Tablets, ChordPro, and PDFs - Oh My!
Jun. 23rd, 2015 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamhouseLook, boys and girls! It's a Real LiveJournal post!
Carrying a ton of songbooks in luggage is simply not practical. Using paper lead sheets in windy outdoor situations also lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. And we now have 4 tablets between us (two Android and two legacy HP tablets with a version of Cyanogenmod). This means it is time to start the conversion process.
There's another good reason for me to do so personally - any of my songs prior to about 1990 only exist in a single paper copy from an old print out of Apple ][ files that no longer exist. Should my songbook find itself permanently redirected, they would be lost forever. In some cases, this would not be a bad thing (they can't all be winners), but in others it would be very painful to reconstruct.
We've standardized on Songbook for now - it has transpose, zoom, and auto-scroll features that we need for performing. At some point we might go to bluetooth pedals, but that adds back some of the bulk we're saving.
After some practical experimentation and attempts to streamline my process (Brenda is doing it differently, of course), I'm doing the following:
Scan old paper copies into a text file (OCR gets a little confused on Letter Gothic but it is still faster than retyping)
Edit text to clean up scanos and position chords
Use ChordSmith program to convert to Chord Pro (naming convention: SongName_yymmddBill.pro)
Optional: Create "one chorus" version for pdf/printing
Create PDF using Songsheet Generator (unless I have multiple subtitles, which Songsheet Generator can't handle. Then I use a PC version of Songbook)
Print backup hardcopy from the PDF
Copy .pro file to central Songbook directory
Copy Songbook directory to shared directory.
Download to tablet.
So, this is going to be EASIER to keep track of? Ah, well, the price of flexibility.
I am through the "B" section of my own songs and as needed we have converted songs we play by others as well but not in any alphabetical order. Yet.
Carrying a ton of songbooks in luggage is simply not practical. Using paper lead sheets in windy outdoor situations also lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. And we now have 4 tablets between us (two Android and two legacy HP tablets with a version of Cyanogenmod). This means it is time to start the conversion process.
There's another good reason for me to do so personally - any of my songs prior to about 1990 only exist in a single paper copy from an old print out of Apple ][ files that no longer exist. Should my songbook find itself permanently redirected, they would be lost forever. In some cases, this would not be a bad thing (they can't all be winners), but in others it would be very painful to reconstruct.
We've standardized on Songbook for now - it has transpose, zoom, and auto-scroll features that we need for performing. At some point we might go to bluetooth pedals, but that adds back some of the bulk we're saving.
After some practical experimentation and attempts to streamline my process (Brenda is doing it differently, of course), I'm doing the following:
Scan old paper copies into a text file (OCR gets a little confused on Letter Gothic but it is still faster than retyping)
Edit text to clean up scanos and position chords
Use ChordSmith program to convert to Chord Pro (naming convention: SongName_yymmddBill.pro)
Optional: Create "one chorus" version for pdf/printing
Create PDF using Songsheet Generator (unless I have multiple subtitles, which Songsheet Generator can't handle. Then I use a PC version of Songbook)
Print backup hardcopy from the PDF
Copy .pro file to central Songbook directory
Copy Songbook directory to shared directory.
Download to tablet.
So, this is going to be EASIER to keep track of? Ah, well, the price of flexibility.
I am through the "B" section of my own songs and as needed we have converted songs we play by others as well but not in any alphabetical order. Yet.
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no subject
Date: 2015-06-23 03:07 pm (UTC)I trust you will fill the extra luggage space with silly hats.