[miles_muso]

Hi All,

I've spent a fair time using various pdf editors and renaming tools to get all pages of a Real Book (Vol 1, 6th Edition) stored as separate pdf files in a large directory (folder) tree as specified by the MS manual, but I'm having one particular problem.

From the MS manual:
Use subdirectories for metadata (Artist/Album/Genre) –
.....If you were batch importing from the “Sheet Music” directory, you could create:

Sheet Music/Beethoven/My Classical Book/Classical

and place both “Fur Elise” and “Moonlight Sonata” under this directory. The batch import would automatically assign all of the folder names into the fields.

So my data is in the following folder structure on my PC:

\Lead Sheet\Antonio Carlos Jobim\Realbook 1, 6th Ed\Bossa\How Insensitive_181.pdf
\Lead Sheet\Charlie Parker\Realbook 1, 6th Ed\Bop\Anthropology_29.pdf
\Lead Sheet\Pat Methany\Realbook 1, 6th Ed\Med Fast Samba\Uniquity Road_421.pdf
etc...

where:
'Lead Sheet' is the Home directory
'Antonio Carlos Jobim' is the composer (Artist)
'Realbook 1, 6th Ed' is the source book (Album)
'Bossa' is the style of music (Genre)
and 'How Insensitive_181.pdf' is the file name (the number suffix refers to the page number in the physical Realbook, so that I can tell my bass player which page he needs.)

The batch import using MS Companion reported no faults, and all the pdf files imported successfully. However, the genre was not picked up during the import, and all the songs have a default genre of 'Instrumental'

Why were the genres not picked up? I need to be able to search by genre (when requested to "play something latin", for example) and this one one of the main reasons I chose MS.

Also, when I look at the actual database, I see that the files have a number suffix (not the one I created, but a different one). For example, 'How Insensitive' is stored as 'How Insensitive_181_1.pdf' and Anthropology is stored as 'Anthropology_29_54.pdf'. Does anybody know what these second numbers are?

Regards,

Miles Forman
Musical Director
P&O Cruises (Australia)

[GraemeJ]

I can't answer the genre question for the simple reason I never use them.

The additional number is part of the MS filing protocol, whereby it can differentiate between different charts with the same title. For example, I have several charts of the same title, but in different keys, so MS adds this number suffix to avid overwriting one with another. You won't see these additional numbers in the MS display, only if you go hunting around with a file reader.

[miles_muso]

Hi Graeme,

Thanks for the answer. Any input as to why the metadata didn't pick up my Genre data?

[GraemeJ]

Hi Graeme,

Thanks for the answer. Any input as to why the metadata didn't pick up my Genre data?

No . If this is the case, then I'm surprised that none of the other beta testers (many of whom use the genre tag) haven't picked up on it.

Maybe Mike will have some input on this.

[Zubersoft]

I'm assuming this is with the original MS and not the beta. The original MS supports custom genres, but it does not support expanding the original genre list. Therein lies the limitation you are running into - if you use the batch import, MS will not create new genres for you based on the directories you are using. You would need to create custom genres like "Bossa" before the import in order for it be correctly populated. I know this is tedious - sorry for that.

I rarely heard about users taking advantage of the directory structure options in the MS batch import, so they are not present in MS Pro (there are additional reasons for this as well). I am moving toward adding an option to populate fields cased on file name formatting, but this would only help if your file names included the fields you wanted parsed out.

Mike

[miles_muso]

Hi Mike,

Thanks to you and Graeme for your help.
In fact, having to set up the genres in advance is not too bad, as it allows me to group together genres such as bossa', 'slow bossa', med' bossa' etc.

Quite a few Real Books have the style of the tune written at the top of the page, and I'm looking at an OCR program that can read the page and create a file name based on the characters it finds, so the idea to populate fields based on file names could be very handy!