Typical situation: since I can't get Lyricist (my renamed "Custom Group") to populate automatically from a ChordPro metadata field, I'm trying to manually enter all the lyricists. In many cases, the lyricist is also the composer, but I don't seem to be able to copy the composer (either as a whole or as text) to the lyricist field.
The input field used in the song editor (and a few other places like the import settings dialog) is a custom control I implemented that allows multiple values to be shown independently without the need for separators. If it was just an open text field, it would require that users enter delimiter between values such as a semi-colon or something like that, which I didn't want to do (and it wouldn't be intuitive). Comma cannot be used, as sometimes you need a comma in the value you want to specify for a given field.
There is no way to copy the value of a field that has already been committed to the clipboard at the moment. If this is important, I can support that as an option after right-clicking or long pressing on one of the committed values (I say committed meaning it's surrounded by the blue box and no longer editable, which occurs after you hit the enter button or "done" button on Android).
03-28-2020, 05:11 PM (This post was last modified: 03-28-2020, 05:13 PM by itsme.)
Until now I don't maintain composer and lyricist in MSP.
But if I would, I would put all in MSP's "Composers" field separated by | and specify with a prefix or postfix if it is composer or lyricist.
Thus "Custom Groups" stays available for other use cases.
Additionally: often just a list of names is specified on a score without mentioning who is composer and who is lyricist.
Example
on a score of "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" I find "J. McHugh & D. Fields"
I can look up e.g. in Wikipedia "by Jimmy McHugh (music) and Dorothy Fields (lyrics)"
I would store it in the "Composers" column of CSVs as "McHugh, Jimmy (music)|Fields, Dorothy (lyrics)"
MSP creates on CSV import two database entries in "Composers", one for "McHugh, Jimmy (music)" and one for "Fields, Dorothy (lyrics)" that are displayed as shown by attached screenshots
(03-28-2020, 05:11 PM)itsme Wrote: Until now I don't maintain composer and lyricist in MSP.
But if I would, I would put all in MSP's "Composers" field separated by | and specify with a prefix or postfix if it is composer or lyricist.
Thus "Custom Groups" stays available for other use cases.
Additionally: often just a list of names is specified on a score without mentioning who is composer and who is lyricist.
Example
on a score of "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" I find "J. McHugh & D. Fields"
I can look up e.g. in Wikipedia "by Jimmy McHugh (music) and Dorothy Fields (lyrics)"
I would store it in the "Composers" column of CSVs as "McHugh, Jimmy (music)|Fields, Dorothy (lyrics)"
MSP creates on CSV import two database entries in "Composers", one for "McHugh, Jimmy (music)" and one for "Fields, Dorothy (lyrics)" that are displayed as shown by attached screenshots
Thanks, Mike and Herbert. All good suggestions, but I like a separate field for lyricists consist with the construction of my pre-MSP sheet music database and to make it simpler to search only one or the other. Agree that it requires add'l research or knowledge to know who's who.
I would like to be able to do standard Windows right-click copy of an entire entry. I do like that they become committed and thereby more easily re-used and reliably searched upon. Maybe it could turn into text if I pasted it in a text-only field (like Keywords)?
Either way, I renew my request that when I rename "Custom Group" to "Lyricists" that CSV imports attempting to fill the Lyricists field would be honored rather than having to import a fieldname "Custom Groups" that no longer displays anywhere and is not intuitive. I'm still confused why it appears as "Custom Group" but to fill it on .CSV import, I have to call it "Custom Groups" [plural].
I've already made the change to support the actual custom group name when importing through CSV. I just haven't released an update with that yet as I'm still working away on the annotations redesign.
BRX - my plan is to add at least four more custom groups. I have to agree that it's probably best just to let users control what names they want to use for the new fields instead of creating new predefined ones.