Are you aware that you don't need to populate the PDF with metadata and use exiftool to get your data into MS?
If you want to have metadata saved in the PDF, then OK. But you can import straight with the csv and the pdf to get the metadata into the MS database and use it to catalog your music.
I don't use metadata saved in the PDFs themselves at all in my > 55.000 song database. That might only be relevant if you want to use the PDFs outside of MS for something, but as soon as you have the metadata in the database of MS you don't neet "hardcoded" metadata in the PDFs from within MS.
Just adjust your exported csv file to the columns and format MS needs and you can import.
P.S. I usually think about importing from a pdf in terms of fakebooks and other collections as source. Importing of single songs/files is a bit tedious as long as Mike hasn't changed the import process to be able to do this in batch processing as well. But I guess the current behaviour (extracting single songs and page ranges from a volume) is what you are looking for in your point 4.
I better let Mike answer the rest of your questions. I haven't imported songs from csv for a long time. But from that another advice: Keep metadata information that isn't compatible with MS yet in a big source csv or spreadsheet file just for later when it will be compatible in the future. I've been waiting for the addition of some additional metadata columns for quite some time for which I have the information ready in my "master spreadsheet" to import when it's possible.
If you want to have metadata saved in the PDF, then OK. But you can import straight with the csv and the pdf to get the metadata into the MS database and use it to catalog your music.
I don't use metadata saved in the PDFs themselves at all in my > 55.000 song database. That might only be relevant if you want to use the PDFs outside of MS for something, but as soon as you have the metadata in the database of MS you don't neet "hardcoded" metadata in the PDFs from within MS.
Just adjust your exported csv file to the columns and format MS needs and you can import.
P.S. I usually think about importing from a pdf in terms of fakebooks and other collections as source. Importing of single songs/files is a bit tedious as long as Mike hasn't changed the import process to be able to do this in batch processing as well. But I guess the current behaviour (extracting single songs and page ranges from a volume) is what you are looking for in your point 4.
I better let Mike answer the rest of your questions. I haven't imported songs from csv for a long time. But from that another advice: Keep metadata information that isn't compatible with MS yet in a big source csv or spreadsheet file just for later when it will be compatible in the future. I've been waiting for the addition of some additional metadata columns for quite some time for which I have the information ready in my "master spreadsheet" to import when it's possible.