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Loading Books Into Mobile Sheets - my method
#1
I buy Music Minus One style books and load the songs into Mobile Sheets, so I thought I'd share my process of doing that. It may give you an idea of how to do it more easily, or you may have your method that's better than mine. 

If I have the physical book, I scan the songs. My scanner has the capability of creating a PDF file, and I make one for each song. I name the files the same name as the mp3 comp track that was included with the book.

If I am able to get a PDF of the book, I use that. This will be a single PDF for the whole book. In order to have a PDF file for each song, I open the file in Windows. I "print" each song using the Microsoft Print To PDF "printer".

At this point, I can load all the songs into Mobile Sheets using the batch import. I have the option set on to include the audio files by matching the names. By the way, in order to avoid any duplicates, I use a batch file rename utility to add a suffix to each name that is something like the initials of the name of the book. This lets me select all the songs in a specific book if I want to.

The last step is to crop them all. I used to do this by selecting a song, open the edit, select "Files", then click the crop icon, then after cropping all the pages, I'd have to click OK twice, and then open the next song, if I could remember what that was. But I have come up with a way to batch crop. What I do is to load the songs into a temporary collection, using that suffix to select them. Then, I select that collection, and click Load All. Then, I click the center of the first page, and in the menus, I select crop. Now, you can crop each page and click next page to go to the next one, and that way work your way through all of the songs in the collection without having to edit and save each song separately.

The last step is to remove the temporary collection.

That's more or less the way I do it. YMMV Smile
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#2
I usually leave the whole book as a single PDF and prepare a CSV file for importing. Audio file paths can be included within the CSV file. To work correctly, the CSV file has to be stored in the same directory as the PDF. All files have to be stored within the MSP folder. I organise the files myself and use one subfolder of the MSP directory per book containing the PDF, the CSV and another subfolder "Audio" for the MP3 files so that each book can be moved easily as a whole.
As an example you might want to take a look at the CSV for a Hal Leonard Jazz Play-Along book that I shared here:
https://zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/forum...p?tid=6421
In the CSV import dialog there's a checkbox to activate auto-crop for the imported songs during import.
first language: German
Acer A1-830, Android 4.4.2 - HP x2 210 G2 Detachable, Win 10 22H2 - Huawei Media Pad T5, Android 8.0 - Boox Tab Ultra C, Android 11
www.moonlightcrisis.de - www.basdjo.de - www.frankenbaend.de


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#3
That sounds like it might be a very good way to do this. I have seen this suggested before. However, there's not enough information for me to attempt to do it. For instance, how do you make a CSV file for a PDF? And how do you make a bookmark file? And then, how do you load that into MSP?

I need step by step directions, and suggested programs to do it with. Are those available anywhere?

I saw that Acrobat has the capability of making a CSV file, but Acrobat costs $13 a month. That's not worth it to me. I looked in LibreOffice, and I don't see that capability. If it is there, I need instructions for how to do it.

The bookmarks file is a text file. Do you have to type all of that in manually? That sounds like a lot of work.

Thanks for any help you can give.
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#4
I make my csv files in excel or notepad. It's pretty slick. It's very easy to copy/paste information (once it's formatted correctly) to each entry. For new information, it's often faster than filling out the metadata in MSP.

One point, the PDF doesn't get turned into a CSV file. The CSV file provides the metadata for the PDF file (including page ranges for each song in the main PDF) that MSP reads from during the CSV import.

Between the manual (pages 36-38), the important 'CSV Files' threads, and some example CSV files, it should be fairly self-explanatory.
Sam

Surface Pro 7 with MSP
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#5
I use LibreOffice Calc to create CSV files. It's free and CSV handling is easier and more logical imho than in Microsoft Excel. It often saves time to apply OCR to a scanned TOC or copy paste from a list from the web.
Then fill the columns you want to use and call "save as CSV". The columns Title and Pages are mandatory, all other columns are optional. Take a look into the manual or in the shared examples to find out how the columns have to be named.
To add bookmarks to a PDF I use jPdfBookmarks which is also free. Once you have the CSV creating a bookmarks file is easy and duplicate effort can be avoided. I find it very convenient and helpful to have bookmarks in my PDFs but it is not mandatory at all.
See https://zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/forum...p?tid=5298
first language: German
Acer A1-830, Android 4.4.2 - HP x2 210 G2 Detachable, Win 10 22H2 - Huawei Media Pad T5, Android 8.0 - Boox Tab Ultra C, Android 11
www.moonlightcrisis.de - www.basdjo.de - www.frankenbaend.de


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#6
Okay, I think I see now. I was trying to figure out how to tell a program to convert a PDF into a CSV. Now I see. It's a spreadsheet in CSV format that you either type in, or OCR, or something. Then the bookmark file is a text file that gives more information.

Okay, that clears a lot of things up.

Thanks.
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#7
Great that I could help with my pretty short explanation.

Some other free tools that I regularly use:

Notepad++
a text editor with powerful search & replace features
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/

Pdf Split and Merge
https://pdfsam.org

PDF24 Creator
https://tools.pdf24.org/de/creator

two PDF tools with useful features to split or merge PDF files
first language: German
Acer A1-830, Android 4.4.2 - HP x2 210 G2 Detachable, Win 10 22H2 - Huawei Media Pad T5, Android 8.0 - Boox Tab Ultra C, Android 11
www.moonlightcrisis.de - www.basdjo.de - www.frankenbaend.de


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