Every working musician has a personal repertoire, the songs you can pull out when asked, the songs you're rehearsing for an upcoming gig, the songs you've covered once but couldn't get through cold today, and the songs you've heard and want to learn. Crescender's song-management surface is where that repertoire lives, with the metadata and confidence-tracking that lets you assemble a setlist by playing time rather than scrolling endlessly through a list.
The metadata that matters for musicians
Every song in your library carries the obvious metadata (title, artist, album) but also the practical metadata that determines whether you can play it at this gig: the key you actually play it in (often different from the recorded key), the tempo, the duration, and any capo position or transposition. For wind and brass players, the original-vs-transposed key distinction matters; for vocalists, the key choice changes whether you can hit the high notes; for bands, transitions between songs depend on key relationships.
We also carry the source, whether you wrote the song, learned it from a recording, learned it from chart notation, or transcribed it yourself, and the syllabus reference if it's an exam piece. Each piece of metadata is optional; you fill in what you'll actually use.
Confidence tracking that updates with practice
Each song carries a confidence rating from 1 (worked on it once, definitely not gig-ready) to 5 (could play it cold, eyes closed). The rating is yours to set, but Crescender prompts you to update it after relevant practice sessions, so the rating reflects current state rather than wishful thinking from six months ago.
When building a setlist for an upcoming gig, you can filter to confidence-3-and-above, or confidence-4-and-above for high-stakes performances. Songs that have slipped below your confidence threshold get flagged for review. The point is to make 'can I play this on Friday?' a data answer rather than a stomach-feeling answer.
Spotify enrichment
Connect your Spotify and Crescender auto-fills the metadata for any song that has a Spotify match: cover art, album, release year, official duration, audio features (key, tempo, energy, danceability). Saves typing and gets the trivia right. You can override any field where the Spotify match isn't quite what you actually play.
We don't push anything back to Spotify, and we don't use your listening history. The integration is one-way: we read song metadata when you opt in, that's it.
Setlist building from your library
Once songs are in your library with confidence ratings and metadata, building a setlist is composition rather than recall. Drag songs into the setlist, reorder by tap-and-hold, mark transitions and breaks, and the setlist auto-computes total playing time so you know whether you're under or over the gig length.
Setlists save to your library and can be shared with band members, exported as PDF for the gig folder, or printed straight from the web app. Recent setlists carry forward, most gigs reuse 70-80% of the previous set; you start the new set from the last one and edit, rather than building from scratch.
