Songbook

A mixing desk's show file is the record of an event's audio system — the input patch, the channel names, the sends, the scenes — and it lives in one vendor's editor, in one vendor's format, on whatever USB stick last carried it. Songbook is a library for them. Each show is read into one brand-neutral model, kept as plain files with a content-addressed version on every save, and the file it came from (an SQ show folder, a dLive or Avantis show archive, a Yamaha .CLF or a DM3 / TF / DM7 scene) is kept beside it byte-exact, so what the desk needs is always there.

Once a show is in the model it can be looked at and edited: the units and sockets with what feeds what, every channel with its source, preamp, fader, pan, assignments and sends, the buses and the output patch, the DCAs and mute groups, the scenes and the cues. The same model goes into a PDF — cover, desk and I/O, the input list, the send matrix, buses and outputs, scenes and cues, the import notes, the version history — into an input-list CSV, and into label strips as 300 dpi PNGs at the fader pitch you give it.

Conversion is where a brand-neutral model earns its keep. An SQ show becomes a DM3 one, or a QL5 file becomes an Avantis show, re-keyed in the target's own spelling and held against its capacity — names cut to its length, colours mapped to its palette, buses beyond its count dropped with every send into them — and every adaptation and drop is a note the converted show carries. Capability tables cover the whole SQ, dLive, Avantis, Qu, CQ, CL/QL, TF, DM3, DM7 and RIVAGE PM ranges.

It writes two vendor formats back. The SQ image's checksum (a CRC-32 after the header) and the CL/QL file's (a one's-complement word sum over its record) were worked out from controlled saves in the vendors' own editors and confirmed in their binaries, so a show's input patch, scene names and channel names go back into a copy of the file it came from, with everything the reader does not decode carried over untouched — SQ MixPad re-saved a Songbook-written NVDATA.DAT byte-identical, and QL Editor loads a written .CLF while refusing one with a single checksum bit flipped.

It also talks to the desks: pull the whole mix from a Yamaha desk over SCP (names, colours, faders, mutes, sends, head amps, the scene list) or from an Allen & Heath desk over MIDI/TCP, push the same back, recall scenes, store scenes on a Yamaha. And it writes a Bitfocus Companion page for the allenheath-sq, allenheath-dlive, allenheath-avantis or yamaha-rcp module, and reads one back to check which of its buttons still match the show. It is a desktop app rather than only a browser tool because the desks speak raw TCP (MIDI on 51325, SCP on 49280) that a page cannot reach; Songbook Lite is the same app without that, in a browser tab.