[madoues]

Hi,

I have been using MS for a few years now and absolutely love it! Can't do without it now... But at first, being a bit sceptical and not wanting to take a risk losing my files, I chose to 'manage my files'. This wasn't a very good idea I have since discovered. I am certain now that MS would do a much better job at managing my files than myself.

I would now like to have MS manage my files, but I have many files (2000-3000 give or take) and many setlists that I need to keep; for example: church setlists repeat every year, or just about.

Is there a way I can transfer everything over without redoing my setlists?
My songs would still have the exact same name as before. If this is not possible, any suggestions as to how to make the transition without re-entering all my setlists would be welcome. Collections also, but especially setlists. If I do have to re-enter everything, it's not the end of the world of course, I would just like to know the alternatives.

Mike, I should have trusted your program from the start, but I have seen many bad programs in my day, so "once bitten" (more than once), "twice shy" I guess... Your program however is quite the opposite I am happy to say; one of the best I have seen, and the support?? Man you ROCK! Can hardly believe you are just one guy...


Cheers,
Dan

[BRX]

Can't help you with your conversion question. But what are your gripes with managing yourself? I'm doing that too from the beginning and much prefer it for my control of names, structure and better sync and backup for other devices.

(Yeah, and Mike rocks!)

[sciurius]

Creating a full backup, and then restore it will do the trick. The restore will ask whether to restore in the original locations, or in the MSPro managed location.
Should anything go wrong, you have a recent backup .

[madoues]

Thanks for the responses.

To BRX, for the heads up, I'll make sure I will not be losing any flexibility that may be needed before going ahead with transferring.

To Sciurius, for the tip, that is exactly what I needed.

Cheers,
Dan

[BRX]

Actually I didn't intend to stop you from converting. I was interested in your reasons and problems to see if I have to avoid them. :;-)

So?

[madoues]

Actually I didn't intend to stop you from converting. I was interested in your reasons and problems to see if I have to avoid them. :;-)

So?

Well, I was in a band last year that no longer exists in the same form, i.e. the name has changed as well as a good portion of the material. The way my folders were established, the charts for the old band were in a folder that had the name of the band. I also have have another folder with charts of just popular songs and would like to move the charts from the old band name folder to the general one. This will likely happen once in a while, bands change, so now I'm thinking maybe it would just be best to have just less folders or let MS manage my files. 

I don't want to remove the songs and re-import because I would like to keep the annotations; my annotations can be arrangement specific but also correcting mistakes in chords and/or lyrics. Eventually I would like to correct the ones that have been annotated and generate new pdfs since I use only pdfs, but I don't have the time right now. And anyway this brings up a whole other matter; I would like to know which songs have annotations with a search function and right now I can't, not that I know of anyway. 

I am not certain if letting MS manage the files is the way to go, but I would like to try it. The main reason for choosing to manage my own files from the start had more to do with not knowing the program and if it was/is well supported, which I now know is the case.

I'm curious, what scenario are you using for your folders structure?

Cheers,
Dan

[BRX]

Well, the point for me in managing my files myself is to have my or even "a" folder structure at all. And I want this to be the same on my PC, my Android devices and my new W10 device.

I want to keep some files separated and organized by folders. As yourself I have some folders with files for a specific band, one with big band charts, another e.g. for some chordpro files and so on.

As I recall (and I might be wrong here, since I never let MSP manage my files) MSP doesn't use folders or let you choose folders but puts the files in one directory (or each file in a folder if you choose the option). It also renames the files if necessary (I think).

I don't want that. Rather I want to be able to navigate in my files/folders without the help of MSP and keep the original names. So it would be a mess for me to let MSP manage my files. I often edit PDFs on my PC for something like optimization, correcting flipped pages or adding bookmarks. Since I keep my folders on the different devices in sync this lands on the other devices as well (without influencing the database). Even locating a file I want to edit (or share from my PC) would be much more difficult without having MSP open to see where to go.

Also - after syncing all the files to be the same on all my devices - I only need to make changes in one database and can use that on the other devices (with adjusting file paths if necessary).

So I'm not sure if managing by MSP is indeed what you want end need for your purpose.

If I wanted to "distribute" a folder I would do it on my PC, sync it to the devices and either - if there aren't too many songs - use the swap option to the new file path (which leave the annotations untouched I think) or just use the "find missing files" feature to let MSP find the moved files (also leaving the annotations intact).

HTH