With my paper scores, in rehearsals I would often drop a sticky note onto the margin of a page where there was a problem, then I could go back and quickly find all the places that need to be addressed.
I'd love a way to do this in MobileSheets: a shortcut of some kind (map to two-finger or three-finger tap?) to drop a note in the location pressed, and then a way to navigate back through the list of them. ForScore can do this by mapping bookmark creation to a two-finger press, as I understand, and then the bookmarks are all indexed for jumping to.
I haven't found a similar feature in MobileScore yet, but the closest is to use the Stamp tool; unfortunately this makes turning pages harder because swipe is not available (limited to using arrow overlay), and there's no easy way to jump from one annotation to the next that I've found.
I'll bet there's another way to do this that I haven't found yet, or if not, would love something like this to be considered. Thanks!
You can already create bookmarks to jump to a specific page, and all of these bookmarks show up in the bookmarks window. You can set up a touch action to show the bookmark window. There isn't an option to create a bookmark with a two or three finger tap though, but that could certainly be added. You could try this out though - use the two or three finger tap to bring up the window, tap the + icon to create a bookmark and then close the window. Does that function as a workaround for the time being? Does that get you what you need? Or are you needing to add a lot more notes than just the name of a bookmark? You mentioned the forScore bookmarking feature which does not support the same idea as a sticky note, so I'm just trying to make sure I understand exactly what you need.
I'm a recording producer, and for the past 20 months, I've been using MSP like crazy for big orchestral recordings, on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra. I JUST LOVE MSP! It changed my professional life, and I keep recommending it to other recording producers, tonmeisters, conductors, musicians...
One of the features I'm desperately missing is the one severtki is describing.
In an orchestral recording session, I make notes in the 300+ pages score while the orchestra is playing. Then I'll go to the conductor to discuss what needs to be done. Flipping through all the pages takes too long. Creating a bookmark takes too long. Every second counts in a session.
I make many small annotations per page with the stylus, and it would be very handy to have a shortcut (double tap, or a tool on the favourites board) to make a note which appears in a special list of notes which I can access very quickly. It wouldn't even have to be named. It's just important to be very quick to jump to specific locations - and mark these locations very quickly as I constantly have to follow the score. I don't want to miss a single note.
Alternatively, if there was a function to display a miniature list of all annotations and filter that list by color, I would use a special color for annotations I want to find later.
A colleague of mine is using ForScore, and I'm trying very hard to convince him to switch to MSP as soon as it's out on iOS, but he's always teasing me that he can create post-its very easily...
It would be great if you came up with an idea how one could bet approach this challenge.
Thank you for the feedback Cristoph - that is helpful feedback. I'll certainly add it to the list of things to tackle this year.
As a side note, MobileSheets is out on iOS now. I'm not sure if that will help with your colleague if creating "post-its" is a critical feature for them though.
severtki and Cristoph: when I add a sticky note like feature, are you wanting to enter notes using the virtual keyboard, or are you wanting to be able to take handwritten notes and have those stored in a list? The implementation may look very different depending on that, unless I try to support having an option to have freeform annotations included in the list of notes.
For me, the best option would definitely be a list of the (miniaturized, normalized) handwritten notes, with a possibility to filter them by colour.
That would give me the chance to immediately see all the little scribbles I make, e.g. a plus sign for "good" and a minus sign, a squiggly line for "not well together", an "i" for intonation, and so on. The fastest in a recording session is definitely using the stylus, unless you find a faster way, maybe even adding the (increasing) number of the take we are recording automatically (which I always have to add to the scribble in a production - for the upto three concerts, I simply use different colours).
So exciting to see that you're thinking about these questions - thanks!
So the question is, if I'm just creating a list of freeform annotations, how will they be described to the user? I can't read the freeform annotation to know what words were written. Would I just say "Note 1, Note 2, etc", or do I have to ask users to enter a name/description for the note? I assume you won't have time to do that based on your description. You said "miniaturized, normalized", but I'm not really sure what you mean by that, and there isn't an API that I'm aware of in each platform to take a drawing of text and turn it into text. Some of the platforms have a stylus implementation that allows you to write with the stylus and it transforms it to text, but that is in lieu of using the virtual keyboard when entering text, not as a standalone API. That approach works with text annotations, but not freeform annotations. So if that is your preference, then the notes would be treated like a text annotation where it will bring up the virtual keyboard, but if you are using a stylus, you should be able to utilize the platform-specific functionality to write words with the stylus which it will transform to text. Then in the list of notes, I could list the first few words that were written along with a color I suppose, but is that sufficient? Or are you wanting to be able to add a name to the note so you can know what it was referring to?
