[swilkes9]

Mike,
I was thinking, if there was a database/library of musical sheet music stave/bars, it would save me a lot of time to be able to select from a MobileSheets database, a blank page of staves to use for creating music scores and leadsheets.  I personally use a 8.5" X 11" blank PDF preloaded with (ten) lines of bars/staves.  I leave space at the time of the page for AUTHOR, TITLE, and KEY.  The current annotation features provides for notes, and other punctuation of the song.  Just a thought.

Thanks,
Steve

[Rey_a]

Hi Steve,

Creating music scores/lead sheets using the annotations editor seems rather cumbersome to me. It must be difficult to postion the notes in the right positions to name one thing ....
While your post indicates it must be possible, MobileSheets was not really intended for actually creating scores/leadsheets, but more to manage/display/use them

Have you ever considered using an other/dedicated tool for creating your scores?
Myself, I use MuseScore for that purpose.
It is free, very powerful and it can play back the scores (including the chords on the lead sheets).
One can even input the notes by playing a MIDI keyboard connected to the pc.
When the score is (partly) finished in MuseScore, I then export it to pdf, and then import that pdf into MobileSheets. The swap file function in MobileSheets then allows for updating the pdf if changes to the score were necessary after the initial import.

MuseScore does not run on a tablet however.

UPDATE :
I just read in another thread you use MobileSheets to produce vocal and guitar leadsheets. I was not aware of that when answering the above.
MuseScore probably is not a good solution for you then ...

Rudy

[swilkes9]

Rudy,
Thanks for the tip regarding MuseScore.  Most of my leadsheets are for guitar only.  It appears that using MuseScore, and requiring vocal information, I could:

1. Create my guitar leadsheet,
2. Export it as a PDF
3. Import it into MobileSheets
4. Add vocal annotations manually to the PDF. 

This seems to be a lot more efficient than the way I'm doing it now.

Cool,
Steve

[swilkes9]

Rudy,

One downside to using MuseScore, if I needed to make changes to my leadsheet after creating, converting to PDF, and importing to MS, I would have to repeat these steps each time.  And then, I would have to re-annotate for any vocal lyrics, info, etc., but it still is easier to create the leadsheet using MuseScore.

Steve

[mdavej]

I think it's unfair to ask MobileSheets to be a full composition tool. I'd rather it focus on being the great gigging tool that it is today. There are tons of great composition tools out there to support MobileSheets.

[BRX]

I'm still hoping for a sooner than later implementation of ABC notation similar how chordpro is already handled. 

Yes, one would have to know or learn the ABC syntax but it isn't really complicated and it really opens the way to transpose and edit your scores (real ones with notation on staffs) on the fly in MS.

[Rey_a]

Rudy,

One downside to using MuseScore, if I needed to make changes to my leadsheet after creating, converting to PDF, and importing to MS, I would have to repeat these steps each time.  And then, I would have to re-annotate for any vocal lyrics, info, etc., but it still is easier to create the leadsheet using MuseScore.

Steve

Steve,

I always add the lyrics to the score in Musescore. It supports lyrics.
I do add other anotations to my scores in MobileSheets. And I also sometimes (mostly) have to make changes to scores after I imported them into MobileSheets. But after changing them in Musescore, I do not use the Import function of Mobilesheets to update the score in MobileSheets. In stead I use the 'Swap File' function in MobileSheets. The advantage is, that all annotations I made in MobileSheets to the score are preserved this way. Of course if the layout of the score changed, I need to rearrange some of the annotations, but I do not need to redo them.

Below is an extract of a score I made. The lyrics were added in Musescore. The Blue and yellow elements are annotations, added in MobileSheets

   

Having said that, not sure how your guitar leadsheets look, but if they contain just chords and lyrics (not notes), you may want to look at the chordpro file type (which is supported by MobileSheets and allows for on the fly transposing)

Rudy

[BRX]

For anyone interested I recreated the example snippet with ABC (see attachment).

The ASCII code necessary for that is only

%abc-2.2
%%pagewidth 22cm
X:1
I:linebreak $
%%soloffs part=0 %space=0 tempo=0
%%partsfont Times-Bold 16 box
%%hyphencont 0
T:Title
M:4/4
L:1/8
K:G
Q:1/4=108
P:1
"Em"eeef-- ffee | "D"ddde- eedd | "Em"eee[P:Brk+Stop]f-- ffeB ||: e3 z z EFG | "Em"B4 z BcB |$
w: *************************j'ai vu l'or-ient dans son é-
"D"A4 zFAA | AF- F2 z2 EF | "Em"E4 zEFG | B4 zBcB | "D"A4 zFAA | $
w: crin a-vec la lu-ne_ pour ba-niére Et je comp-tais en un quat-rain chan-ter au

You can try yourself copying the code to the left side of 

http://moinejf.free.fr/js/edit-1.xhtml

and see the generation and edit possibilities.

[Rey_a]

Hi BRX,

I had never heard of this ABC notation method.

Seems pretty powerful ! 
The fact that it is so powerful would make it more complex to support in MobileSheets though. Has Mike in any way stated his intention to support it  one day?

Rudy

[BRX]

Yes he has. Though it's certainly some other big features away before he attends to it.

I think (and hope) it is not to complicated (at least not more than chordpro) since there's excellent and free (rather open source) code that can be used and in my expectation the main thing is to put a renderer (essentially a html browser) into MS and just use that code and connect that to the other capabilities of MS.

I'm a particular fan of Jef Moine's abc2svg which he is improving daily and putting in lots of features the current ABC standard doesn't support yet. (Quite a few on my request, for instance an automatic chord grid feature long before it has been implemented in chordpro).

IMO ABC is well worth to know as a musician who writes his own sheet. Very powerful, quite easy to start with, free, can be done on a sheet of paper (though it's power unfolds on the computer when rendered) and more. It's very common and known in folk/traditional music where it is stems from. Not so much in other areas (a pity).

If you want to know more, the biggest and best place to start from is https://abcnotation.com (or just ask here).

[itsme]

I use EasyABC https://sourceforge.net/projects/easyabc/files/EasyABC/
Great for beginners.
A helpful forum is https://groups.io/g/abcusers/topics

[Rey_a]

Thanks for the info!

Yes, I already looked at the abcnotation.com site, so now I understand most of the code you published. (writing it myself is still another matter though  ).
I will definitely play around with it a bit, and see where I get ....

I also found out that MuseScore supports import/export from/to ABCnotation format, so when Mike supports ABC, I can simply export the scores I made in Musescore  to ABCnotation and use those in MS to enjoy the additional possibilities of the format.

Thanks

Rudy

[BRX]

I also recommend the sites 

http://moinejf.free.fr (of Jef Moine, developer of abc2svg)
and
https://wim.vree.org/svgParse/index.html (of Wim Vree, developer of the abc<->MusicXML conversion tools, which are AFAIK used in MuseScore)

Also I think the implementation of ABC would (because of the conversion tools) be a good way to implement MusicXML support at the same time.

[Zubersoft]

I'll look into adding an option to support "templates" in the future as an import option so that users can select from a few included PDFs, or add their own. I don't know where this fits in with all of the other requests though in terms of priority. It's not something that is requested very often.

Mike