[maintech]

I have very successfully imported all my current printed library using a scanner, but I'm wondering if I could import digital content directly. Hal Leonard books are what I'd like to use. Has anyone else used this method?

Thanks,

David.

[McAroni]

Maybe i do not understand you question correctly, but Why should this not be possible? If the book is an PDF or Image there is no Problem. If you would like to split the book while importing have a look here: 

https://zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/forum...php?fid=29

[itsme]

I usually keep books as one complete file per book. To access the songs from MSP you can use Import - PDF Bookmarks or Import - CSV File.
CSV import is much more powerful and allows populating the MSP database completely during import but requires some effort to prepare them (one CSV file per PDF). It's a good custom to post created CSV files in the forum to share the effort. Just the CSVs, not the PDFs of course, as the PDFs are under copyright. You can find a number of already available CSV files by searching the forum for 'CSVFile' (without blank, without the quotes).
https://zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/forum...p?tid=6667

[BRX]

The only problem could be if your books are in the epub format which is (not yet?) supported by MSP.

As already mentioned if your digital copies are PDFs (without DRM) than it's no different from importing scans.

[maintech]

thanks for all for your quick response, I'll check to see what format the images are and post my result. 

appreciate you all very much,

keep safe,

David.

[maintech]

Hal Leonard responded but they prevent the importing by their use and protocol of their digital version. However, Amazon sell the Kindle version which can be read on a Win 10 laptop, and with screen capture it sounds like that may work. 
Anyone have input to that way of using MS?

Cheers,

David.

[maintech]

I downloaded the Kindle app and a songbook from Amazon using the Hal Leonard materials. Sadly the images were too small to read, even on my 17" laptop, and the app prevented any method to import the music into MS.
I will get pdf images from the web and I know that works.

David

[davidandbirds]

I downloaded the Kindle app and a songbook from Amazon using the Hal Leonard materials. Sadly the images were too small to read, even on my 17" laptop, and the app prevented any method to import the music into MS.
I will get pdf images from the web and I know that works.

David

appreciate that this is an old thread but jumping in with new info and a new question

i have bought epub and kindle format digital music books
i was able to extract the original image files from the e-book. [ there are free tools for that]

some initial observations: image quality in epub was better than in kindle, but that may vary by book. epub page image sizes about 1100 pixels high - not great but reasonable

in the cases where I have abandoned a poor kindle and bought the paperback version instead, to scan in tediously, the image quality of a printed book is better than that of a digital sold version. [ but e books are cheaper] so maybe it depends on what quality you will accept

here's my question. the ebooks build page 1 of a song from 3 elements: . Text containing title etc, image of the music notation, more text with the footer blurb i.e. copyright info  that is at the foot of every 1st page of music. Page 2 of the song is just a single image.

so aspect ratio is badly out for page 1. when you get it into sheets on a 2 page view, its like having a square next to a rectangle. i need a feature like crop thats is opposite of crop i.e. can add white-space to top and bottom of an image, to make it an A4 ratio aspect

for Hal Leonard, if you locate a book on their site, there may be a link saying " if you only want some of the songs you can buy them digitally here 2 - link takes you to sheet music direct where you can buy a PASS subscription. with pass you can display, and screen grab, complete songs , one page at a time, you can also grab an audio playback from their interactive player i.e. a robo performance that can help with practicing - if you are tech savvy.

or you can keep paying the monthly pass fee and stream online all the time, but that does not get the product into MS.

once again i have an aspect ratio issue with the digital music service. if i go to a shop and buy a paper sheet music of one song, it will always filll a whole number of pages. there will never be just one stave on the last page. but that happens all the time in the digital renderings.
sometimes you can fiddle with the font size in their player so it ends at near to a full page but its awkward to use

[Zubersoft]

I do plan on eventually adding a feature where you can "normalize" song pages so that they will all be sized to match the largest page in the song. The idea will be that I will render the image for a given page, and then edit the image data to just append as many white pixels as necessary to get it to be the same size as the page with the largest image. I may have to do this independently for width and height though, meaning some pages could have their width increased.

