Setlists turn your song library into the order you actually play on stage — with breaks, notes, exports, and an optional generator when you want a first draft fast.
Setlist list
Two tabs: Setlists is the active working set (gigs, Play, generator results). Library is an archive of old or unused lists — mutually exclusive, not a superset. Right-click or long-press for Duplicate, Play, Move to library, or Restore to setlists. New setlists and playlist imports land on the active tab. Your plan quota counts only the active tab.
Click a setlist name to open the view page. Add setlist on the list opens a modal for name and optional description, then takes you to edit. Generator on the list opens the setlist builder (see below). If Add is greyed out, your band hit its setlist quota or you only have view rights. With no setlists yet, the list card explains the module and offers Create your first setlist or Generate from your songs. The band owner, or a member allowed to manage what people see, opens Settings (gear) to rename setlists and to hide Tempo flow, Generator, Library or iReal Pro.
Songs in a setlist
On edit, the Setlist block is the running order — drag by the handle to reorder; order saves over AJAX as you drop. Total duration updates at the top from song lengths in the library plus talk time per song when you set that. Remove (X) drops a row immediately. Suggest order (next to the song count) opens a preview: pick a gig type (the same profiles as the setlist generator), then Suggest order to see a running order for the songs already on this list — keys, energy/valence/impact, without adding or removing titles. Change the gig type and Suggest again to try another shape. Breaks stay in their current slots and split the show into sets: each set gets its own build and closer, songs may move from one set to another, and the last set carries the big finish. Extra songs stay under Extra. Use this order applies it and saves; Cancel leaves the list as it was. You need at least two songs.
Check setlist (next to Suggest order) reviews the order you already have instead of replacing it. Pick a gig type and click Check. You get a short summary and a list of findings, each marked Issue, Suggestion or Tip, with three lines: what the checker noticed (the songs involved, and which set when the list has breaks), why it matters (the research or stage practice behind the rule — peak-end rule, contrast between neighbours, harmonic and tempo flow, vocal recovery, and so on) and what to try. Findings are always in English. Breaks count: the check judges each set on its own (opener, closer, peak, length) and the show as a whole (biggest song and signature material in the final set, a strong song into every break and a strong restart after it). Songs you flagged on the song page as opener, closer or break songs are never flagged for being exactly there; a song you marked as a closer used as an opener is. Where one move solves a finding, the "try" line names that move and the finding gets an Apply button; Apply all at the top applies every fix that makes the set better overall, one after another. After applying, the order is saved and the check runs again so the list reflects the new order. Findings about song choice rather than order (too many ballads, a section that runs hotter or cooler than the gig type, set length, missing tempo/key/energy data) have no Apply button. Check again re-runs after you change the gig type. You need at least two songs.
Talk time per song is on the setlist form (minutes). Save stores it. The total adds that many minutes once for each song in the running order — not for breaks or extras.
Add songs searches the available list below; the search box filters by title. Add puts a song on the setlist. Extra puts it under Extra at the bottom — visible on view, PDF, and Word, but not counted in the total. A song already on the setlist has an Extra button on its row that moves it down to Extra; an extra has a Setlist button that moves it back to the end of the running order. Breaks cannot become extras. A song disappears from the picker while it is already on the list or Extra — remove it first if you need it in two slots. Add break opens a modal for label and optional duration; the label starts as Break (in your language). The new row has a drag handle, a coffee icon, and that label, and you can drag it like a song.
On view, Play opens a fullscreen chart player (swipe pages, tablet spread, transpose). Song count and total duration sit with the song list in the card. Song titles link to the song page; tempo, key, and duration show when the song has them. Breaks show a coffee icon and the label you entered. Extra songs appear under Extra. Move to library / Restore to setlists archive or bring the list back.
When you are building the setlist, the Add songs list can be sorted by title, tempo, key, or genre, and filtered to a single genre — handy for pulling all the up-tempo or all the same-key numbers together quickly.
Essential members and availability
A song can have Essential band members set on its own edit page (in Songs) — the people it cannot be played without. When a setlist is tied to a gig, nGage compares those essential members against who is available for that gig. If an essential member for a song on the list is not available, that song is flagged so you know it cannot be played as-is — this warning is the whole point of marking members essential. Where you have set Similar or Substitute songs on that title, the flag offers those as one-click swaps for this gig only, so you can keep the flow without the missing person. If a flagged song has no swap links, no similar or substitute exists in your repertoire yet — adjust the essential members on the song, add a similar/substitute link, or change the setlist. The gigs pages show the same compatibility warnings; see the Gigs manual for the gig side.