I include a typical page from a chamber music production. Many takes have been recorded, each take has a number. In the score, I write down the take number and what was the problem (intonation, ensemble, whatever). That's the many red annotations. No need to list them all as the recorded takes are usually rather short, only a few pages.
But then comes the dress rehearsal or the first of three concerts, and then I'll make notes in a different color, in this case here in yellow.
This would be the typical post-it analogy: in old times, you would have put a sticker onto a page to be able to very quickly find the crucial 12 spots in 300 pages of score.
Here in MSP, I use a yellow color to mark the few spots.
On that sample page, I have three yellow annotations. Ideally, they would appear each in a list of small images, say 50x50 pixels or even smaller. The first one being the scribbled "i" (intonation) as a small jpg, the second a small circle, the third a squiggly line.
Browsing this list, I would very quickly find all the spots where I left a note, and I could see already without going there what the problem was. If I want to go through all spots with intonation problems with the artist, I could easily find and show them.
There's no need to use the keyboard, usually there's no time to really type something. There's also no need to OCR the stylus input. However, it would be useful to optionally quickly add a comment to the note using the keyboard.
If I may dream on: in the context of music production, it would be amazing if each note had a timestamp (MIDI, SMPTE, time-of-day, user-defined start) so that you can export a list of the notes which you can import into a DAW or video editor to quickly jump to the spots. And vice versa, it would be possible to playback a file which can tell MSP to jump to a nearby annotations You could even have special marks for synchronizing audio and PDF... Sorry, I sometimes get a bit wild.... forget the last paragraph :-)
So if I'm understanding you correctly, in whatever list I'm showing, you want me to render the annotation that was drawn and scale it down to fit in a 50x50 or smaller image, and that's the identifier you would use to know which one to jump to? If the annotation was large, say 400x400, that would probably be pretty hard to see and make sense of, so this feature would then be designed around small annotations. In that case, we'll have to talk about the workflow. For this to work well (and quickly), I'd probably need to introduce a new dedicated "note" tool that would function much like a freeform annotation, but would have some additional settings so that you could optionally add a note. If your preference is to utilize the existing pen tool for this, but then have a way to designate something as a note after selecting and editing it, let me know, but that seems like it would be slower.
I got a little lost in your last paragraph in terms of how the timestamp would be processed by the DAW or video editor for jumping to the spot. I'm not sure what kind of list would be created that would indicate a particular position on the PDF that could be used by a DAW or video editor. That seems to me like it would require new functionality in the DAW or video editor to work with that kind of list. I think most features like this are built around things like musicXML that include the note information and such, versus PDFs which are just containers for images.
Mike and Christoph,
I'm glad to see someone else is looking for exactly this feature, and so glad to see Mike considering how to implement. I'm not able to follow all the details of the entire discussion above, but I would just say that it is highly desirable to be able to drop a note in a specific place on a specific page without any additional entries or clicks, and then to quickly navigate through all the dropped notes.
To share my particular use case, in case it's helpful to see another one compared with Christoph's: while conducting or playing through 300 pages of music, I use different color sticky notes to quickly mark a location (color-coding for strings, winds, brass, soprano, tenor, etc.), and then when giving notes to the tenor, say, I quickly browse through all of the red tabs for him.
I really like the idea above of indexing annotations using thumbnails. In which case, when starting a runthrough or session, the user could begin a new layer for annotations, then mark spots with squiggles of some kind (e.g. B for balance; I for intonation; R for rhythm, etc.), and then afterward, they could access an index of annotations made on that layer by looking through the indexed thumbnails. I think it could be quite widely useful to view an index of annotations in any case -- what page did I add that # sign, anyway?
I'm with Christoph, in that every second counts because it's in real time, and simplicity is best. I too have ForScore colleagues who tease me about not being able to drop a sticky note...
In case this is implemented by just dropping a place marker of some kind, instead of capturing a scribbled annotation, then I'll bet some users may want a way of adding a note to the mark for further information.
So no, I haven't had time to work on it yet I'm afraid. Surprisingly, only you and Cristoph have contacted me about adding that functionality, so it hasn't been raised on the priority list yet. I'll see what I can do about working on it early next year though, although I'm already promising quite a bit. I know it's hard to wait so long for features you need and I appreciate your patience.
