[tannerlindsay]

I looked for a similar topic, but missed it so apologies if this is a repeat.

I use MobileSheets at the organ (as in pipe, not as in rock or Hammond   ) for practice, performance and lessons. Currently use an (aging) Surface Book, and the pen for annotations.

For my lessons, I have a very large book containing a variety of exercises, songs, music, etc. that we work from. It is several hundred pages long. For my lesson, I have a song in MobileSheets that has all of the pages that I am working on, which includes exercises as well as actual pieces of music that will be played.

For the musical pieces, I have added annotations - sometimes LOTS of annotations. These can include fingering, pedal markings, highlights, phrase markings and the standard "stop forgetting this note is sharp". It is also very helpful that my teacher can use the stylus to make quick markings as we work through the music. Once I have learned the piece, I would like to move it to a separate "song" on it's own so that I can pull them up directly, use tags, all that. I do this by "Cloning" the giant song, then just adjusting the pages being used in that song. However, it seems that I lose my annotations when I do that. Or am I doing something wrong?

I saw the option to "embed annotations" and it sounds like perhaps that might help? However, it also sounds like when I do that, it becomes harder to add or edit annotations later? While a lot of my annotations will probably be fine in a "permanent" sort of state, some will not. Because organs can be wildly different from instrument to instrument, most obviously with what stops are available, but also things like combination pistons, toe pistons and the number of manuals (keyboards), I may need to make some changes to the annotations when I use a different organ. And it wasn't entirely clear if that will be more problematic if they are embedded. Notably, I saw another thread that said it might mean re-loading the entire PDF when opening or annotating? And on a few hundred pages, that seems concerning.

I'll admit - I'm away from my MobileSheets system - so perhaps some playing around would answer this quickly, but I thought I might ask.

Also - any other organists out there using MobileSheets? Any tips?

[MB10]

Hi tannerlindsay,

I think this depends a little bit on the way you organize your files and songs. I would assume from your explanations that you have several different pieces of music that each have exactly one separate pdf file belonging to them and you combined all those pdf into one big "song".

So first of all (you might not like to hear this, I hope it doesn't sound condescending! ) I believe that the logic of MobileSheets would fit better if you would have each piece as one separate "song" in MobileSheets and combine them in a "setlist" (where you can adjust the order) or a "collection" for your organ lesson. This way the song stays exactly the same if you at one point remove it from your organ lesson setlist - or even have a "learning" and a "performing" copy of the same song (the first in the setlist and the second not) and don't have to worry about adjusting pages and so on.

But obviously that is no good solution for your organ lesson song already in use right now, perhaps more like a suggestion for the future. You could use the "snippet" feature for that, I suppose, but it will probably only work in the case that all the pages of your pieces are originating from the same pdf-file (I guess). For it, you open the song go click in the middle of the screen to open the overlay, tap the down arrow in the lower left corner, and then choose "create snippet". You fill in the page range relating to the song you opened and then it creates a copy of only this page range. I am pretty sure that all your annotations are kept.

I hope it will work out for you! Let me know if I can help you further.

Kindly, Malte

[tannerlindsay]

Hey Malte, 
Thanks  for the reply. As a clarification, the the large "song" is a single PDF, not multiples that were combined or otherwise. It's a single "textbook" if you will. It has its own sections (manual technique, pedal technique, registration, repotoire, etc.) but they aren't separate in any way. I use bookmarks and such to navigate around.

I think at one point, I had considered making many, many individual songs, but I didn't take the time and basically forgot about that option

I can do that, and then yeah, I think using setlists or collections will work. I would just clone it, oh 100ish times and then adjust the pages for each different exercise, song or what have you. That should keep a single copy of the base PDF yes?

I imagine I could also break the PDF into many separate files, either one page each, or more manually depending on the length, which could be 1-8ish pages each.

Is there one option that is better or worse on that front? Single PDF with lots of "clones" or lots of PDFs?

(Just checked. It's 296 pages in the PDF that needs to be about 85-95 different "songs". Although I don't ever intend to perform the exercises so ... ?)

[MB10]

Hey tannerlindsay,

thanks for the clarification! In that case the most practical way to proceed from here would be creating snippets of the pieces and exercises you are currently working on as I described in my previous message, I think. Then you would have 2 copies of the songs, one containing only the section and the "original" full book. You could combine the shorter ones in various ways e.g. have one setlist containing everything you need for practicing and lessons and another setlist for a concert. By the way that would not crowd your internal memory because the file only gets stored once.

There would also be a possibility to break up the whole big file in every single section and if you don't want to do everything by hand you could use a csv in which the page ranges for the sections are specified. This is explained in several forum posts, I hope you find something on it by searching for "csv" or "csv import".

But actually the way you're organized right now I think proceeding with snippets would be the best solution as you can kind of "cut out" the sections of the file you need one by one. Also, the snippet method is the only one I would be sure of that it keeps your annotations.