Tempo flow and key-change hints
Both the view and edit pages can show a Tempo flow card: a stage-light strip — one continuous colour bar that shows how the set rises and falls across the running order. Each song is a segment as wide as its length, so the strip is laid out against real set time. The colour of each song, and the thin line traced over the strip, are based on a calculated impact for that song, blending its energy, danceability, tempo, and mood; if you set the optional Perceived impact rating (1–5) on a song, that rating takes over for that song. The colour shifts from cool blue (calm) through violet and magenta to hot red (high impact). Each song keeps its own colour across most of its block, with only a short blend right at the boundary to the next song, so a calm song between two energetic ones stays clearly its own cooler colour. Under each song you see its title, then its key and time signature when set, then its tempo (BPM). The title, BPM, key, and time signature also appear in the hover tooltip. It uses your own song data, not Spotify energy.
A small dot above a song means the setlist check has something to say about it — hover the song's block and the finding appears under the title in the same words Check setlist uses (grey for a tip, amber for a suggestion, red for an issue). A discreet exclamation mark (!) appears where two songs in a row sit in clashing keys (based on harmonic mixing / the Camelot wheel). Next to it, a small up (▲) or down (▼) arrow shows the direction of the key change along the circle of fifths between the two songs, so you can see at a glance whether the key rises or drops. The legend under the chart explains the exclamation mark and the arrows. Breaks (intermissions) are shown too, as a neutral gap with a small pause mark on their spot in the set, so you can read the pacing of the whole show; the strip closes with rounded ends before the break and re-opens with rounded ends after it, and the line interrupts cleanly there and resumes afterwards. On the edit page the chart refreshes as you add, remove, or reorder songs, so you can see at a glance whether a set stays flat, builds, or winds down. A song with no usable data at all shows as a neutral hatched gap in the strip rather than a stray point. If a song has a flow chart with segments (set on the song's edit page), its block is drawn with internal sub-segments so you can see the song's own dips and highs during the set; songs without segments stay a single block. Dragging still moves the whole song, never a part of it.
Hover anywhere over a song's block on the strip to see its title, BPM, key, and time signature in a tooltip. Click a song's title under the strip to open that song's edit page in a new tab, handy for a quick correction (breaks are not links). On the edit page the Tempo flow card sits at the bottom, below Add songs, and it is interactive: drag any block — a song or a break — left or right to change its position in the set. The running-order list above the chart moves live to match, along with the strip and the key-change warnings, and the new order is saved the same way as dragging in the list — both methods stay in sync. The view page chart is read-only. Everything here is a gentle hint — nothing is blocked, and a folk or orchestral set is never forced into a DJ-style mix. If your songs have no tempo, energy, or rating set, the card simply stays hidden.
Notes
Setlist notes hold stage directions, spoken intros, or cues that are not tied to one song. Add on the notes card creates a blank note and opens its editor. Notes support rich text; open from the list to read, edit from the note page or the pencil on the setlist edit card. Delete only from the note edit flow or the confirm modal on the setlist edit list.
Duplicating a setlist copies songs, breaks, extras, and talk time but not notes.
Setlist generator
When you want a data-assisted first draft, open Generator from the setlist list. Pick gig type, target duration in minutes, optional song count, Breaks (none to three) with a Break length, audience type, and small energy adjustment. If upcoming gigs exist, link one to respect its lineup filter. Generate setlist runs the algorithm and shows a preview you can save as a new setlist or discard. The target duration is the whole show including breaks; the preview shows the playing time and, when you asked for breaks, the total with breaks, and the break rows are saved with the setlist. Generated order is a starting point — always listen and drag songs on edit before the gig.
Breaks make sets. One engine sits behind the generator, Suggest order, Check setlist and the Tempo flow chart, and it treats a show as sets separated by breaks. Every set tells its own story — its own opener, build, peak and closer — and the show has an overarching arc on top: earlier sets sit a little cooler, the night's biggest song and your signature material belong in the final set, the last song before a break should send people to the bar on a high, and the first song after a break has to win the room back like an opener. Set length is judged per set, so a 99-minute acoustic show with one break is two comfortable sets, not one long one.
