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Importing folders as songs
#1
Hi MobileSheets community,
I'm still quite new to MobileSheets so I'm importing my existing sheet music. Most of it is already organized in folders, where the folder's name is the song title with all corresponding files in it. Normally, these files are not just named like the song, but at least additionally what they are (e.g. different instrumental parts, audio files, and others). That's why batch import did not give me really useful results until now (e.g. I get 3 songs named "Song A trp.pdf", "Song A piano.pdf", "Song A played by great artists.mp3" instead of "Song A" including the PDFs and the MP3 as files).

Do you have any idea how I could tell MobileSheets to just use these folders as song folders and connect the included readable files? That would be a HUGE time saver... since somehow, I just already did before what it does itself with the files in the library when the songs are imported. I really hope that I just did not find out how to do this the right way until now.  Angel

Thanks for your help in advance!
Waldbaer
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#2
It depends what you mean. If you want to MobileSheets just to use your files and folders as is, that can be done. You'll need to go to Settings->Storage->Set MobileSheets Storage Location and specify the root folder containing all of your song folders. Then you can use Batch Import and MobileSheets will just pull in all of the files and folders without moving them.  If what you are asking is if you can view your songs using your folder structures in MobileSheets, the answer is no. The application is not designed around folders. Heirarchies like that, while they can provide an extreme level of organization, are slow to access and navigate. In most cases, you can find exactly what you are looking for with a couple of taps or with a short search term in MobileSheetsPro. You do need to name your songs appropriately to make them easy to find. If you want to use Import->Batch Import, you can't have multiple PDFs combined in one song, but you can add multiple songs to one setlist. If you want to add multiple PDFs to one song, you'd have to create each song one by one by tapping the "New" button on the library screen and then adding each individual PDF in the song editor.  I have discussed in other parts of the forum a planned feature called song versioning where you can have multiple versions of one song that you could switch between and each version could use a different file. You'd still run into the same problem with that though - you would need to create each version separately, so I'm not sure if that buys you a lot...

As far as pulling in audio files, you can enable Settings->Import Settings->Automatically Add Matching Audio, but this only works if the mp3 has the same name as the PDF and they are in the same folder.

If there is enough feedback from users that they would like a batch import feature similar to what you are describing, where MobileSheetsPro basically creates one song per subdirectory that contains files, I could certainly look into adding that, but I'm not sure how much value that would provide for most users.

Mike
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#3
Hi Mike,
thanks for your answer! It seems the problem is not really easy to solve, so I'll probably just go on and create the songs manually. Or is there maybe some kind of scripting possible to create the folders with the right names? I think about building a fake PDF and a CSV and import that. I'll still have to add the files themselves, but at least I would not have to rename them all one by one... I'll try experimenting with that. I remember you can have setlists as XML, could I create something similar to import and link songs? Maybe I could find a way to automate that... I'm sorry I have not yet found the time to look up these things for myself, I'm just thinking about it while writing...
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#4
The Import CSV feature does not currently allow you to specify multiple files in the CSV. This is an enhancement that's on my list of things to do. It also won't let you specify that a song should use multiple PDFs (although you can specify audio files).  The batch import lets you populate metadata based off folder names, but it won't let you add multiple PDFs to one song if you want to do that. 

Mike
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#5
(01-26-2019, 09:49 AM)Zubersoft Wrote: The Import CSV feature does not currently allow you to specify multiple files in the CSV. This is an enhancement that's on my list of things to do. It also won't let you specify that a song should use multiple PDFs (although you can specify audio files).  The batch import lets you populate metadata based off folder names, but it won't let you add multiple PDFs to one song if you want to do that. 

Mike
To ease automatic import of my scores it would be quite useful for me to have the ability to specify within the CSV file of a given song all the files attached to the song, for instance a pdf for lyrics, another for the chords, another for the score in a given tone, midi file of the song and so on.
Is this a functionality that will remain long time in the todo list or is this something that we could expect to be available in reasonable timing?
Thanks in advance for your response!
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#6
I can't commit to making those changes until I'm done with the annotations rework and iOS version. So not until later this year. The CSV functionality is currently all designed around one CSV file and one PDF, so adding the ability to specify multiple song files requires a different implementation and options. It basically means that you could specify any number of files for any number of songs and the CSV import would have to verify that each one of those files is present, and you'd have to specify the page order to use for each of those files if they are PDFs, and error checking would need to be put in place if no page order is used (to perhaps use the full range of pages from the PDF). You already can specify a list of audio files, but specifying MIDI commands would require additional changes. 

Mike
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#7
While I'm still eagerly waiting for multiple file support for CSV imports (it was my request originally) I don't think MIDI commands should be part of that.

A batch editing method from within MSP for MIDI commands similar to batch editing the metadata fields seems sensible to me, though.
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