[IGNOTRON]

I'm fairly new to MSPro and have been very impressed by how easy it is to import all my songs. I've mainly constructed CSV files for existing PDF albums and this has worked well.

A also have a lot of physical albums for which I have scanned the indexes and generated CSV files from them with titles, page numbers etc, and I'd like to be able to somehow reference these from within MSPro without having scanned any of the actual song pages. The idea being that I can easily find *any* song that I have, even if it's only in a printed album. In such a case I could then go ahead and scan just that song, thus gradually building up the library with songs that I actually need.

One idea I had was to generate ChordPro files from my index CSVs (one file for each title), so that they show up when I do a search. But I wondered if there could be an easier way to achieve this? Perhaps by allowing the import of such an 'index-only' text file which could be included in the search when looking for a song?

Great product!

Roger

[BRX]

That should be pretty easy since you already know your way around csv import.

Just make one dummy file, text or PDF to use for the import and make your csv for that with titles, albums and other data you want like you would for a “real“ PDF. I'm not sure if there is a conflict if there are higher pages numbers if there's only one page in the dummy file, so you may have to transfer the page number to a custom field.

But otherwise you get database entries like you want and the reference to the dummy file can easily be replaced later with an actual scan if needed as well manually or with a reuse of the csv with page numbers for the correct scan. The old dummy entries would have to be deleted manually though in the later case but easily done if the album is categorized correctly.

[IGNOTRON]

Thanks BRX, I hadn't imagined that pages that were not within the PDF could still be referred to like that. Worked very well. I decided to just scan the front cover of each album and use that as the PDF.

I wanted to also show the page numbers within the actual album where a song could be found but, oddly, PAGES isn't something you can place with the title formatting string. So I just duplicated the page numbers in the CSV as CUSTOM and used that to conditionally format the title.

So I'm pretty much home and dry, but I've not tested the workflow of inserting an actual PDF of a song yet.

Thanks for you help!

[BRX]

You're welcome.

And you're using title formatting, too. That makes you one advanced MSP user. :-)

It wouldn't make much since to have page numbers in the title since they are only meant for MSP to find the right page in a PDF. But indeed that can be easily worked around with custom as you already did.

[itsme]

In fact you can add the page numbers to the title format or the caption format (the second line below the title): %PAGE_ORDER% is the keyword you are looking for. You have to type it on the keyboard, it is not on the selection buttons.
But it won't help: %PAGE_ORDER% refers to the MSP database entry which refers to the PDF page within the PDF file. In your case this is always =1 as your scanned title page is always just one page. The page in your paper books is something different. So your idea to use a custom field is the way to go.

To read more about %PAGE_ORDER% see http://zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/forum/...p?tid=3441