Your experience counts more than the rules. On the song page, the Setlist notes card lets you tick Works as opener, Works as closer / late in the set, Works before a break and Works after a break next to Signature song and Familiar song. The engine prefers those songs in exactly those slots and stops second-guessing you: a song you marked as an opener is never flagged as a wrong opener (even if it is your signature song), a closer song is never proposed as an opener, and break songs are kept for the slots around the break.
Gig types shape the set: Festival / support slot (short, no slow valley, strongest material up front and a big finish), Club headline (strong opening block, a breather, a second build, a dip and a final climb), Wedding dance floor (open with familiar mid-tempo songs, build in waves, peak late, close on an anthem), Pub / café night (start relaxed while the room fills, climb steadily), Party, crowd already warm (stay high, vary tempo and mood, finish on the biggest song) and Acoustic / listening room (wide dynamics, gentle rise).
What the engine looks at. It follows the energy shape of the gig type over the playing time of each set, keeps neighbouring songs compatible in key and tempo (a break resets that chain), avoids two slow songs back-to-back and long runs of near-identical songs, opens each set with a strong, familiar song that is not your biggest — and, for pub and acoustic sets, not too hot either — keeps the highest-impact song for the last part of the final set, and places a Signature song in the closing block. It prefers songs marked Familiar for weddings and pubs, gives singers a breather after several Heavy vocal-load songs, and only picks songs marked Ready to play. The more of these fields you fill in on the song page (tempo, key, duration, Perceived impact or an analysed recording, the Setlist notes flags, Vocal load), the better the result; songs without any of this are treated as unknown, not as average, and are spread out rather than clustered.
Why this is not random. The rules behind the generator and the checker come from research and long-standing stage practice, not from taste. The peak-end rule (Kahneman and colleagues) shows people judge an experience by its most intense moment and its ending — hence the strong closer, the late peak and the signature song in the closing block. The serial-position effect adds that the first moments are remembered almost as well — hence the strong, familiar opener. Music psychology finds that listeners enjoy a song more when it contrasts with the one before and tune out when several songs feel the same (Schellenberg et al. 2012 on contrast; habituation research) — hence no two ballads in a row and no flat runs. A 2024 analysis of professionally sequenced albums (Neto et al.) found they change direction between consecutive tracks more often than not and front-load energy — hence the gentle bends inside a build. Key and tempo compatibility follow the Camelot wheel and DJ harmonic-mixing practice, and the playlist-sequencing work of Bittner et al. (ISMIR 2017) treats good sequencing as a shortest path through the songs' features, which is exactly what the optimiser searches. The gig-type shapes themselves distil practitioner guidance for weddings, festivals, clubs and pubs. Every finding in Check setlist names the rule it rests on, so you can decide for yourself when to break it.
Already have the songs you want to play, just not the order? On the setlist edit page, Suggest order runs the same engine on that list only (see Songs in a setlist). Results can differ a little between runs — that is what Suggest again is for. Happy with your own order but want a second opinion? Check setlist on the same page explains, finding by finding, what the engine would change and why, and lets you apply each change on its own.
Exporting
Export pdf opens a modal to include or hide duration, key, and tempo columns, then downloads. Extra songs appear under Extra at the end. Export docx saves an editable Word file with the current song list. Both are available on view and edit. Duplicate from the list context menu or edit toolbar clones name (with copy), songs, breaks, extras, and talk time.
On the setlist view page, iReal Pro (next to Export pdf and Export docx) sends the whole setlist to iReal Pro as one irealbook:// playlist link. The export page offers Open in iReal Pro, Copy link, and Download as HTML file. Breaks and songs without a chord chart are skipped; any skipped songs are listed on the export page so you know what did not transfer.
Limits
Plans limit how many active setlists a band can store. Hitting the cap disables Add with a message. Move unused setlists to the Library tab, or delete them on the edit page, to free space.
When something goes wrong
No songs to add — create songs in Songs first. Drag not working — refresh the page; reorder needs JavaScript enabled. Suggest order and Check setlist are greyed out until the setlist has at least two songs. Check setlist says a song is "unknown" or skips it — add tempo, key and Perceived impact to that song. Generator returns nothing useful — widen duration or loosen gig type; the band needs enough songs with metadata for the template you picked. Missing edit or delete — ask your band lead for setlist edit or delete rights.