Mike

[davidandbirds]

that will ( eventually) be great.

i struggle with the aesthetics of margins etc. 
at first I scanned all my bought books, and aggressively cropped everything, thinking to maximise the music on screen for my ageing eyes, but i now think that having some white space all around, like a printed book page, looks better.. i may have to go redo some because I cropped my scan images and now I can't put the white space back.

the images in professional epubs, kindles, are cropped very aggressively- you can see that if you use free samples and change the page background colour in the google books or kindle apps to e.g. sepia. so that the white image stands out . i think they do that to reduce file sizes for transmission as much as they can .  and call me old fashioned but removing the song title onto a separate page , which they often do , looks wrong. I like to see the title of what i am playing on page 1

so bring on some sensible tools and I can stop fiddling with crop settings instead of practicing

[ for music page scanning, after much trial and error 300 dpi and black& white only setting seems best for my cheap printer+scanner ]  going to 600 makes no visible difference but file sizes get a lot bigger and scanning takes much longer.  the free epson scanner app ( part of their printer software) has a feature which auto straightens up the page and corrects any accidental tilt - that's wonderful as you get perfect verticals every time.  it also has a choice of save or "add" so that you can keep scanning all the pages of a song using " add" then "save" at the end to get a single pdf.

[BRX]

Yeah, epubs and especially those from Hal Leonard aren't very sheetreader-friendly. I feel the same with the titles on separate pages.

What I've done a couple of times is converting the epub to pdf (epubor is a good tool for that, there are of course others), copy the
titles onto the pages they belong (easily done with the screenshot tool in PDF X-Change, there are of course others) and delete the
single title pages from the PDF entirely.

[davidandbirds]

thanks, i did similar things using calibre, converted between mobi, epub, pdf. in one case goint to mobi and back to pdf tricked it into showing music title on same page as staves

some different info to share. I has wondered for sometim if taking the pages for a single piece out of a pdf book via print to PDF options.

so yesterday I did some of the same extracts but using a pdf splitter instead

much staring at my monitor screen later - at piano-playing distance from screen, I believe that the splitter results are better .
 When a "print to PDF" runs, some processing goes on to scale source to fit an A4 page. Using a spliltter like the free one at ilovepdf bypasses that.

the pdf does get scaled when MS renders it to screen.. and certainly the "high" quality in MS is needed to match a side by side display in Adobe.

has it ever been asked if that high quality setting is cranked up as far as it can go ?
  as a previous gamer, I expect to see ultra, super duper ultra, insane.. etc in the graphics options

[KHS]

thanks, i did similar things using calibre, converted between mobi, epub, pdf. in one case goint to mobi and back to pdf tricked it into showing music title on same page as staves

some different info to share. I has wondered for sometim if taking the pages for a single piece out of a pdf book via print to PDF options.

so yesterday I did some of the same extracts but using a pdf splitter instead

much staring at my monitor screen later - at piano-playing distance from screen, I believe that the splitter results are better .
 When a "print to PDF" runs, some processing goes on to scale source to fit an A4 page. Using a spliltter like the free one at ilovepdf bypasses that.

the pdf does get scaled when MS renders it to screen.. and certainly the "high" quality in MS is needed to match a side by side display in Adobe.

has it ever been asked if that high quality setting is cranked up as far as it can go ?
  as a previous gamer, I expect to see ultra, super duper ultra, insane.. etc in the graphics options

Not sure if this is directly relevant, but I often extract .PDF pages as image files (.PNG usually) for any necessary editing and then re-combine all those pages back into a .PDF using a Print-to-File "printer" within Windows. At least with he one I use (CutePDF), I am able to override ALL the presets for page size by selecting "Custom Postscript Page Size" (or something like that) in the Advanced tab and specifying EXACTLY what size (in inches or in pixels) I want the .PDF pages to be. This appears to avoid the scaling problem you mention.

I should add that if I've extensively edited and/or cropped the various pages extracted from the .PDF so that they're not consistent as to page size, I can use native Windows File Explorer to display "Length" and "Width" metadata and then Sort first on one and then on the other in order quickly to see the largest width I need to accommodate and then largest length and just set the customer page size to accommodate those 2 dimensions in "printing" the .PDF.. On a side note, make sure ALL your edited pages are longer than wide (even if you have to add some white space) or the Print-to-File "printer" will often rotate the page to make it "portrait".

If I've posted this the wrong way, I hope someone will put it where it belongs.