General pause, anonymous polls, singing career and scrolling sheet music

It has been a little over a week since our last overview, and quite a lot has come together again. Choirs still under contract with another provider can switch right away and only pay once the old contract ends. Polls can be anonymous, the singing career moves into the singers' own profiles, and the cash book works in any currency. Everything in the web version is available now. The changes in the app arrive with version 3.1.4, which will be in the app stores in the next few days.

General pause: switch before your old contract ends

Choirs that cancel with another provider have often paid months in advance. Until now that meant waiting or paying twice. With the general pause your choir starts with Chorilo right away, and the first payment is only due the day after your contract with the previous provider ends. Until then the subscription costs nothing.

Under Choir settings › Subscription, administrators upload proof of the current subscription, such as the latest invoice, along with the cancellation confirmation. The documents only go to our team by email, Chorilo does not store them. Once we have checked them, the subscription page shows the approval with its date, and you take out your subscription, monthly or yearly. At checkout you then see until when it is free. The general pause applies to main choirs; sub-ensembles run through their main choir's subscription as usual. The subscription page now also has rows explaining how payment by invoice and linking sub-ensembles work.

Polls: vote anonymously and never miss one

Some questions are easier to vote on when nobody can see who chose what, such as the concert programme or the membership fee. For this, permission groups have a new permission, "See who voted for what in polls". If a group does not have it, they only see how many votes each answer received: no names, no breakdown by voice part and no download of the results. A note explains why. For a truly anonymous poll, remove the permission from all groups, including your own. To start with, every group has the permission, so nothing changes until your choir switches it off.

So that no poll gets lost, an announcement with a poll carries the label "Not voted yet" and counts towards your messages until you have voted, even if you have already read it. The label disappears after the deadline and does not appear on your own polls. The app also clears its push notifications from the notification centre when you open it, and event hints count as read once the event has been visible in the event list.

The singing career belongs to the singer

Until now each choir kept its own list of the choirs a member had sung in before. Anyone singing in two choirs therefore had two lists that rarely matched. Now there is one career per person. Members maintain it themselves in their profile and can add, edit and delete every entry. All their choirs see the same list. A choir can add and edit entries, but it can only delete the ones it added itself.

Choirs that use Chorilo appear automatically with joining and leaving dates and count towards jubilees without anyone having to enter them. Jubilee lists, exports and requests to your choral association use the whole career. We have merged duplicate entries kept by several choirs. In the app you will find the singing career from version 3.1.4 when you tap your profile picture.

New members and events

New members can now be added to all upcoming events automatically. You will find the switch "Automatically add new members to upcoming events" under Choir settings › General › Events and members. When it is on, every new, approved or reactivated member is added straight away to all upcoming events they may see, with a pending response. By default it is off, and you keep adding them via "Add missing events" as before.

The other way round, Chorilo now asks when you end, change or delete a member's function: should they be removed from upcoming events they will no longer see? Past events stay untouched for attendance. When adding a member you can set their gender right away. And a member's profile shows "Registration complete" once they have opened Chorilo after joining your choir. Only people allowed to edit members see this. Chorilo does not show when or how often someone uses it.

Parents can now decline for their child even if the child has already accepted. Guests you invite to an event from the address book get a Chorilo account and, after signing in, see the event with its sheet music and files. If a contact was invited earlier without an account, simply invite them again; their previous response is kept.

Group chats and choir picker

Group admins can now delete a group chat for everyone. The chat and all its messages, pictures and files are then gone for good for all participants. Events and announcements that were only visible to this chat stay visible to its former members, so nothing suddenly becomes visible to the whole choir. While a report about the chat is still open, it cannot be deleted. In the choir picker, projects and sub-choirs now appear indented under their main choir, so you can see at a glance what belongs together.

Cash book in any currency

Not every choir works in euros. Under Cash book › Settings › General you can now choose the currency, for example Swiss francs, and set the tax rates offered when booking. The defaults are euros and 19, 7 and 0 per cent. All amounts, the transaction list, the annual report, the statement of assets and the audit report follow the currency and the language of your interface. The built-in categories are created in your language, and importing bank statements as CSV understands more date formats.

The app: version 3.1.4

The biggest change for everyone who sings from a tablet or phone: sheet music can now be scrolled instead of turned page by page. In the profile menu, choose "Scroll" under Sheet music view › Show pages. All pages then hang together one below the other, and you see the end of one page and the start of the next at the same time. Your annotations and jump areas stay the same. Tapping the edge or pressing the pedal moves you on by one screen height, and scrolling past the end takes you to the next piece in events and playlists. For drawing, the app shows the single page and then returns to the same spot.

The mini player in the sheet music view now has buttons for ten seconds back and forward, repeat and tempo, so the large player no longer has to cover the music. On the lock screen, single recordings show skip buttons instead of next-track buttons that did nothing, and play and pause from outside the app now reach the app too. The timeline only jumps when you lift your finger. The other app-related changes in this post, such as polls, the singing career, group chats, the choir picker and parents' responses, also arrive with version 3.1.4.

Other improvements

Scanned sheet music PDFs no longer show blank pages. A setlist keeps its new order after switching between tabs. Sub-ensembles whose main choir was deleted become independent choirs again. New publisher titles appear in the sheet music shop's publisher filter right away. Conversations with the help assistant are deleted 90 days after the last message. And Chorilo Files, the desktop app for macOS and Windows, picks up changes immediately in version 2.2.0 instead of checking every 30 seconds, including when files and folders are renamed or moved.

Many of these changes came from choirs' wishes. If you are missing something or something could work better, write to us: via the AI chatbot, the feature requests or by email.