[Serafin]

narmani,

The way MobileSheets is currently designed, I really can't treat a bookmark as a song, because a bookmark doesn't tell you how many pages the song should be. I'm adding in version 5.0.0 a "snippet" feature which lets you cut out a portion of a song to create another song really quickly. So if you added a song with a 500 page pdf, you could open the song, and then use the snippet feature to just type in a name and a page range, and it would create a new song using that. You could repeat this multiple times to split up the PDF quickly. This is really just a more convenient way to use the copy/paste method that currently exists.

I have not yet added support for importing PDF bookmarks, but this begs the question - if I just import PDF bookmarks as bookmarks in MobileSheets, this may not really meet everyone's needs. If I import PDF bookmarks to try and create songs out of them, how long do I make each song? Do I just assume that the pages between each bookmark is how many pages that song should be?

There is another option that I haven't really thought too much about yet. The current model for a bookmark is just a named link to a page in a song. If I did away with this model, and instead treated a bookmark as an independent song with all the properties of its parent, but a different title, and a different page range (I would have to enforce page ranges for bookmarks), then I could support what you are describing.  The only difference between a bookmark and a regular song would be that there is a flag in the database that specifies that the bookmark is a child song of another song. From a user interface perspective, there would a lot of little things I would have to add code for all over the place though...  Because of this, I would prefer just finding a way to make the current architecture work by creating songs out of PDF bookmarks if that works for you. I'm definitely open to thoughts and suggestions about this issue, and how people would like things to work.

Mike

Mike, Thanks for approving my forum membership request.

What you describe above is very much what I need… to put it in your terms: snippets or ranged bookmarks that can be saved and referenced as songs in the Library. I have yet to try MS, but from what I read, you cannot currently save snippets this way; you need to enter them in each setlist you create. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Like narmani, I, too, use PDF music books that are over a thousand pages long, containing hundreds of songs (including the OCP Guitar Accompaniment Book, oddly enough). These are frequently protected PDF files which cannot be edited/printed/split. There may be hacks to get around modifying the files, but I would rather abide by the EULA to remain legally unambiguous. Also note that not all multi-song PDF books come with PDF bookmarks/TOCs.

The scheme that first comes to mind is more or less what you describe: If you treat the concept of a "song" to be fully independent of a "file", it works to simply define a "song" to be a snippet of a PDF file. A file could contain one to as many snippets/songs as you want. In the default single-song file case, the snippet would happen to point to the entire page range of a given file. It's fine to assert the restriction that snippets - and therefore songs - are always entirely contained within one file.

You can also do something similar to what the unrealbook app on the iPad does. It allows you to add single files from your library to your playlist (same as MS), and it also allows you to define "bookmarks" and store these as indexes (in separate lists) in its library. Unrealbook's bookmarks however are more akin to MS's snippets - they include not just a page destination, but a range (number of pages - actually optional). Snippets are actually more powerful because they are not strictly consecutive pages. MS seems to have most of the pieces in place to make this happen with only minor changes (easy for us users to say ). See the link below for details .
https://unrealbook.uservoice.com/knowled...kmarks-etc

A key part of unrealbook's scheme is its capability to accept simple spreadsheets (.csv) entered by a user to create these indexes of bookmarks. Each row in these spreadsheets consists of a title (bookmark name), a PDF file name, and a page range (start, length). That's it.  Furthermore, one can add entries to a spreadsheet incrementally over time and have unrealbook re-read the modified spreadsheet without creating duplicates of existing entries - I'm guessing that it simply overwrites previous entries with the same name - so one can build an index over time as needed. I.e., it's much easier to add 3 or 4 songs a week than to enter 800 songs in one shot (this is important for usability).

Yes, I like unrealbook a lot. I've used it regularly over the past several years. It's the main reason I own an iPad. But I also want a much bigger display than my iPad currently offers. I'm looking to MS, along with an Android emulator - at least until you have a native Windows version - to give me digital sheet music capability on my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 (MusicReader's UI just doesn't do it for me at the moment).

I hope these thoughts make sense. I hope that I'm not simply rehashing ideas you already have - or that if I am, that it is helping to reinforce your plans towards the right direction.

Thanks for listening.

SG