Setlist

Sometimes the challenge is working out what to leave out of a feature in order to keep it focussed and useful!

I just launched discussions on #Setlist which brings together the recent work I've done on making every entity linkable to everything else. The challenge here was stopping myself from going down those "Wouldn't it be cool if..." rabbit-holes. This is instead deliberately not chat. I'm not trying to compete with e.g. WhatsApp, so there's no threading, real-time updates and direct messages....

However, when a topic comes up that needs a proper band discussion, what Setlist can do is be the place the decision gets written down, and it's linked to the songs, setlists and events it's actually about, and is still findable a year later.

Deliberately scaling back my ambitions I think has actually made this a better, more useful feature. I'm going to try and make "what can I leave out" my default stance in future instead of "what can I add in"...

https://setlist.rocks/help/guides/discussions

One of the great benefits of managing your band through Setlist is that related "things" are linked together - so songs belong in a setlist, which can be attached to events, which are in turn linked to venues and also feed into the band finances tracker.

Now, anything can link to anything - which will make it even easier to keep on top of your activity! This will all be very relevant in the next feature I'm planning (stay tuned!) but for now, I've exposed the new service in the comments system. As well as being able to tag bandmates with the @username shortcut, you can now attach any entities your band has created.

For example: If you're reviewing how an event went, you can now quickly reference a song in the comments and link directly to it. Or cross-reference a poll from a financial transaction and vice-versa. And when posted, your comment will include handy links and previews to the linked content and all items will also display a new card showing where they've been mentioned or linked from.

There's a lot more to come based on this backend work and new UI components - but I've really enjoyed working on this first iteration and am really excited to share 😀

And it's live! The latest new feature in #Setlist - Finances and Band Fund tracking!

While it's not the most exciting part of managing a band, keeping on top of the shared band finances is important to keeping everything ticking over smoothly. I've noticed that from my experience, this job tends to get left to one band member, and there's also usually another spreadsheet floating around that's never quite up to date.

As my own band has become busier over the last few years with more and more gig bookings and associated expenses, I decided to bring that part of the band management into Setlist. The end result is a new Finances card on your band homepage and a set of tools to help make managing your band's shared funds a lot easier.

As it's fully integrated into the rest of the Setlist app, notifications, comments, notes and tags all work the same way they do throughout the rest of the site - and there's even the ability to automatically log the income from paid gigs straight from the Events and Calendar system.

There's a complete guide to using the new system, along with some updated FAQs in the Help Center. Many thanks to everyone who participated in the Beta test phase, and I hope this new feature helps you get on with the (frankly more interesting and fun...) business of making music!

Quite the month for my hobby project #Setlist ! I just passed the milestone of the 100th band signing up (along with nearly 100 events & gigs planned and organised through the app) and got a very cool new logo provided by one of my users!

There's also a big new feature in the works (thanks to all my beta testers!) - watch this space for more details soon 😀

That was a blast! #Setlist just finished its promoted slot & launch. Over the course of a month it gained:

• 🎸 19 new bands

• 💿 224 new songs tracked

• 📝 13 new setlists created

• 🎉 21 events over 11 new venues

And loads of new features and improvements thanks to feedback from my new users. Sadly, I have to end the promoted slot this month as it's a hobby, not-for-profit passion project but it's been great fun! Thanks uneed for helping me to launch my site in style 🥳

Have you been "Sloppy Copied" ?

I'm writing a more detailed article on this but the TL;DR is:

- Before I submitted my app to Uneed, it got some interest from a technical article I wrote that made it to HN

- Shortly afterwards, my monitoring picked up unusual bot activity, scraping FAQ/Help/About public pages as well as probing for non-existent pricing & subscription pages. Again, this was all before it was posted on Uneed.

- I recently discovered a bunch of "Sloppy Copies" of my app, almost verbatim just with a pricing model or ads slapped on them, and some looking sketchy as hell.

This isn't simply people with a Claude subscription cranking out the same idea (although there is a lot of that and I do not claim to have come up with a unique concept myself), this was way too specific. I've been looking at other niche communities and there seems to be a lot of AI cloned apps, sock-puppet social media accounts promoting them and so on.

Now I don't have a commercial axe to grind here, and even link to alternative solutions and provide a complete "export my data" function. But I'm wondering how many creators here have seen the same sort of drive-by cloning of their sites/apps ?

Random weekend thought - getting user feedback. How to do it, or incorporate it in your app without making it overbearing ?

Everytime I've had an organic conversation with someone using #Setlist there's been an interesting insight, something I hadn't thought of, or even a great idea for a whole new feature/direction. What's everyone else doing for this without shoving surveys/pop-ups in user's faces ?

An exciting launch day! Got to number #2 slot (Congratulations to #Looties on the #1 spot!), pushed out a couple of features during the day (YoloOps™ 😂) and also wrestled with a backend service I rely on going down half-way through and having to emergency code a fix/swap out to an alternative backend.

How'd it go for everyone else ?

Oh, new features - you can now create a personal setlist, which is great for organising your own practice sessions. And there's a mini-player now in the setlist view - so you use the Rehearsal Room for deep focus, slicing songs up, looping parts and slowing them down - then when you've learned them, you can play through them in order from your setlist.

That dilemma when you've been doing some lunch-time hacking and a cool new feature you've been working on for days is finally working - but it's the middle of launch day and you really don't want to accidentally take your site down 🤔 🤣

What a great start to the morning! https://setlist.rocks launched today and I woke up to see it in the top spot. Thank you so much for the upvotes - it's lovely to see that a pure "passion product" built just for the joy of creating something can gather so much interest. I'm old enough to remember the web as it was in the late 90s, and this is my way of harking back to the good ol' days where we did things just for fun.

As I posted here yesterday, these little projects (that take on a life of their own!) are my way of reaching out, building communities and making connections that I otherwise struggle with. Thank you again for the upvotes - they really do mean the world to me - and keep 'em coming!

And if you do play in a band, give it a go - all suggestions and comments/feedback appreciated!

-Mark

Site https://sitelist.rocks | About https://setlist.rocks/about | Help https://setlist.rocks/help

Hi everyone! I'm excited to officially launch my application today! https://setlist.rocks - the free, all-in-one tool to help bands organise their practice sessions, create setlists and prepare for gigs. Bit of an unusual one in that it's 100% free, and I have no intention of monetising it at the moment.

What Is It ?

I built Setlist to help my own covers band out with our own challenges, and had so much fun getting back into web development I decided to open it up to the public. There's some technical details behind how I built this (In Ruby On Rails!) on my blog at https://www.markround.com/blog/2026/03/05/returning-to-rails-in-2026 which got some interest from the Hacker News crowd (link in blog article).

Free, you say ?

Setlist is for me totally a hobby project - as I explain elsewhere, I'm very fortunate that I have a day job I love and can make music on my own terms. I want the same for my projects, and if I started charging, it would cease to be a labour of love and become an obligation.

I built it purely for fun (and other reasons - see comment below) and I have an allowance I grant myself for personal projects and have been saving up for a while to properly promote my work hence the "big splash". So it's got a promoted slot today, but officially "launches" tomorrow - any upvotes then would be much appreciated!

Why here ?

I've been lurking here for a while and found it to be a really inspiring group of creators and hackers, with very little of the negative vibe that infests so much of the "hustle culture" corners of the Internet. Really happy to be a part of your community properly now!

Anyway, I appreciate it's somewhat of a niche product - but if anyone does happen to play in a covers band and fancies giving it a go, let me know what you think! It's not perfect and has a lot of rough edges - but as another poster below said "Nobody ships the product they planned" and I decided to stop making excuses.

Cheers,

-Mark