[Dave McCrea]

Needed: A way to delete all songs in a Collection - not just their references to the Collection.

I use PDF charts including Fakebooks (RealBook, etc) all the time. No issues here.

But some PDF Books I use evolve as new songs get added or old charts get updated. These are PDF books of charts that I or other members of our group have written. Currently we have two books with about 350 charts each that are used by 15 musicians. Some use iPad,  some use Android, some PC tablet.

To allow everyone to keep up to date,  our management practice is to edit the PDF book (add, remove, or replace a couple of songs) - embed the date in the title - and save the entire book to the cloud.  This ensures everyone has access to the current book and everyone has the same chart for each song no matter which platform they use.  Posting individual charts that then have to be inserted into software on multiple platforms is not a solution. It’s a recipe for disaster.

Now we come to my issue with MSPro.  

When I get a new version of a PDF book of 350 songs, I want to first delete all songs from the previous collection in the MSPro database.

As far as I can tell, to actually delete songs, I have to do one song at a time from the Songs Tab. Checking 350 check boxes is no fun.

Select “all” filtered songs would do what I need. In this way I could use the filter to display all songs in a Collection and “select all” for deletion.  

After deleting all songs from the previous version of the Book in the MSPro database, I could import the new version of the Book into a Collection without worrying about which charts had been changed - they would all be current.

Thanks for making a great application!  For my needs, MSPro works much better than iGigBook (iPad) or any of the several PDF readers I have tried on IOS, Android or on the PC. 

I will be spreading the good word about MSPro.

Dave

[Skip]

Have you looked at the 'import files' selection in the main songs library. It may work by importing the new book into a file on the tablet first then using this function to import and modify the songs by checking the 'update songs if matching files are found' and , maybe, 'scan all subdirectories for files' and 'populate metadata from directories' [uncheck 'avoid duplicate songs']. Rename the collection by long pressing the collection name.

[itsme]

- open the collection
- long press one of the songs to select it and show checkboxes for all songs
- at bottom right there's a little window with a "select all" icon - use that to select all songs
- open the menu top right (three little squares)
- use "Delete Song from Library"
- done

[Zubersoft]

The directions provided by itsme are spot on. If you've hidden the floating toolbar, go to Settings->Library Settings->Show Floating Toolbar to turn it back on, as that's where the select all button is.

EDIT:
As a side note, if it's more intuitive to long press a checkbox that is not checked to select all, and vice versa, I could add that feature easily.

[Dave McCrea]

- open the collection
- long press one of the songs to select it and show checkboxes for all songs
- at bottom right there's a little window with a "select all" icon - use that to select all songs
- open the menu top right (three little squares)
- use "Delete Song from Library"
- done

A thousand thanks!

I'm new to the program and didn't understand those buttons on the Songs Tab. I did a search of "select all" within Adobe Pro on the MSP Help file but only turned up about the Annotations Tab.  I guess I should have put 2 and 2 together.

(It would be really useful to have a clickable index at the end of the Help PDF)

Thanks again, does just what I needed.
Dave

[Dave McCrea]

The directions provided by itsme are spot on.  If you've hidden the floating toolbar, go to Settings->Library Settings->Show Floating Toolbar to turn it back on, as that's where the select all button is.

EDIT:
As a side note, if it's more intuitive to long press a checkbox that is not checked to select all, and vice versa, I could add that feature easily.

Thanks.  

Now that I know about the magic little Floating toolbar, why not have use it on the Collections Tab when assigning "Unassigned Songs" to a particular collection?

Now the tiny double left arrows "move all"to the Collection being edited.  Seems unintuitive to have 2 ways of doing the same thing. Could "Select All" and have a "Move" or "Add" item in the top menu bar.

Dave

[Zubersoft]

Are you suggesting that I move the "Add All" button into a floating toolbar on that screen as well? I don't think a move/add button is necessary as just touching a song or dragging & dropping accomplishes that. There also isn't a reason to long press/select all like there is on the main library screen, so I wonder if that would just be more confusing. I'm not sure if requiring two actions (select all and then add) really buys much, and I don't know how frequently people use the add all button. The other thing to consider is how much more screen space is used by the floating toolbar over a simple button.

[Dave McCrea]

Are you suggesting that I move the "Add All" button into a floating toolbar on that screen as well?  I don't think a move/add button is necessary as just touching a song or dragging & dropping accomplishes that.  There also isn't a reason to long press/select all like there is on the main library screen, so I wonder if that would just be more confusing.  I'm not sure if requiring two actions (select all and then add) really buys much, and I don't know how frequently people use the add all button. The other thing to consider is how much more screen space is used by the floating toolbar over a simple button.

