(04-20-2016, 03:42 PM)itsme Wrote: I use a separate folder on the tablet's SDcard that contains just the fakebooks and their CSVs. I copy directly from the PC to the tablet using TotalCommander for Android with its extension TotalCmd-LAN. This uses only my local WLAN, no internet connection is required. The folder on the PC has to be shared (SMB).
That makes it more organized, I guess. So am I right in saying that you don't use the MobileSheetsPro Companion to transfer your PDFs, but instead use the Import feature from the app itself?
correct. I don't use the Companion at all. I copy Fakebooks one by one with TotalCommander as above. The files for "one file per song" are in SD0\_MobileSheets\ in subfolders #, A ... Z. This is a mirror of the same structure on my PC that I synchronize in both directions with an Android app called FolderSync, also via local WLAN. In MSP the setting “Let MobileSheets Manage My Files” is OFF. I import the files for single file songs with "Import - Local File". That's it.
I needed to import a book of songs and, although my initial thought was to split into separate pdfs, I decided to play around with the CSV import mechanism (just to see how it worked)
Although I've managed to get it to work, the documentation could be improved to make it more obvious. Some of the points below are solely to aid others using this mechanism for the first time.
The PDF and CSV need to be present in the same folder when importing - you can't just import the CSV. Files need to have the same name (apart from the extension)
You can't do import via the Companion program (shame)
In my first try ( the PDF book already loaded on the tablet), it appeared that MSP was processing both files as I moved sequentially through the pages to check the cropping (as shown by the page/total pages indicator)
There didn't seem to be a way to create/use a collection
Note for new users: you can specify this in the first line of the CSV file e.g. "title;pages;collections;")
There appears to be an issue removing the songbook so that it can be replaced - deleting it from the Songs tab doesn't delete the songs that referenced it. Although one can use a filter (quite hard to find) on the Songs tab to identify songs with a common string in their name, there is no "Select All" option to mark them for deletion; it is a pain to mark each song individually.
In the end I used the Companion program to delete the songs (sort on the collection field and use standard window operations to delete multiple songs)
Looks like if one wants to update the CSV, one will have to effectively remove the songbook and associated songs before reimporting (not fully investigated as had already spent enough time)
When importing the CSV, I had a truncated window showing the entries available for selection (the "outline" box was chopped on the right side of the dialog even though there was plenty of room to display it). The box did show "Select None" (or similar) but I'm sure that when I first attempt there was a "Select All" on the right of the dialog box. Without a "Select All", I had to manually select each song (for a small number of songs this is ok but if it was a large book!). I tried several times to see if I could get a full dialog but failed (I suppose I should have seen what happened if I had closed/restarted MSP).
Ideally, it would be nice if someone could create a PDF extraction tool that would take the CSV and PDF and create separate songs. This would allow users to use the same CSV irrespective of how they intended to load the files.
I'm sure someone is going to tell me that they have such a tool (I think there is something earlier in this thread but I'm ideally looking for something pretty easy to use - not because I'm thick but because I'm not likely to use it extensively and don't want to keep relearning how to use it).
to 4.)
You can create and populate collections, albums, genres... as you like. It requires not only the title line, but additionally populating the whole column with the desired value(s). For examples see http://zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/forum/...p?tid=3276
to 5.)
I always add the title of an imported songbook to "Albums" so filtering by album is a snap. As soon as all songs of an album / songbook are selected by a filter "select all" can be done by selecting one of them via long press. Then all songs can be checked in the little box at the bottom right. Note that "Delete Song Pdf/Image/Text Files" is only available when you delete from the Songs tab and won't delete files that are referenced by more than one song. Deleting from Collections, Albums, Setlists and so on will only remove the song from the respective group
to 7.)
That looks like a bug. It works fine for me on Android. There seems to be a bug on windows, see my next reply.
05-04-2017, 07:43 AM (This post was last modified: 05-04-2017, 07:45 AM by itsme.)
@Mike:
CSV import is different on Android and on Windows. Android: When I select a .CSV file the .PDF with the same name in the same directory is selected at once, the song selection window is shown and selected songs are imported correctly. Windows: When I select a .CSV the file picker is shown once again to select a .PDF. Is that really the intention? I can select any .PDF on the device. If the .PDF does not match with the .CSV, the import result is complete nonsense. If the referred page from the .CSV does not exist in the .PDF I get an "eternal circle" when I try to open that song. The mess that is created by such a faulty import is hard to clean up.
05-04-2017, 04:45 PM (This post was last modified: 05-04-2017, 04:46 PM by Zubersoft.)
I don't really have a choice on Windows due to the way file permissions work. In order to have permission to access the PDF, the user has to pick it from the Microsoft file chooser. Otherwise my app will be denied access to read the file. I probably should add code to warn the user if they pick a file that doesn't match the CSV name, and require confirmation.
How strange is this! That's a difference between Win10 Mobile and the "normal" Win10, right?
Would it be possible to set a default filename (determined by the CSV filename) for the PDF?
A useful additional plausibility check would be verifying that all "pages" entries in the CSV really exist in the PDF.
Quote:I always add the title of an imported songbook to "Albums" so filtering by album is a snap. As soon as all songs of an album / songbook are selected by a filter "select all" can be done by selecting one of them via long press. Then all songs can be checked in the little box at the bottom right.
I had a collection with only 3 songs in it so I added a common word to their Albums field and applied a filter for this word when displaying the songs tab. A long press displays the check boxes but there is no "little box at the bottom right" so I am unable to "select all" (this is using Android version 1.8.0).
I also use 1.8.0. The "Select alll" button is there and works fine, both on Android and on Win10.
Here's how it looks like. I could not find it in the manual, so I don't know the correct term to name it.
I have found that this box only becomes visible when the "Library Settings| Show Floating Toolbar" is ticked.
As I would prefer not to see it by default, I'll have to remember to enable it on the odd occasion that I want to use it (I would prefer to see it as either as an option on the extra items menu or alternatively automatically pop up if any song is checked).
I started one (which is attached here) by scraping the titles off a website page.
The PDF has bookmarks, but the song title strings are not user-friendly. I'd like to get the page numbers out of the PDF bookmarks and combine them with the user-friendly song titles in the attached CSV.
I don't have the ability to extract the bookmarks from the PDF. Wondering if someone who can do that, would be willing to do it and post the bookmarks as a text or CSV file here.
thanks,
Chris
(PS for mods- I tried to attach an .ods file (LibreOffice spreadsheet) but the forum said that filetype was not allowed.)
You can save the spreadsheet with LibreOffice in XLS format. XLS can be uploaded to the forum.
Find attached the bookmarks. It's in JPdfBookmarks format. You can try if it really helps.
The New Orleans Jambook contains mostly one song per page. Using the autofilll feature for spreadsheets could also create reasonable results for "pages". I guess that proofreading and correcting the autofilled pages could also be fast and easy.
Thanks very much for sending along the bookmarks - it has indeed helped a lot, partly because the songs in the PDF are different than those in my 'screen scrape' and it was much quicker to merge the bookmarks list with the screen scrape, than it would have been to go thru the PDF itself page by page. I still have some work to do to clean it up and I'll post it when I think it's more-or-less ready.
Thx on LibreOffice xls as well. I was aware of that, and just thought it might make sense to allow ods on the forum since that's the native LO format and LO allows CSV export with semi-colon delimiters while excel does not (to my knowledge). (I'm also just generally inclined to support things like LO which offer alternatives to things like MSFT (Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc) which have already accumulated so much market power as to be sometimes difficult ... )
All that said, again thanks very much for your several very helpful things over the last couple days!
best - Chris
