MobileSheets Forums

Although I would have loved to have just a little bit more time for preparations, and a more stable version of MSP, I had my first paperless performance yesterday.

Set-up: Samsung Galaxy 10.1 Note 2 (portrait) with MobileSheetsPro 1.0.6. PageFlip Firefly via USB connection. About 40 lead sheets in ChoPro format.

After making the final modifications to the lead sheets on the PC I copied them to the tablet and imported them into MSP. In MSP I compiled the setlists (4 sets) and checked the song view of each song, adding some annotations (notes and highlights) where needed. I used MSP to make a back up of all songs and data.

On stage, the first surprise was that loading the first setlist crashed MSP. Fortunately, I had some spare time to track this down to one song in the setlist, a song that I didn't really need. So this was 'solved' quickly.
A more serious surprise I got while playing: the annotations I made all appeared shifted down for about 2 lines, which made them very confusing. And since I was playing I couldn't do anything about it until the first break.
I hope these issues are already solved in the post-1.0.6 releases.

On average the performance went well, but I clearly need more time to get used to the pedal for page flips. I also have an multi-effects pedal to control, and sometimes it became confusing what pedal to press. Given time this will get better.
I need to make a lot more changes to the ChoPro files. For example, of a song that is two paper pages, I have chords for the first verse and chorus (on the left page), and just lyrics for everything else (on the right page). Since MSP on the tablet is in essence a single-page display, I can no longer peek at the chords when on the second page. Two adjacent pages in portrait mode is too small for me to read.

Will I continue to use MSP? Definitely, despite some critical notes!

FYI: I choose for a wired (USB) connection with the Filefly since I did not want the complications that result from problems with the bluetooth connection. I hope we'll be able to nail these problems soon.

I had a similar problem with a certain song in a setlist that crashed MSP: http://zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/forum/...p?tid=2542
Luckily it did not hit me on stage. I was stepping through a setlist that I used some weeks ago to look at the changes to displaying ChordPro in landscape. The bad thing was that one file destroyed the whole setlist and I had to open all songs one by one from the 'Songs' list to detect the bad one. Backstage before an important gig this would have driven me nuts. 

Anyway: I will keep using MSP. Great to have many more songs at hand for sessions, no heavy binders to carry and preparing setlists is easier than ever.

Sorry for the instability guys - I fix crashes as the crash reports come in, and I appreciate your patience.

Johan - were the annotations on text/chord pro files, or on PDF files? I haven't tested too much with annotations on text/chord pro files, but one limitation is that any change to the document properties can result in the annotations no longer being placed properly. I'm just storing the position on the page where the annotation should be, but if you do something like change the text size, this could result in the annotations not being where you want them. Is this what you encountered, or did they really just move without any input from you?

Thanks,
Mike

Yes, I tried annotations with ChoPro files. And as far as I can remember I didn't make changes to the files after completing the annotations. It is, however, possible that I accidentally changed one or more of the display options for ChoPro files. I'll try to explain why.
I have configured default settings for newly imported ChoPro files. But sometimes it seems that an imported file gets different settings. So I adjust the settings, "Set as Default", and "Apply to all other files" to make sure all files look the same. This may have changed something.
A feature I'm missing is the ability to change all display settings of a ChoPro file to Default. I though Reset would do that, but apparently it doesn't.
As soon as we have a more stable release I'll continue testing.
Thanks for the great job!

A hint for the editing work that you're expecting:
"... I need to make a lot more changes to the ChoPro files. For example, of a song that is two paper pages, I have chords for the first verse and chorus (on the left page), and just lyrics for everything else (on the right page)..."
The program "Songpress" (http://web.skeed.it/index.php?q=songpress.html) has some nice editing features that I found nowhere else: You can copy a verse and "Paste Chords" pastes just the chords to another verse that you select. That needs some corrections afterwards because the guesses where the chords should go are not perfect. Keyboard commands "select next chord" / "select previous chord" / "Move chord right " / "Move chord left" simplify the necessary corrections

Thanks for the tip. I have some tools that turn ChoPro (embedded chords) into text (chords above the lyrics). Then it's easy to copy the chords to another verse. Of course, manual adjustment is always needed. It not the biggest of jobs, and Emacs (with ChoPro mode) is a good helper.

I have an on-going project of rewriting Chordii. Goals are Unicode handling, PDF generation, and extensibility.