[normmacneil]

Loooong time ForScore user and am migrating to MobileSheets.  I'm involved with a few bands and have all the parts on my iPad for each chart (because someone ends up forgetting a part or losing a chart and not realizing it until we get to the gig) and because I have to be able to switch "chairs" sometimes.  Anyway, I have 18K+ files, three iPads (my primary, a secondary, and an old iPad in case an iPad blows up on me), and syncing my library between iPads was becoming impossible with ForScore: trying to sync to the cloud (iCloud) was timing out (it's not a network, bandwidth, or cloud space issue) so my only mechanism was doing an archive, using iTunes to copy the file to my PC, and then to the second iPad, etc.  That would take a good hour of my time.  I couldn't seem to sync directly to the other iPad.

Ok, that's the back story.  MobileSheets allows me to use my PC as the "base" and just sync to the various iPads.  Great.  But getting the annotations migrated over is a little bit of an issue.  I can do it for each file (upload) but doing multiple files always seems to time out. Also, I have a boatload of charts so trying to remember which ones actually have annotations is a challenge.  There doesn't seem to be a way to search for files with annotations.  If I go into iTunes -> File Sharing -> ForScore, I can see all the charts but if I transfer a file, it's just the original PDF... no annotations.

Has anyone successfully migrated songs from ForScore to MobileSheets while including the annotations (layers) from ForScore without having to do them individually OR know a way to find only those charts with annotations?

Thanks,
  N.

[Zubersoft]

Welcome Norm - hopefully some forScore users can provide their experience with their migration. I do have one question about the sync issue with annotations though - normally the sync would just push the annotations from device to the other. I would recommend doing a one-way sync, meaning have your PC as the server with the sync type set to "Update Client".  If you make changes on one of the iPads, you could just sync that back to the PC then, and then sync your PC to the other iPads (whatever works best for you). You could also consider using the cloud, but that will be a little slower in general, and with 18k songs, WiFi would certainly save you a little time. If you can't sync annotations in this manner, I'd like to know more about what issue you are encountering exactly. Or are you saying the problem isn't with the sync, but just with importing the annotated PDFs from forScore? If that is the issue, is there a reason you can't just export every PDF from forScore with annotations included? I'm referring to the Share->Annotated PDF option. Does forScore not offer a way to do this with multiple files at a time?

One of my goals is to provide a way for users to import 4sc and 4sb files, and I will pull out as much information as I can from them (mainly the metadata and PDFs). I don't have any information about the way forScore annotations are stored though, so unless someone knows about that in detail, I wouldn't have a way of converting those to MobileSheets annotations.

Mike

[normmacneil]

Mike,
  Thanks for the quick response.  Just to be clear, the issue is *not* with MobileSheets; it's that syncing with ForScore is a pain and trying to get the files with annotations onto my PC was seemingly impossible.  I did see the "Share" for the individual chart that I had displayed but didn't see "Share" in the library area.  I just tried it and it works.  I use a Synology NAS and the DS File service doesn't seem to handle multiple files; it just takes the first file only.  So, I used Google Drive as a landing spot and it worked.  So, my plan is to upload everything and then use a Duplicate File Hunter to remove the non-annotated files so I'm left with just the files I've changed.  I don't mind if the annotations are not shown as a separate layer; I just don't want to lose them.

  I'll let you know how it goes and hopefully another ForScore user can make use of this tip to migrate annotated PDF files.

[Zubersoft]

Thanks for sharing your experience! I'm sure it will be of use to others.

Mike

[normmacneil]

Mike,
  Thanks for the quick response.  Just to be clear, the issue is *not* with MobileSheets; it's that syncing with ForScore is a pain and trying to get the files with annotations onto my PC was seemingly impossible.  I did see the "Share" for the individual chart that I had displayed but didn't see "Share" in the library area.  I just tried it and it works.  I use a Synology NAS and the DS File service doesn't seem to handle multiple files; it just takes the first file only.  So, I used Google Drive as a landing spot and it worked.  So, my plan is to upload everything and then use a Duplicate File Hunter to remove the non-annotated files so I'm left with just the files I've changed.  I don't mind if the annotations are not shown as a separate layer; I just don't want to lose them.

  I'll let you know how it goes and hopefully another ForScore user can make use of this tip to migrate annotated PDF files.

Well, I was able to upload all the files as annotated but unfortunately, even charts without any annotation were different from the original somehow (metadata?) so when I did a file comparison, every file was showing up as "changed".  So, I had to go through them one by one to find the ones that had annotations.  Fortunately, I was able to narrow it down to only about 100 so it didn't take too long; however, my objective to quickly figure out which ones did have annotation failed.

[paltieldav]

I totally get your struggle with migrating from ForScore to MobileSheets—I've been there! When I switched apps, I found that exporting all my annotated PDFs from ForScore first helped streamline the process. Then, I used a PDF editing tool to quickly check which files had annotations before uploading them to MobileSheets. It saved me so much time not having to sift through each file individually. It’s definitely a bit of work upfront, but it made the whole transition smoother.

[itsme]

@paltieldav: which PDF tool did you use?