[jeffn1]

Layers are designed to give you an easy way to group annotations, and quickly turn the visibility of individual layers on or off. If you create the same layers on all pages, you can then switch the visibility of a given layer on all pages at once if you turn on the linking feature (the icon that looks like a chain link). In terms of why you would use this feature, it depends on your needs. A piano teacher might have one layer dedicated to each student, and they can enable annotations for just one student a time by turning all layers invisible except the one layer for the student. Someone might have some annotations for practicing a song and other annotations when performing, and they can quickly swap between the two.

As far as the issues you've encountered, it's possible this is related to the issues other users have reported where they have seen annotations duplicated. I'm putting in changes for this with the next update, but it's also possible something different is occurring with the process you are using as you are always embedding annotations which the other users didn't seem to be doing. You mentioned editing the embedded annotations - I'm assuming that means you also enabled the option to edit embedded PDF annotations? Just be aware that this increases the complexity of saving the changes and also slows things down when switching between annotating and viewing a score. If that's important for your workflow, that's completely fine, but if you are embedding annotations just so you can have a copy of the PDF with the annotations in it, it's probably better to not embed annotations, disable editing of embedded PDF annotations, and just use the Share->Export files option anytime you need a copy of the PDF with the annotations in it. You asked if you should write to all pages in the current file or all pages in the current song. A song can technically have multiple PDFs in it, or a mix of PDFs and images. So that option is just determining whether you want to embed annotations for all files in the song, or only the file you are currently viewing.

Can you please verify if you go to Settings->About that you are running version 3.3.7 of MobileSheets? I just want to make sure you are on the latest version.

Mike

I am glad I read this post.  I did not really understand what the layers were for.  Now that I do, I think they will be helpful.  Here is another use.  If you play in several bands that play slightly different arrangements of a song (outros are different, etc.), you can use layers so the right comments on the chart for that band show.