Lilac Writer

Lilac Writer is a new online songwriting software that does many of the things Master Writer does. You sign up online with your own account. It's designed to help you with your lyrics and includes references that are built in, help with song organization and gives you tools to collaborate with co-writers online.

They have three pricing plans as well as BETA which is now testing for free. The first plan is Solo which is limited to 10 lyrics. A Regular plan which has up to 150 lyrics (price not yet announced) and Super with unlimited lyrics (price also not announced yet)

The Solo doesn't provide for collaborators while Regular allows five per lyric and Super allows ten collaborators per lyric. I'm trying to imagine 10 collaborators on a song. I've never come anywhere near that. Oh well its a great new unique option you can use. Note: Solo users can participate in collaboration with a paid user, they just can't share lyric projects]

The Solo doesn't offer any backup. Regular backs up your work weekly and the Super backs it up daily. Backing up you work is an absolute must so with Solo I would back up to my computer or send my self an email of the lyrics I was working on.

The chances of their system crashing is probably almost non existent. However, personally I don't think I would want to take that chance. But hey, Solo is provided for free.

I signed up for an account and tried it out. It was easy to do and it seems to work pretty well. It lets you keep your typing area uncluttered. The feature I like is being able to have the rhyming dictionary open right beside your lyric. Easy to see and work on rhymes and not lose sight of your lyrics.

The rhyming dictionary gives perfect, family, additive, subtractive, consonance, and assonance rhymes listed down the right half of the page. Gives lots of examples and is a very good feature to the program. It provides a "hide the sidebar" feature so you can use all the space for you lyrics. Personally I like leaving the side bar visible. There is lots of room on my screen. With a small laptop screen it could be handy.

It also has tabs for Ideas, again they list on the right half of the page too. Its easy to use you ideas in your lyrics. Its a good feature.

A very big plus in keeping you lyrics online is you can access them anytime from anywhere. That is assuming you can get online. If you can't, you stuck working in a word processor until you can get online. I'e. no writing songs with Lilac Writer for all you airplane travelers while in the air.

Is it as good as MasterWriter? I'd say it's not. My bias is - MasterWriter's pop culture, word family and audio features still make it my preferred songwriting program (a Master Writer online feature would be nice). But if you read on you'll see it has some other features Master Writer doesn't have.

However I haven't seen Lilac Writer's pricing yet. If it comes in as a reasonable cost it could give a good alternative to Master Writer for those who can't afford hefty cost of $299 for Master Writer. (Click on this link and use my personal discount number 2001 to get a $70 discount on the purchase of Master Writer.)

Unlike Master Writer, Lilac Writer was developed to be a tool for collaboration online. Most songs that are successful today are co-written. This software allows songwriters a location and environment to work together even though they may be far apart.

Other features:
1. Automatic revision control of the main lyric page. You can go back to any revision and also see which writer saved each revision.

2. A running dialog in the comments tab. Comments can easily beemailed to your co-writers, then they can link back to the LyricProject.

3. Shared To-do lists per project can help keep the co-write on task.

4. Shared files allow MP3 demos (and other files) to be exchanged and documented during the course of the project.

For the individual songwriter, this software offers some unique advantages over Master Writer as well:

1. Since its completely online, your lyrics are not at risk of hard drive crash or other lose of your computer.

2. You can easily work on your song catalog from whatever computer or connected device is handy, not one specific computer.

3. It also is updated with user requested features andenhancements every few weeks. Every user automatically runs the latest version of the software. The user base has a lot of say in the future direction of this program.

4. The automatic revision control is a useful feature even for the individual songwriter. You can re-write more freely knowing that the history of your versions is still in the revision list.

Of course, you do need to be connected to the Internet to use Lilac Writer just like any other web 2.0 style application. You can use the "email to Lilac Writer" feature. If you get a great song idea while out and about, you can email your lyric with the title in the subject line to a special email address and it will create a new lyric project in your online account!

There is also a convenient way to export your entire catalog of lyrics to a text document, so you can keep them off-line or move to another system if you decide Lilac Writer isn't for you.

It certainly competes with all the other software programs I seen for songwriting. Try out Lilac Writer and see what you think. Every tool a songwriter can add to help creating songs is worth it.