[StuartV]

Two issues:

1) Custom page ordering for imported JPGs (is broken)

My band likes to give me sheet music. I have been without a scanner. So, I use the camera in my tablet to take a picture of each page of the music, then import the pictures into MSP. Even if I had a scanner, I wouldn't have it at rehearsal when they had me the sheet music. So, because of the way MSP is working, I have to bring the music home and find a scanner, instead of just taking photos and handing the sheet music back to The Keeper of The Sheet Music.

Custom page ordering does not work for songs imported from JPGs. When I go to the Files tab on the edit page, it shows "Total Pages in File: 1" and "Page Order: 1-1" even though there are 2 pages. If I try to change the order and use any number greater than 1, it immediately displays a message, "The maximum allowed page is 1".

This happens whether I import p1 and p2 at the same time, or if I only import p1 at first, then add the 2nd page after.

When I actually play the song, it displays both pages correctly, scrolling from one to the next. So, this bug is not a problem for some music. But, I have a number of charts with a DS al Coda that goes from the 2nd page back to the 1st, and for those, I really need to be able to enter a custom page order.

2) Imported song title

I have reported this before, but nothing has happened that I know of.

Most of my charts are PDFs that are all named "bass.pdf". They are in a folder structure with all the charts for the whole band. The folder names are the song titles. Every time I import a song, it creates the song with a song title of "Bass" and I then have to go manually rename it.

I really WANT a way to tell it to combine the folder name and the file name as the song title. 

But, if I can't have that, can I at least get SOME way to manually enter the song title when I import it, so it doesn't have to be a 17 step process (okay, exaggerating just a bit) just to import a PDF?


I have MSP v1.6.2, from Google Play. I'm running Android 6.0.1 on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 9.7.

[AndyL]

With reference to your first point. I assume you are creating two JPG files and adding those to the song. JPGs don't have a concept of pages, so there is no way MSP can generate a page order. I assume you are trying to create a custom page sequence that repeats some of the pages. To do this you will have to add the files multiple times. You can shuffle the order of the files so they are displayed in the order you want.

If the JPGs really do contain more than one page and you need to change the ordering, then you can use crop to pick the bit of the image you want and again add the files more than once.

Not as easy as using a PDF I'm afraid.

Another option may be to see if any of the PDF creator apps will convert your multiple JPGs into a single multi-page PDF. You could then use this to set a custom page order.

Regards

Andy

[Zubersoft]

Andy is correct - the page ordering for a single jpg file would only allow you to duplicate that one page in the page ordering (i.e. 1,1). You will have to add the files multiple times so you can put them in the order you want. Due to the fact that page ordering is saved per file (not for the song as a whole), I don't see any easy way around this problem when using image files. What I probably should add is an option so that if you long press an image file in the file list, you are given the option to duplicate it. This would make it much easier to reuse the same file multiple times. I'll add an enhancement request for this.

[sciurius]

Instead of taking pictures and import the pictures into MSPro, you can create (in MSPro) a new song, go to the FIles tab, and use the camera icon to take pictures and add them directly to the song.

[StuartV]

First, each JPG is just one page of the song. I did say before that I take a picture of EACH page and import the pictures (plural) into MSP.

Second, I said this in the first post. It doesn't work, either way. I can import a local file, pick the JPG that is the first page of the song, create the song with just one page (i.e. one JPG), then edit the song to tap and add the second page (a second JPG). OR, I can pick both JPGs (for page 1 and 2) at the same time and import them as one song. Either way, it displays the 2 JPGs as 2 separate pages and I can scroll from one to the next. But, either way that I get there, it still only lets me enter a maximum page number of 1 in the custom page order field.

I have not tried actually taking the photo itself from inside MSP. But, it doesn't seem like that should matter.

When I tap to edit the song, on the Files tab, it shows a list of 2 files (the 2 JPGs). Why would it not treat that as page 1 and page 2? If I want to go from page 2 back to page 1, are you serious that the way it is SUPPOSED to work is that I would import page 1 again to be the 3rd page, then crop it to only show the part used in the coda? Then import page 2 again, to be the fourth page and crop it to also show only the coda? That does seem like a workaround that would probably work. But, it's also clear that MSP DOES recognize the 2 JPGs as the first and second pages, as it scrolls correctly from one to the next. So, saying that there is no way MSP can generate a page order seems patently wrong.

