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Looking for a calendar management app


Stylon Pilson
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I've recently joined an established band and I feel like our system for managing our calendar, while not awful, could be improved.

The guitarist manages the calendar - we all send him our unavailabilities, and periodically he circulates a PDF containing a calendar for the next year with our unavailabilities and booked gigs listed. The drummer books most of the gigs and emails us with the details. I have the following issues:

  1. This is a process with a lot of manual stages involved. I have to email my unavailabilities to the guitarist, who retypes them into his document. The drummer emails us with gig dates, which I then retype into my calendar. Etc.
  2. It's possible for information to get lost along the way. For example, we have a gig this weekend which has been on our website (and in my calendar) for months with the address of a pub 12 miles away with the same name. This is because the drummer's email just said the pub name, and didn't clarify the postcode.

What I'd really like is a system that minimises retyping. Ideally a shared Google Calendar into which we can all enter our unavailabilities and gigs seems like a good start. However, I'd also like the following features:

  1. To be able to automatically populate the gig list on our website with any confirmed bookings. This would be difficult to do using just Google Calendar, however it doesn't seem like too big a task for a dedicated band management app. You'd need a flag on each booking for whether it was confirmed or not, and then the app could simply expose a simple web page that could be embedded in an iframe or something.
  2. The guitarist wants to be able to print off an A4 page containing the entire calendar for the next 12 months, as similar to our current PDF as possible. This is a single page, landscape, with one row per month. Bookings are in one colour, with the name of the venue. Unavailabilities are in grey. It's a fairly high-density format, but it works well for him. He likes it because, when talking to venues, he finds it easier to scan a printed page to check dates than to be scrolling through an app.

The second one feels like an especially niche requirement. Right now I'm considering using a Google Calendar and then writing tools that parse an exported ics file to do both of these tasks, using the event title to distinguish between tentative gig, confirmed gig, or unavailability, and then exporting as PDF or HTML accordingly. But I thought I'd check first to see if anyone's already using something that does all this.

Thanks!

S.P.

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  • 5 months later...

We just use Google Calendar.  We've set up a calendar for band members and get people to mark things like holidays/unavailability so when we're booking gigs we can see whether anyone is not free.  We also use it to a lesser extent for scheduling practices.

It's pretty straight forward to use, once you can work out how to set up the calendar.

 

Once gigs are booked we add them separately to Facebook (and in our case Lemonrock).

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31 minutes ago, BrunoBass said:

We use Band Mule, it’s an app on IOS (and I assume Android). It works very well, even our decidedly non-tech drummer has got the hang of it.

I like Band Mule. It's almost perfect, I just wish it had live notifications for the chat / messenger function. I messaged the developers about this and they said they had sorted it out in the latest update but it still doesn't work for me. 

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2 minutes ago, Newfoundfreedom said:

I like Band Mule. It's almost perfect, I just wish it had live notifications for the chat / messenger function. I messaged the developers about this and they said they had sorted it out in the latest update but it still doesn't work for me. 

Yes, we found that too. We’ll have to stick with WhatsApp for now.

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