[Jonny Walker]

Hi community,
i'm new on MSPro and I'm searching for a solution to import my huge collection of songs to MSPro (several 1000).
I found the description of csv in the docu, but I was not able to find an answer, so here's my issue:

Until now, I have organized my colletion in Excel, each Line is a song with some categories in the collums, like in MSPro, like this:

SongName;FileName;Genre;Composer;OtherInformation
Song A;0569.pdf;Tango;Villoldo;Argentina
Song B;A5397.pdf;waltz;Strauss;Austria
....

The filenames are unique, the songnames are not

How could I automatically import this, including the colums as metadata for the fields?
Because my source is Excel, I can easily create a csv, but does this work with several files?
Or do I have to create for each pdf a seperate csv with one line? This won't be a problem also, but it's work to do.
And if so: I don't know the number of pages of these files, what do I write in the entry for the pages?

Thanks for help,
Jonny

[Zubersoft]

Hello Jonny,

The CSV functionality is currently only meant to be used to break up a single PDF into many individual songs. I do plan on adding support for CSV files where users can specify the PDF to use for each song in the list (like in your example). When I add support for that, I can eliminate the need to specify the page order, as the absence of that field will just indicate that every page should be imported. 

In the meantime, I can only see a couple of ways for you to utilize your csv file:

1) Split it up into one csv file per PDF, and the csv files have to be named the same thing as the PDF and you have to specify the page order to use for each file, (so you'd need to open each file to see how many pages it is). I imagine this will be pretty tedious to do.

2) If you are comfortable with scripting and SQLite databases, you could manually populate the database using the data in your CSV file. This is a little involved due to the large number of database tables that have to be updated.

I know you are not the only user to want support for importing csv files to populate the library, but I just haven't had the time yet to implement the necessary changes.

Mike

[Jonny Walker]

Thanks for the suggestions, Mike.
yes, I understood the intention behind this function

One additional question to 1)
Does it cause an error, if I select more pages in the csv, than available?
Normally, my songs (pdf) are not larger than 5 pages, so if i set the pages field in the csv to 1-5 will this work, although there are sometimes only one page?

Greetings, Jonny

[Zubersoft]

MobileSheets will limit the page range to what is actually in the PDF, so it's perfectly fine to specify more pages than what are available.

Mike

[Jonny Walker]

Is there a problem with the fields "costum_groups", "costum", "costum2" ?
I tried all three, but no one worked. All other fields in the csv has been working

[itsme]

u first, o second
correct is CUSTOM_GROUPS, CUSTOM, CUSTOM2
uppercase / lowercase doesn't matter

[Jonny Walker]

the one, who is able to read,...
thanks
btw:
Could you update the manual? There is no underscore "_" in the 2-word field names, like source_types, custom_groups, sort_title,...

[itsme]

Thank you for the hint.
Updating the manual is not my part.
@Mike: could you take care for the fix?

[Zubersoft]

I will make sure it gets fixed - thanks.

Mike

[Jonny Walker]

I have created now all these *.csv for each song.
Is it right, that I have to select every single csv file on my device to import?
There is no way to import the whole folder automatically ?

I just want to make shure, before i start to select 2000 files by hand

[Zubersoft]

There is no batch importing mechanism for csv files at the moment, as that's not really what the current feature is intended for. It's intended for breaking up an individual PDF and selecting which songs to create from that, which wouldn't make sense as part of a batch import. Once I implement a separate mechanism for using csv files to populate metadata, then I could support batch importing with that.

Mike

[Jonny Walker]

Hi Mike,
thanks for the reply.
Now I can start to build up my database and hopefully soon ... play music.
Jonny

[Jonny Walker]

I finished now, importing 3000 csv Files - and I want to give feedback.
I know that the function, I used was not made for this, but I read in this forum, some users had the same problem with importing big collections
So, perhaps, you can think about some improvements in the csv import dialog & filemanger:

• A filter option to display only csv or pdf-files
  
• An option to delete the csv-file, when the import was successful
  
• Not to switch back automatically to the library view will give them the posibility to import the next csv instantly
  

My workaround was:
See above, I hade an xls, where I had for each Song a line with the metadata, having a numbered pdf for each song, like A01234.pdf
I wrote a c# program to resort the fields and creat a csv for each song
Import by csv-import, sort by date upside down, to have the newest files on top, which was all new automatically created csv
After imported 20 files, I deleted those csv and start again
Saved a lot of time

Jonny