[thomasp]

Hi folks,
I am up to scan some songbooks containing more than one song along with a *.csv - file for the content. I i do nothing spcial, I see the songs in alphabetical order by their song title. Sometimes I like to scroll through the songbook in order of the page numbering, or numbering of the songs.
There is a column "sorttitle" available for this purpose. If I fill this colums with the page numbers for instance, the list is now sorted by the page numbers. But from now on I am not able to change back to the alphabetical order by song titles. The available options are sort manual, A-Z, random, create date, edit date, and numeric. I cannot change "sort by title" vs. "sort by page numer".
Is there any workarround for that?
Thanks in advance
Thomas

[Geoff Bacon]

I've never used sorttitle so don't know how it is supposed to be used

If I was doing this, I would have created a setlist to hold the songs in order - you could probably have added the setlist name to the .csv file.

You could create a setlist now.
1. Display list in current order
2. Long press topmost song until it has a check mark
3. Use floating box to select all songs
4. Three vertical dots at top right - select create setlist from songs

Open the New setlist and check ok.
Remove the sorttitle field by 1 to 3 above followed by Edit; then delete the sortedtitle text

There will be other ways to handle this!

Geoff

[thomasp]

I've never used sorttitle so don't know how it is supposed to be used

If I was doing this, I would have created a setlist to hold the songs in order - you could probably have added the setlist name to the .csv file.

You could create a setlist now.
1. Display list in current order
2. Long press topmost song until it has a check mark
3. Use floating box to select all songs
4. Three vertical dots at top right - select create setlist from songs

Open the New setlist and check ok.
Remove the sorttitle field by 1 to 3 above followed by Edit; then delete the sortedtitle text

There will be other ways to handle this!

Geoff

Hi Geof,

thank you for your reply, bu I do not want to edit it for every sonbook in MobileSheets on my tablet. I already have it on my PC, and I do not want to do the same work a second time just for occasionally browse through the book in its original ordering by page numbers.

But I found a workarround: I copied the Songbook (you have to copy it becauss MobileSheets won't import a document two times regardless whether or not it comes with a *.csv file) and imported this copy a second time but now WITHOUT a *.csv-file. I created two albums "My Songbook (single songs)" and "My Songbook (complete book)" and nor I can choose one of then.

Yes, this sounds a little bit weird because I now need to maintain two copies of the same book, but now it works like desired.

[Geoff Bacon]

Sorry, I didn't twig that it was a single file - even though you mentioned that it had a ..csv

You should be able to create a snippet, with the name you want, and then edit it's range of pages to cover the whole file

Geoff

[Zubersoft]

To answer your question, no, there is no workaround as you can't globally switch off sorting by the sort title field. That's certainly something I can consider in the future though.

Mike

[thomasp]

Sorry, I didn't twig that it was a single file - even though you mentioned that it had a ..csv

You should be able to create a snippet, with the name you want, and then edit it's range of pages to cover the whole file

Geoff

I also tried:
Let there be a Songbook with 10 Pages.
Page 1: the index of the book.
Page 2 - 4: SongA
Page 5: SongB
Page 6-8: SongC
Page 9-10 SongD

A simple *.csv would be:

Code:

title;pages
SongA;2-4
SongB;5
SongC;6-8
SongD;9-10

My idea now was to add a single index line representing the whole book:

Code:

title;pages
WholeBook;1-10
SongA;2-4
SongB;5
SongC;6-8
SongD;9-10

But this also didn't work. It would be a fine idea, but it didn't work.

