. I'll see you at the meeting spot around 8pm server time.

Briallan
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No, definitely not too late, Raven, glad you can join us!

BTW could you remind me which instruments your character plays?

Also, you will need to download the songs again after I rename them to reflect the order we play them in the concert .. I should have a link to the final songs and part assignments sometime today (though it may be late today....)



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