I need some help here. I'm doing a Sync to a cloud folder, and I'm being presented with a "Select Song To Use" dialog. If my attachments to this post are working, you will see what I'm being presented with. Title "Alice in Wonderland" is being found in two different PDFs and it's asking me to choose between them.
But of course, that's normal. I have a couple dozen jazz books, and when I search for a song, sometimes I get 10 hits from different books, all the same song name. They all chart the song out differently, and I carefully compare them to choose which one is best for the band to use. That is, in fact, one of the main reasons I use digital music managers.
I did read this section in the manual:
Quote:FILE STORAGE
Due to the very restrictive model used for file storage on iOS, MobileSheets must copy all imported files into its own application folder. Files cannot be used from their original location. Another important thing to mention about file storage is that there is the potential for conflicts with file paths. If the “Create Subdirectories For Songs” setting is enabled, file conflicts can be eliminated by ensuring that all songs have unique titles. Otherwise, all imported files must have unique names. This is because all imported files will be copied to the same location, and files would overwrite each other if their names are not unique.
And so I have that box checked. But obviously, it's not preventing me from having this issue.
Does anyone know how to get past this problem?
To be clear, the only time the app should think I have a duplicate song is if I have two PDFs with the exact same name. For indexed PDFs, the key for a unique song should be the PDF+SongName combination.
Hi Dave. I can't help you but just chiming in to say I've had the same problem. I hadn't seen it for a while but it came up again a few days ago. I'm not using iOS though, I'm running MS on e-Ink Android. I had two library entries, both called Welcome to the Black Parade, one with a pdf called Welcome to the Black Parade trio and the other with a pdf called Welcome to the Black Parade quartet. When I was syncing to a cloud folder it asked which piece/pdf combo to use but the info given was truncated so I couldn't tell which pdf was being referred to. I ended up just retitling the pieces so that one is Welcome to the Black Parade qtt and the other is Welcome to the Black Parade trio. I'm fairly sure that's how I've dealt with it previously and it does seem to stop the sync from glitching. It's not an elegant solution but I figure that soon enough Mike will code the versioning update and it will become moot. From recent posts it seems like the versioning update isn't coming very soon though so perhaps Mike will be able to help out in the meantime.
Guy
Curious, were you dealing with CSV-indexed PDFs, or just straight PDF files?
The quote from the manual leaves me confused about whether the conflict is with the file names of the PDFs or with the song names. For indexed PDFs, like my situation here, those should be two different things. The business about putting PDFs in separate directories seems to suggest the issue is about file names. But the error messages I got clearly show different PDF file names, but a common song name.
So perhaps this checkbox (and section of the manual) have nothing to do with the conflict I'm facing here......
02-28-2023, 01:06 PM (This post was last modified: 02-28-2023, 01:07 PM by Zubersoft.)
Without having access to your library and sync folder, it's very hard for me to know the details of why a conflict is being presented. It means that, for whatever reason, MobileSheets can't uniquely identify some of the songs in the library. That means it is seeing multiple songs with the same titles and underlying files in the library, and it doesn't know how to pick the right one. This also can occur when songs use multiple files. It's possible you have multiple entries in your library pointing to the same file with the same title. If you want to send me your database file, I could query for that and see, but you should be able to verify it pretty easily by editing a few of the songs that were shown as conflicts.
The best way to resolve conflicts is populate the song ID fields if you are going to have multiple songs that have the same title and file. I know you are saying that all your songs use different files, and I agree that there should be no conflict in that case, but without having access to your library, I can't verify whether you have duplicate titles + files in the library.
Hi Dave. Just straight PDFs, no CSV indexing. I am using multiple libraries though and the libraries all refer to the same files so I wonder whether that has something to do with it - I think Mike might have mentioned a while back that the multiple libraries feature hasn't been fully tested and had all potential bugs ironed out. Dave, if you want Mike to try and fix the issue, would you be able to share some files with with him that still cause the conflict? I've already sorted mine out so I'd need to try and recreate the problem and seeing as it's only happened a handful of times I'm not confident I could do that quickly and reliably. I can confirm that both the songs in the conflict only contained a single PDF, and that the PDFs had different names. Mike, let me know if you'd like me to try to recreate the glitch. If versioning is still in the plans then I'm happy just to work around it though.
03-01-2023, 12:48 AM (This post was last modified: 03-01-2023, 12:49 AM by reggoboy.)
This screen shot is just to demonstrate my typical use case where I search for a song and it finds multiple transcriptions in different jazz books. As expected, each one I tap on brings up a unique image. This list includes the two PDFs shown in the file conflict screen shots previously posted.
Mike, thanks for the reply!
Quote:That means it is seeing multiple songs with the same titles and underlying files in the library, and it doesn't know how to pick the right one.... The best way to resolve conflicts is populate the song ID fields if you are going to have multiple songs that have the same title and file
So Mike, the screenshots I shared show different PDFs, right? But you are saying the error indicates "the same titles and underlying files in the library".
Quote:This also can occur when songs use multiple files.
I don't think I've done this anywhere, certainly not on purpose. Just individual PDFs and CSV-indexed PDFs.
When you say:
Quote: you should be able to verify it pretty easily by editing a few of the songs that were shown as conflicts.
what do you mean by editing? Changing metadata? Annotations? And then what, try the sync again and the software should stop seeing the two as being the same "song"?
I can email you a link to a backup of the library (it's all "internal" on macOS) and also the Sync to Cloud folder. Curious what you will find!
If you want to send the backup to mike@zubersoft.com, I can certainly take a look at it to see if I can give you more information about the issue. Your screenshots do show different files - what I'm suggesting is that each one of those instances has another instance using the same file. Alice in Wonderland is listed four times in the sync log - do you expect to see that many instances of that song? If not, that means you may have duplicate entries, which would cause the conflicts you are seeing.
As far as editing, I was just suggesting you long press Alice in Wonderland, tap "Edit Song" at the top of the screen, go to the files tab, and make a note of the file path. Do this four all four instances of it (or however many you have listed on the Songs tab). If you see the same file path listed for more than one, that's why a conflict is occurring.
Thanks, Mike! I have emailed over the links to the library and sync folder.
Quote:As far as editing, I was just suggesting you long press Alice in Wonderland, tap "Edit Song" at the top of the screen, go to the files tab, and make a note of the file path. Do this four all four instances of it (or however many you have listed on the Songs tab). If you see the same file path listed for more than one, that's why a conflict is occurring.
Gotcha. Interesting. And yes, for each of the 7 "Alice In Wonderland" hits, what it shows under the Files tab matches the PDF file name displayed in the screenshot above (using Song Title Formatting). They're all unique.
To provide a follow up in this thread - the issue is occurring because the tablet has 7 entries named "Alice in Wonderland" but the sync folder only has 6 entries. MobileSheets processes 4 of the 6 entries, but then processes the 7th entry (which happens to have a lower table ID than the others which is why it's sorted this way). It can't find a match for the 7th entry, but it sees two other unprocessed entries named Alice in Wonderland, so it asks which of those is a potential match. The piece of logic that is missing here is that, when MobileSheets is considering potential matches, it needs to compare them against the tablet library (or vice versa) to see if an exact match for those potential matches exists. If so, they should be disregarded, as they will be matched up later. This will allow MobileSheets to correctly detect the 7th entry as a new song that doesn't exist in the sync folder.
