Most directors arrive with a folder of practice tracks already, usually built over years and currently living in email, Dropbox, or a shared drive. This is what will and will not come across, so you can tell before you start whether the move is an evening’s work or a rebuild.
Audio only
Choirside holds audio. It accepts:
- MP3
- M4A and AAC
- WAV
- OGG
- MIDI
And it holds nothing else. No PDFs, no scanned scores, no images, no video. If your shared folder is mostly sheet music, that part of it stays where it is. There is no plan to add score storage, so it is not worth waiting for.
There is a size limit per file, set per choir. The app tells you if a file is over it rather than failing quietly.
One file per part beats one mixed file
This is the one thing worth redoing rather than importing as-is.
If your existing tracks are single mixed-down recordings with all four parts audible at once, they will upload and play, and your singers will be no better off than they are today. What makes Choirside worth the move is a separate recording per voice part, because that is what the mixer works on: a singer can then raise their own line and drop the others, or mute their own part and sing it against the rest.
So the practical migration is:
- Upload the accompaniment or piano reduction you already have.
- Add a recording per part as you get them, rather than waiting until you have a full set. A song with an accompaniment and two of four parts is already useful to half the choir.
- Let your singers record the missing sectionals. A member can record a part for their section, and it stays hidden until you publish it.
Building your music library explains the kinds of recording and who can hear each one.
MIDI is worth knowing about
If you have MIDI files, from a notation program or from a publisher, upload them as they are. Choirside turns them into audio on the phone rather than storing a rendered file, which means the tempo can be changed without re-exporting anything.
Copyright comes first
A practice track made from a copyrighted arrangement is still the copyrighted arrangement, and moving it into Choirside does not change that. Being able to upload something is not the same as being allowed to, and a subscription grants you no rights to any music.
Read copyright and licensing before you upload a library rather than after. It is the part of this that most often needs undoing.
Moving the choir itself
There is nothing to import. You create the choir, then invite your singers with a link or a QR code, and they join by tapping it. Nobody has to be added by hand from a spreadsheet, and there is no member list to migrate.
You set each singer’s voice part after they join, which is also the moment the right tracks start appearing for the right people. See managing members.
What to do first
Getting started as a director is the order that causes the fewest questions from your choir afterwards.