Why I’m abandoning MasterWriter
Last week, a song opportunity came up (I’ll say more about it when/if there’s more to say), and it required digging through our catalog for songs of a particular style and mood. I thought I’d done a relatively decent job of setting MasterWriter up to be able to do this, but in this case when I attempted to find suitable songs, I found myself at a loss as to how to whittle down my 600+ song library in an efficient way.
See, MasterWriter is antiquated by software standards (the copyright in the web site’s footer says 2001, and yet the FAQ page still says “Coming Soon!”), and its search capabilities still require the user to select a field in which to search. Ugh. More to the point, not all fields are searchable. So where I’ve set up a rough approximation of keywords (such as male, female, or neutral, loss, breakup, happy, etc), I now realize that I have no search capability.
But I knew this, sort of. I had recognized a while back that there was every possibility that MasterWriter would never produce another software release (even though I provided them with feedback so specific it was practically a requirements document, which no one at MasterWriter ever acknowledged to me, so I shortened it and posted it as a review on Amazon, thinking maybe someone would get ambitious and use that feedback to build a better tool). At that point I started investigating other possibilities, such as Journler or Yojimbo. But now I see that I need to speed that process up and get everything moved over from MasterWriter to another app with a quickness so I don’t run into more situations like this.
But MasterWriter has no real export facility. So it seems to come down to a manual, one-by-one copy and paste process. No kidding. I’m not thrilled.
5 Responses to “Why I’m abandoning MasterWriter”
Posted: Aug 26th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
If you can poke around and identify the files that hold your database I can try to parse it out for you.
Parserboy.
Posted: Jan 20th, 2008 at 7:20 am
yes i agree. this is a pretty helpful piece of software that i really like that hasn’t been developed properly and they seem defensive and obtuse about improving it. i’ve emailed them a lot. it doesn’t do a lot of simple things that updates do like scrolling on new macs etc. but most importantly it’s clunky internally you can’t internally navigate easily and the audio thing is so cool but it’s only one track so here’s my question:
who’s doing this right?
Posted: Feb 9th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
I wish I knew. I can’t seem to get the hang of writing songs in either app I mentioned as alternatives. It’s starting to irritate me not just a little.
Posted: Oct 8th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
[...] time ago, I wrote that I was abandoning the leading software for songwriting: MasterWriter. I proposed a few alternatives, but in reality, those have turned out to be [...]
Posted: Oct 19th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
[...] Why I’m abandoning MasterWriter [...]