01-03-2022, 02:35 AM
Greetings,
I'm getting started with digitizing my big band's library. We'd like to keep the library platform-agnostic, but I'm personally pursuing MSP on a chromebook to try to maximize value. I've had very good results so far.
We've got an existing library database web app that we can easily customize and extract extensive metadata from. We number our charts and have about 300 active charts in the book.
I'm about 50% done with scanning the book for my own instrument (Readdle Scanner Pro is impressive.) Initially, I'm going with one pdf file per chart, per instrument. I've been naming the files after the titles which makes things simple when importing to MSP but now I'm exploring the most efficient way to get the rest of the metadata (nicely formatted title, composer, arranger, etc.) from our existing database into MSP. From what I've seen, it looks like CSVs are the way to go for that, but I'm not 100% sure. Most of the docs and forum threads show CSVs being used to index fakebooks. I've tried that out with a few fakebooks and I understand that application. One awkwardness with the CSV method is the required field for "pages." In my case, I don't really need that since I'm not managing a large file (just one chart per file), I just want to import metadata. Can I use a wildcard like "*", or just leave it as "1-"?
As a possible workflow, I'm thinking:
- Scan the chart and name it after the chart number i.e. 131.pdf
- Have a like-named CSV (131.csv) that I generate from the database using these columns and values
- Title: In the Mood
- Composers: Glenn Miller
- Song id: 131
- Genre: Swing Dance
- Collections: Big band library
- Pages: 1-?
You see from the pages field that I've got a problem to solve. The guitar part has 2 pages and the piano part has 3. If I didn't have to worry about the pages field, I could make a global MSP metadata extract function in our web app for the whole band. It would make a zip file of 300 CSVs with all the metadata. I could just tell everyone to name their pdfs consistently and importing the CSVs would make their pdfs instantly searchable from various angles.
I could maintain a count of pages per chart per instrument in the database, but it just makes the whole scheme more fragile without any benefit. I'd like to find a way around it.
I've already got a set list builder in the web app, so exporting mss files for set lists looks trivial. I just have to settle on the actual pdf file management scheme.
Thanks for reading and for any insignts you can share.
Matt Trimboli
I'm getting started with digitizing my big band's library. We'd like to keep the library platform-agnostic, but I'm personally pursuing MSP on a chromebook to try to maximize value. I've had very good results so far.
We've got an existing library database web app that we can easily customize and extract extensive metadata from. We number our charts and have about 300 active charts in the book.
I'm about 50% done with scanning the book for my own instrument (Readdle Scanner Pro is impressive.) Initially, I'm going with one pdf file per chart, per instrument. I've been naming the files after the titles which makes things simple when importing to MSP but now I'm exploring the most efficient way to get the rest of the metadata (nicely formatted title, composer, arranger, etc.) from our existing database into MSP. From what I've seen, it looks like CSVs are the way to go for that, but I'm not 100% sure. Most of the docs and forum threads show CSVs being used to index fakebooks. I've tried that out with a few fakebooks and I understand that application. One awkwardness with the CSV method is the required field for "pages." In my case, I don't really need that since I'm not managing a large file (just one chart per file), I just want to import metadata. Can I use a wildcard like "*", or just leave it as "1-"?
As a possible workflow, I'm thinking:
- Scan the chart and name it after the chart number i.e. 131.pdf
- Have a like-named CSV (131.csv) that I generate from the database using these columns and values
- Title: In the Mood
- Composers: Glenn Miller
- Song id: 131
- Genre: Swing Dance
- Collections: Big band library
- Pages: 1-?
You see from the pages field that I've got a problem to solve. The guitar part has 2 pages and the piano part has 3. If I didn't have to worry about the pages field, I could make a global MSP metadata extract function in our web app for the whole band. It would make a zip file of 300 CSVs with all the metadata. I could just tell everyone to name their pdfs consistently and importing the CSVs would make their pdfs instantly searchable from various angles.
I could maintain a count of pages per chart per instrument in the database, but it just makes the whole scheme more fragile without any benefit. I'd like to find a way around it.
I've already got a set list builder in the web app, so exporting mss files for set lists looks trivial. I just have to settle on the actual pdf file management scheme.
Thanks for reading and for any insignts you can share.
Matt Trimboli