Any alternatives to Meetup.com for a ukulele group

brUKEman

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Looking to start a ukulele club. I have used meetup.com in the past but they now have no file sharing so I am looking for an alternative. I know I can build my own website but I liked the convenience of meetup.com being able to bring in members since it is so well known. Any ideas or thoughts would be appreciated.
 
Try linking up with a music store or two.
I had great success with the local library.
Also placed some ads on Craig’s List.
Good luck...
 
One club I frequent uses shutterfly.
The other used meetup, but converted to a home-grown website for the reason you mentioned plus some others.
 
TBUS uses Meetup and Facebook. We get around the problem Meetup caused by creating a separate gmail account and letting everyone get the song files from us by asking for them, then they were sent in pdf. We then got a volunteer to use her iPad to put the songs up on a screen, so she was the only one that really needed the files for jam sessions.
We still allowed folks to have the files in case they wanted their own paper copies.
The libraries host some of our events, and they are happy to advertise them to patrons.
We do have two homegrown websites that our geek manages now.
 
I just joined a Meetup acoustic group in Culver City. They have a link on their Meetup page to another site that has their song book in one big PDF, which I find almost useless since I always use a tablet with MobileSheets Pro, so I'm going through the process of separating each song into individual PDFs formatted specifically to the size of my 13.5" tablet. By doing so, I can find any song very quickly instead of having to slide through a bunch of songs to get to the one they want to play.

The leader has also recorded the songs on YouTube and I save the audio tracks to attach to the song sheets in MobileSheets Pro. Extremely convenient to be able to practice anytime, anywhere.
 
Our club still uses Meetup for the social networking features, and Box.com to host files for downloading. There are lots of sites that let you share files: Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. File sharing is the least of your worries. Read this 2017 article and pick a site:

https://www.pcmag.com/roundup/306323/the-best-cloud-storage-providers-and-file-syncing-services

kohanmike, I love MobileSheets but I haven't bothered to break down big PDF files into individual songs. That would be nice... if I could talk somebody else into doing it! Since I'm too lazy to do it myself, I open big PDF files in the Amazon Kindle app (which is free and available for Android and iOS). The Kindle app lets you jump to a page number rather than scrolling endlessly. I can get to page 43 about as fast as my cohorts can page through their paper copies.
 
Our club, really just a collection of players, no real organization, has a website we keep music on and a facebook page. There is an email sent out each week on which songs we will play that week. It sorta works as we are very informal. There is also a more dedicated performance group that communicates though a separate Facebook page.
 
The ukulele club I go to the most is Facebook-based, which works well for us, since we can post events and get RSVPs that way, and we can host files there.

The club that's further away but more active used to be a Meetup group but recently switched over to a home-brew website.

Meetup is still good, though, for new groups trying to find people. Perhaps have two solutions-either Meetup and a Facebook page, or Meetup and a cloud solution for files like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.?
 
For music sharing we use Dropbox. Our group leader uploads individual PDFs into a file accessible to all of us. The beauty of this is that most of us show up with tablets, connect to Dropbox and simply pull up the song we're singing. Dropbox has the capability to display PDFs instantly, without downloading. So, you can go to Dropbox before our meet-up, download and print the selections OR use a tablet and skip all of that. No paper. This also has the advantage of everyone always having access to the updated song list, which eliminates oodles of confusion. Dropbox automatically stores things in alphabetical order, so it's quick and easy to find a song from the list.

This also means that I've got our whole collection available on my tablet, phone, home computer or any other connected device, always up to date.

For those who want more, you can pull up the song from Dropbox straight into one of the many PDF reader apps available. I have one that allows me to make notes, highlight things or whatever on the sheet then save it.

I believe Dropbox is free up to a certain point. I have a paid version because I back-up all sorts of stuff to it, including all my pics. I'll never lose all this stuff with a hard-drive crash, and I can access any/all of it from any device anywhere.
 
For music sharing we use Dropbox. Our group leader uploads individual PDFs into a file accessible to all of us. The beauty of this is that most of us show up with tablets, connect to Dropbox and simply pull up the song we're singing. Dropbox has the capability to display PDFs instantly, without downloading. So, you can go to Dropbox before our meet-up, download and print the selections OR use a tablet and skip all of that. No paper. This also has the advantage of everyone always having access to the updated song list, which eliminates oodles of confusion. Dropbox automatically stores things in alphabetical order, so it's quick and easy to find a song from the list.

This also means that I've got our whole collection available on my tablet, phone, home computer or any other connected device, always up to date.

For those who want more, you can pull up the song from Dropbox straight into one of the many PDF reader apps available. I have one that allows me to make notes, highlight things or whatever on the sheet then save it.

I believe Dropbox is free up to a certain point. I have a paid version because I back-up all sorts of stuff to it, including all my pics. I'll never lose all this stuff with a hard-drive crash, and I can access any/all of it from any device anywhere.

+1 for all of this. My acoustic music Meetup group now has over 2200 songs in our Dropbox folder, shared by about 300 people. The key for making it work smoothly for us was to give most people read-only access. Before that was an option, it seemed like every week someone would accidentally delete one or hundreds of PDFs from the shared folder. Now it never happens.

- FiL
 
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