No, I'm suggesting that having those 2 little left arrows to add all songs to a Collection is inconsistent with the use of the floating toolbar used on other screens. Its not a big deal. The floating toolbar would just be consistent across Tabs - at the expense of a few pixels.

I have no idea how many people use your wonderful program like I do. But as a professional player doing a lot of casual gigs, I will use the "Add All" frequently to update collections. 

I find your program much more useful than iGigBook (IOS). An interesting discovery as many of my fellow musicians brought an iPad just to use iGigBook. (I have and have used, an Android, an iPad and a PC tablet for charts).

As much as I like your program, the documentation while good from explaining what the options are, could be improved towards explaining how to use the program.  As a start, an index of key words would be a good idea - links to take you to the page. 

I admit to being a naive user, but I have a wealth of experience with databases and software on multiple platforms.  Still, it took me several hours, and several miss tries, to figure out how to import the PDF books and create collections the way I need them. 

I made a tutorial for myself on how to import a Book of charts. Thanks to advice from "itsme" a tutorial on how to delete songs in a collection from the database.

I've attached the tutorials in Word format. You can do what you like with them - Correct - Edit - Post - or throw in the garbage. 

I found what I believe to be a BUG in the program - look at the first tutorial to see how I got there.

Thanks again for the program and your quick response(s)  to my question.
Dave

[Zubersoft]

Dave,

I just read through your tutorial and was able to reproduce the bug you listed. It only occurs when the add all button is used, so I have a fix in place for it now. As for your suggestion, I definitely appreciate the feedback and I think that consistency is really important between different screens of the application. The toolbar does take up a fair amount of space on the screen on smaller devices, which is why it's actually hidden by default on phones, so that's always something I have to consider with the UI layouts. If I get additional feedback from users that they find that button placement unintuitive, I'll consider making changes like you've described. I still think it's a little more convenient to have a single press button versus having to long press, tap select all, and then tap Add though.

You are certainly right about my documentation. For quite awhile now, I've been wanting to write a "How To" guide that focuses more on accomplishing common tasks within the application versus just spelling out what everything does on each screen. The problem is that I'm just a single developer working nights and weekends, so if I start focusing the bulk of my time on documentation like that, no progress is made on development, and the demand for continued development is currently much higher than the demand for better documentation. I'll get around to it at some point when there aren't quite as many highly anticipated features and such on my plate.

Thanks,
Mike

[Dave McCrea]

Dave,

I just read through your tutorial and was able to reproduce the bug you listed. It only occurs when the add all button is used, so I have a fix in place for it now.  As for your suggestion, I definitely appreciate the feedback and I think that consistency is really important between different screens of the application. The toolbar does take up a fair amount of space on the screen on smaller devices, which is why it's actually hidden by default on phones, so that's always something I have to consider with the UI layouts.  If I get additional feedback from users that they find that button placement unintuitive, I'll consider making changes like you've described. I still think it's a little more convenient to have a single press button versus having to long press, tap select all, and then tap Add though.

You are certainly right about my documentation. For quite awhile now, I've been wanting to write a "How To" guide that focuses more on accomplishing common tasks within the application versus just spelling out what everything does on each screen. The problem is that I'm just a single developer working nights and weekends, so if I start focusing the bulk of my time on documentation like that, no progress is made on development, and the demand for continued development is currently much higher than the demand for better documentation.  I'll get around to it at some point when there aren't quite as many highly anticipated features and such on my plate.

Thanks,
Mike

Again thanks for your prompt reply.

I fully understand that you cannot and should not attempt to satisfy ever whim brought to you by users like me.

But here is something you might consider about documentation. 

In my other life (other than being a musician) I am a professor and scientist at the Spinal Cord Research Centre in Winnipeg, Canada.  We have a single programmer who has developed a very deep suite of programs to analyze data of recordings from the nervous system. This is over more than a 20 year period.  Like you, he must prioritize development over documentation.

Our documentation solution was to (text in brackets for your situation):
  1) identify a set of data that could be posted to the web and available to all (types of charts, mp3, PDF books, ChordPro etc). 
  2) get the USERS (not the programmer) to write tutorials on particular analyses using this data set (ways to get Songs in and out of MSPro, ways to organize sets, bands, etc)
  3) Have the programmer or senior scientists check the accuracy of the tutorials and post them to the web.

You can see the documentation page here : http://scrc.umanitoba.ca/doc/
Click on "22 Tutorials" to see what our small community of students and investigators wrote. 
Tutorial #0 is the guide to writing our tutorials.

Caveat: Some of our tutorials are now very old and reference outdated software. They should be updated but they do work.

You probably have a handful of users willing to participate in making a series of tutorials. I just gave you 2 that could form the basis of a How To guide. Might be food for thought.

Dave