[BRX]

Well, MSP isn't meant to work like that for single image files, personally i think for good reason.

Page order is meant for multiple pages in one file. You can set custom page order for each file in a song. Your images are files with one page each to MSP though. Either you Import the Images as multiple single files in a song and order them manually (or take snapshots directly with the camera) or you convert the images to a multiple page PDF with Adobe Acrobat or one of many other tools and import that. Then you have all the benefits of page order and so on.

After all MSP basically is a PDF reader though it also supports image files.

P.S. And also there are lots of apps for scanning/photographing to convert your scans directly to PDF on your Android phone or tablet which you could consider.

[Zubersoft]

You are still thinking about things in terms of a page ordering for the entire song, versus a page ordering for an individual file. Instead of thinking about this in terms of JPGs, think about it in terms of multiple PDFs. If you added two separate PDFs to the song, and wanted to use only a couple pages out of each PDF, you would need to be able to specify an independent page order for each file. That's why when you tap on each file in the song editor, a different page order is shown that corresponds to the currently selected file.

So, back to your example. You have two one page files that happen to be JPGs. MobileSheets does allow you to change pages between these files, but it wouldn't make sense for you to say, "I want to use page 2 of my one page file", which is precisely what you are trying to do. Obviously when using JPGs, you would prefer to be able to specify a page ordering for the entire song instead of per file. This would introduce a huge amount of complexity though, because you can actually mix and match PDF and image files. So how would you combine the concept of page orderings per file with a page ordering for the entire song? It would just become a mess. That's why I don't support that concept for image files (and why it's better to use PDFs for what you are trying to do).

Having said all that, like I said before, you will need to add the same files to the song multiple times if you want to repeat pages, and I will add an option to duplicate files in the song so you don't have to manually browse for each file to add it. Then the steps would be as simple as this:

1) Import the two JPGs.
2) Long press jpg 1->select duplicate file. A third entry is now present in the file list that matches the first file (both reference the same file, no copy is made)
3) Long press jpg 2->select duplicate file. A fourth entry is now present in the file list that matches the second file.
4) Repeat as necessary for each time you want the pages repeated

I don't think that's so bad personally. If having access to the page order dialog is confusing with JPGs (which it apparently is), then I'm going to disable the page ordering for everything but PDFs.

[Skip]

I think the OP is asking how to reorder the display of multiple jpg's, ie. from jpg 1, 2, 3 to jpg 3, 2, 1 or jpg 2, 3, 1, etc.

[BRX]

I don't think so. OP expects the custom page order to work for the order of all imported (image) files in the song unlike it's designed use for the page order of each multiple PDF in a song.

Ordering would be simply by dragging the arrow symbol in the front like in setlists.

[StuartV]

Okay, I see what you're talking about now, Zuberman.

You are thinking of it it in terms of how the application tracks things internally. I am thinking of it in terms of how I (the user) see it.

I don't see any problem with having it work the way I suggested. Even if it were a combo of PDFs and JPGs. PDFs have the concept of pages, so any PDF that is part of a song would have its pages recognized. JPGs do not have a concept of pages, so any JPG would be treated as a single page.

The Files tab has an order for all the components (PDFs and JPGs) of a song. The song's page order should simply be the page order of each component, in the order the components are set in the Files tab.

So, if there was a PDF with 2 pages, a JPG, and another PDF with 3 pages, then the song would have 6 pages. If they were in that order on the Files tab, then p.1 and 2 would be the pages from the first PDF. Song page 3 would be the JPG, and song pages 4 - 6 would be the pages from the second PDF. If a JPG were actually more than one page and the user wanted to treat it that way, the user would use a custom page order to have the JPG shown twice (or however many is needed) and then crop each one to show only the portion of the JPG that is desired. That is just how I do it now with a multi-page PDF that has a DS and Coda requiring showing the 1st and 2nd pages multiple times, but showing a different portion of the page each time.

