[Manul]

Hi,

I just started using MobileSheets (after a very short interval with the trial version a few years ago, when I bought a small E-Ink tablet and unfortunately managed to lose it again only weeks later) and so far, I'm very happy with it.

However, I was wondering whether it's possible to (temporarily) set defaults for some metadata fields for new songs?

To explain the use case: I regularly attend music workshops where we will go through quite a number of new songs in a couple of days. I want to group those into one collection for each annual workshop and by year. So, for a couple of days, all songs I add will have a collection of "workshop title" and the current year. I can of course select these by hand for every song, but that's six additional clicks I could save for each song. The same holds true for scanning material from older workshops. I can't imagine the situation that one wants to add multiple songs which all share some metadata is so uncommon.

So, is this possible and, if not, could such an option be added? One idea that wouldn't even need (many) additional UI elements would be to automatically apply active filters in the song list to new songs. This could be made a preference needing one additional check box.

Thanks for reading so far and I'm curious if anyone else would find this useful.

All the best,

Manuel

[Geoff Bacon]

You could 
a) long press one of the songs until the checkbox shows
b) select any other songs for the workshop
c) Edit
d) change the common meta data fields (including creating a collection for the workshop).

The above assumes that you already have all the songs on the tablet.

If you are adding them one at a time during the workshop then probably best to create the workshop collection and add each song to it as it arises. When all songs present, display the collection and edit the common metadata as above

To populate the collection/setlist, you could also select several songs, click the overflow menu (three vertical dots)  and use the appropraite "Create" or "Add to" option
You could also temporarily change the sort order of Songs to date order - this will easily allow you to select all the songs that have been created that weekend.

Geoff

[Manul]

Thank you for these suggestions, Geoff, these are great workarounds indeed. Especially the idea of temporarily changing the sort order sounds very practical.

I still think the option to directly add songs into a given collection (or adding some other metadata in batch directly upon import) would be a good idea, but for the time being, your suggestions are very helpful. Thanks again!

[BRX]

I still think the option to directly add songs into a given collection (or adding some other metadata in batch directly upon import) would be a good idea

But, but, that's what you can do with the batch import. Don't you use the window where you can add metadata and collections/setlists/albums and so on on import?

[Manul]

But, but, that's what you can do with the batch import. Don't you use the window where you can add metadata and collections/setlists/albums and so on on import?

No, I don't  - I've only been using MobileSheets for about a week now and even though I've read (most of) the manual, I'm sure I've only discovered a fraction of the functionality yet.

Thank you for the pointer to batch import. Unfortunately, it seems like that's not applicable in my case, as it seems only available for importing existing files. So, I guess I'm looking for some kind of batch mode for scanning songs with the camera.

[BRX]

Well, than just scan all your new songs one after another, select them in the recent tab (showing up on top if you didn't open other songs after that), choose edit and batch assign the metadata you want.

[Manul]

Yes, thank you, that's what Geoff suggested and what I'll probably end up doing. It's a workaround that I can live very well with, but it means that I either a) only have the correct metadata for all songs at the end of the workshop (when all of them have been handed out) or b) have to go through the same process multiple times. As I said, no big deal, but I still think an option to preselect metadata for the next songs I want to add would be a good idea.