Songs of the people
– one church, for a short time

Our church used Media Shout as its presentation program for a decade or so (it has switched to Planning Center). Media Shout was an old-fashioned, off-line, file-driven program, amenable to organization and scrutiny. I spent some time developing a perl program to parse the service files recursively through multiple directories and to write each instance of a song sung to a MySQL database. From there I could sort and export to an html table, which has now been imported into this WordPress Table Press.

I would have loved to keep this going past 2010, but then Media Shout changed its data structure and I didn’t have the heart to keep up. Anyway, there’s at least a three year snapshot of all the songs sung in one church’s worship services. It would seem a shame to me to sweep this hard-won data into the dustbin. I trust that, in the far-flung, long term, there will be some interest in this unique slice of worship life in one congregation. You’ll have to guess at some songs – I’ve sung them, of course, so I generally know what they are, but just a title is not really enough to pin them down.

Worship Songs in Order of Frequency Sung