RAc

That is a hexagonal concertina, but the one you received appears to be square (or is it simply a distorted picture)?

I believe to have read somewhere that music theory research has pinpointed the maximum storage space to between 50-100, of course depending on many different factors with a significant individual variance. As usual (just like in almost any issue related to music), there is no "one size fits all" answer to the question how to approach music/music practicing. In the circle of musicians I hang out with, some have classical training, meaning you can present them with any score, and they will be able to sight read those score and render them in finest written detail at full combat speed without ever having seen them before. Generally they don't do as well in improvising, inventing complimenting voices, accompanying and so on, but the range of pieces accessible to them makes me envious at times. Some others do not read music at all but can pick up pieces by ear real fast. After two times through, they will be able to play along as if they had practiced it all their lives. Makes me envious at times. I myself am neither a good sight reader nor a good by ear player (though I like to believe I am getting better at it), so my only choice is to learn the pieces I feel confident to play outside my four walls by heart. That works fairly well and has so far gifted a satisfactory repertoire to me, but it is a time-consuming process, and as the number of pieces gets larger, I realize my limited storage capacity. Thus, for me personally, I resolved for a mixture of sight reading training, ear training and tune studying as my recipe for getting better (or sometimes, depending on how much time I can invest in music, simply keeping my level). As the indeed very interesting thread that @Don Taylor linked with (thanks!) revealed, there are as many strategies out there as there are people making music, so everybody must find his/her own lever.

Oh I see. Great, I was expecting nothing less... 😉 what happened was that we wrapped the pdf created by you into an "envelope pdf" that contains additional art work, a preface and the like. In the envelope, the book marks got lost. I need to check with the pdf editor I used ("perfect pdf" I believe) if they provide a way to retain or adjust bookmarks in imported documents. If not, I will just distribute the "raw" pdf created by your tool; after all, the preface and artwork is of little use with Mobile sheets. Thanks again for taking the time to look into it!

Hi Michael, I suspect this feature request is already there and I just can not find it, so apologies for being too dumb or lazy: In the export pdf dialog for multiple tunes, is it possible to automatically add bookmarks corresponding to the locations of the tunes? Reason I am asking is because I use Mobilesheets which allows bookmarks to be entered in the tune data base for finding a tune, so for a collection, it would greatly help not to have to add the bookmarks manually. Thanks!

Possibly just a clogged reed, fairly easy to find out and fix (clean the reed by sliding a piece of paper between the reed and the shoe). If you are reasonably careful, no harm should be expected. As a concertina owner, you will need to get used to opening up your box, I hate to tell you...

I can certainly relate to that, having published a labor-of-love book myself (not on a musical subject, sadly). The sad truth of the matter is, one doesn't publish books for the money. (as a positive side effect, you can only become surprised for the better in case it does sell after all).

Hi Michael, I have unzipped your current tree from github locally and fooled around with it for a while, focussing on the offline playing features. So far, everything looks very stable and solid, kudos! I was wondering if you could make your "force every font note into midi cache" abc available to non-facebook users (or at least me 😁)? It wouldn't be a big deal making it oneself, but since it is already there... Thanks!

is it just my browser (edge), or are the lyrics misaligned with the notes? The long C in bar 4 should align with "year," but what I see is attached.

I just double click the local copy of the html file. I am an embedded developer, wouldn't ever bother with local web server or other satanic stuff... 😉

Thanks so much for the detailed explanation, Michael, much appreciated! If I understand you correctly, the only real online requirement then is the "need" for updates of the service worker code? Can that be turned off such that what resides on my disk remains "frozen" version? I do not like unsolicited updates of anything, following the old adage to never change a running system... My need for offline use is mostly (as we discussed before) that in many session/gig/workshop environments, there is no or limited network connectivity. The unzipped version of your tool so far has been invaluable and perfect for everything not related to listening to tunes, such as transposing, generating pdfs for display on the fly and so on. Now the new feature would close the gap neatly, allowing me to play a tune in a session environment (simple sound font/no effects) such that others can listen to it. A frozen version that does exactly that would perfectly fill my needs.

Hmmm, an offline capable software that relies on online services? I am not sure I understand... Btw, isn't it after midnite in SD right now? Go to bed! 😉

is the offline version available separately in github, or do you plan on merging it into the main branch? I clear all my history on browser exit, so I would need a local copy of all the html files. Thanks!

actually, forScore and MSP are fairly similar from what I can deduct from forScores Web page, two major differences being that MSP is multi platform (about the only such software suite that support Windows) and MSP is not limited to pdfs. The perspective that abcs would eventually be supported was what got me hooked (aside from the Windows support feature). I am surprised that there is music that can not be rendered well in abc format. Do you have examples?

Again, to my best knowledge, MSP does NOT have a file format of its own. It can display anything that represents written music (abcs,pdfs, jpgs,gifs...) without converting it to anything. Its purpose is to organize collections of such files so that you easily find any piece of music in the collection by author, genre etc. It being a data base will of course imply some kind of data and thus file format, but that one is independent of the music files itself. I also did not mean to imply that you should support MSP in any way. All I wanted to point out is that the task to create a pdf tunebook with 20000 entries is sort of pointless if the main point of the exercise - printing out the document - is impractical AND the other possible use case - creating a digital tunebook along with an index that is browseable on a computing device - can be better and much more efficiently accomplished by software that can natively organize and render abcs SUCH AS MSP (there are other ones too, I am sure). All of this, again, without impoying any criticism or downplaying of your impeccable work. There are so many invaluable features in it. Of course, the generation of cross-indexed pdfs is in itself a very useful feature for small up to medium sized tunebooks which I have used myself several times now. I just felt that the exercise you presented (a pdf containing 20000 tunes) illustrates the gap between the "analog" and "digital" music world very well. Apologies again for leading the thread somewhat astray.

you do have a point here, but to me, there are two different use cases involved - thanks for pointing that out! For everything that is worth preserving, digital representation may not be a good alternative, as you justly state. However, for everyday use, things are different. In all of my band contexts, I am ironically one of the oldest (in terms of lifetime accumulated) members, but practically the only one who uses digital dots. Everyone else comes to band practice with a huge heavy stack of printed music, and a good deal of the practice time goes down the drain from people trying to locate a given tune in their respective stacks. To make things worse, the band leaders frequently bring in freshly printed copies of tunes already in the repertoire just to make sure everyone is equipped with the music needed for the night. As an end result, huge amounts of paper (a very valuable natural resource) are wasted with the sole effect of burdening the backs and time constraints of many musicians. But that is sort of side tracking the point here. We were starting out with the issue that the intermediate step format pdf over abc for digital music representation is an anachronism. True, the p in pdf stands for portable, so one of its side effects is that even in a digital context, it used to be the smallest common denominator for everybody's computing needs (and, as a side effect, also makes printing fairly straightforward). My point is that given the growing ubiquoty (is that the proper noun here? I would not know...) of abc notation along with software that can process and render it along with its advantages would and should make it the first choice in almost all musical contexts. Apologies to Michael for taking his thread OT; if there is more to discuss here, we should probably take it to another thread.