[itsme]

@thomasp: You misunderstood the intention of "sort title". Sorting by title in MobileSheets is not strictly alfabetical, it follows a number of well-thought rules.
- you can exlude certain terms at the beginning of a title from being used for sorting under Library Settings - Articles To Ignore. I changed the default setting and ignore only "the". So "The Cuckoo" is sorted under C instead of under T
- terms in brackets are excluded automatically, e.g. "(La) Cucaracha" is sorted under C
- certain special characters e.g. quotes ' and " are ignored during sorting
- Library Settings - Normalize Characters specifies if Ä, Ö, Ü is sorted like A, O, U
In case all these still don't do what you want you can overwrite the sorting with an entry in a song's "Sort Title". So "1919 Rag" can be displayed as "MCMXVIIII Rag" by setting the title accordingly but can be sorted under N by setting the sort title to "Nineteen Nineteen Rag"

@Mike: please change sorting only in case of really important reasons, it would confuse long time users

[itsme]

Most of my CSVs for books contain 2 additional entries, one for the table of contents, one for the whole book. I add a ~ as prefix to take them out of the sequence of song titles and have them sorted to the beginning of the list:
~CJB Fakebook 2024 C (complete)
~CJB Fakebook 2024 C - TOC
I posted many examples in the forum e.g. https://www.zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/f...12013.html and all of them are working fine for me, on Android, Win10, Win11 and in the e-ink version.

I don't understand why the example that you posted doesn't work for you. It seems correct.

[thomasp]

Most of my CSVs for books contain 2 additional entries, one for the table of contents, one for the whole book. I add a ~ as prefix to take them out of the sequence of song titles and have them sorted to the beginning of the list:
~CJB Fakebook 2024 C (complete)
~CJB Fakebook 2024 C - TOC
I posted many examples in the forum e.g. https://www.zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/f...12013.html and all of them are working fine for me, on Android, Win10, Win11 and in the e-ink version.

I don't understand why the example that you posted doesn't work for you. It seems correct.

Thank you for this reply.
I did not add a ~ as a prefix but an exclamation mark (!), but this should work as well.
Maybee I made another mistake, I will check that out and report.
Thanks again.

[thomasp]

@thomasp: You misunderstood the intention of "sort title". Sorting by title in MobileSheets is not strictly alfabetical, it follows a number of well-thought rules.
- you can exlude certain terms at the beginning of a title from being used for sorting under Library Settings - Articles To Ignore. I changed the default setting and ignore only "the". So "The Cuckoo" is sorted under C instead of under T
- terms in brackets are excluded automatically, e.g. "(La) Cucaracha" is sorted under C
- certain special characters e.g. quotes ' and " are ignored during sorting
- Library Settings - Normalize Characters specifies if Ä, Ö, Ü is sorted like A, O, U
In case all these still don't do what you want you can overwrite the sorting with an entry in a song's "Sort Title". So "1919 Rag" can be displayed as "MCMXVIIII Rag" by setting the title accordingly but can be sorted under N by setting the sort title to "Nineteen Nineteen Rag"

@Mike: please change sorting only in case of really important reasons, it would confuse long time users

Thank you for this! 
This makes sense.

[samibe]

One other possible option: I like to put all of the songs from a book in the same album (as part of the csv). Mobilesheets will add them to the library in the order that they are in the csv file. So if I import the csv, then go to the albums tab, click on the album I just added, it will bring up the list of songs in the book. If I select 'manual' sorting, all of the songs will be in book order. If the 'load next song' setting is active, I'll be able to page through all of the songs in page number order in the album. I do this with every csv I import to make sure all of the songs have the right page ranges. 

Sometimes I'll include a song with the whole book but not usually. The album works good enough for me. If I want paging through the whole book to be more seamless, I'll select all of the songs in the album (in 'manual' order) and add them to a new setlist. Since I have 'load while setlist' active, viewing the setlist is practically the same as viewing the whole PDF songbook.

[itsme]

So simple & efficient, just using features that are already there. Thanks samibe for sharing this tip.

Let me add another hint:
I often do not add a book completely but only select certain songs from the CSV import list. In that case it's easier to find the songs I want to import when the list is sorted alfabetically by title.
But it's really easy to change the sort order of the CSV file. Most of my CSV files contain an additional column with either the startpage in the PDF of every song or the printed page number. This is possible because MobileSheets just ignores columns where the header field is not a known MobileSheets database field name. So I just can open the CSV with LibreOffice (other spreadsheet programs like Excel should also work) and change the sort order between sort by title for selecting single songs during CSV import and sort by page number for importing the whole book according to samibe's advice.