From the user perspective, this is the intuitive way for it to work.

There is no reason for the internal organization of the component files to be exposed to the user.

The application already works (at least with multiple JPGs) to display the pages in the correct order., so it already has the info that it needs.

From the user perspective, the 4th page I see as I hit my page turner button (when there is no custom page order defined), should be referred to as Page 4 in the custom page order field, period. My example song has 2 pages. The application knows there are two pages there as it shows them to me one after the other. Therefore, the application should allow me to refer to Page 2 in the custom page order.

Anyway, if I can ever figure out how to get my printer/scanner to work with Linux, I will scan the pages into PDFs and be done with this problem (until the next rehearsal where they hand me more pages of sheet music...). But, for now, my printer and computer are not playing nicely together.

[StuartV]

In other words, whether I have 2 PDFs that are each 1 page, or whether I have 2 JPGs, if I put "2" in the custom page order field, the application should have no trouble figuring out which actual page I'm referring to. I.e. the 2nd page that is displayed.

If I have 2 PDFs that are each 2 pages, and I use page 3 or page 4 in the custom page order, again, the application has all the info it needs to figure out which page I'm referring to.

And, the same applies if it assumes a JPG is always only 1 page - which, how could it do anything else? JPGs do not contain "pages".

[Zubersoft]

Changing the page order from a file page ordering to a song page ordering is a pretty big design change, and could impact a lot of users, so I definitely want to hear from as many people as possible before making any changes. The change would only affect users who have added multiple PDFs each with their own custom page ordering, so I need to get a sense for the number of people that actually do that. I do think a song page ordering could become more difficult to use and confusing in certain contexts, especially when using multiple files, but I don't have a sense for the number of users that do this regularly. The one thing that seems more difficult to me is if I have two PDFs each with a lot of pages (say I'm combining multiple real books each with 200+ pages), the user then has to perform the math to figure out what the page ordering is for each file in terms of the total page numbers. So they might want page 57 of the first file, but page 62 of the second file, so they have to know that they need to add the total number of pages from the first file to figure out what page 62 of the second file is. If there are more than two files then it just gets more complex and confusing. It also might be confusing that the page order would be in terms of the total number of pages in each file, but the total number of the pages in the song is a reflection of the combined number of pages used in the page ordering. The question is whether more of my users are going to be using multiple image files and will want to use custom page orderings for those, or if more of my users combine multiple PDFs, which means the current implementation is easier to use.

[BRX]

My vote is against a change. I use it with multiple PDF files and want to keep the individual custom order.

I may be wrong, but I also believe in most occasions a user wouldn't work with multiple image files anyway or at least with so many it needs other page ordering means as the current import and drag functions. You can of course improve the import for instance with an batch option to distribute multiple images directly to the song a once, the duplicate function you mentioned or even a conversion of multiple images to a multiple PDF.

But don't change the current design.

[itsme]

@Zuberman: Please do not change the current implementation of the "Page Order" field. It is essential for CSV import of multi-page fakebooks. Some users (including me and BRX) spent many hours to prepare and provide CSV files containing page order data that match the content of many fakebooks.
@StuartV: Please think about how to make best use of the existing functionality before demanding MSP to be adapted to your personal workflow. There are content users out there having several years of experience with MSP. I'm happy with the probably best sheet music app for tablets, spent many hours importing and optimizing hundreds of songs and do not want to rework a lot of them.

[AndyL]

I'd vote to keep things as they are too. CSV index files are a good point. Mike might be ale to work some trickery adding the page offset, but it's another complication that's bound to introduce problems.

The thing that I would find hardest to deal with is the "burnt in" page numbers of the second (and third etc.) PDFs. Lots of the fakebook PDFs have page numbers in the corner. These are handy to find the page you want. With this page offset, you'd have to constantly be doing the arithmetic in your head to work out what the page number should read.

I can understand StuartV's confusion, but feel sure once he understands how and why things are as they are he he will be able to find a workflow that fits his way of doing things.

Andy