[GuitarHero25]

Hello.  I am trialing MobileSheets, using the lite version, while I am exploring different sheet music reader apps.   One feature that I discovered which looks really attractive to me is the ability to transpose the New Bob Book into different keys.  Eg Calypso Score  and iGigbook do this.  Is this possibility on the horizon for MobileSheets?

[Zubersoft]

Is the "New Bob Book" a PDF? I'm assuming so, and I'm assuming you use the option to import an index file with it. In that case, I don't plan on supporting transposing for that, as transposing a PDF is very complicated. I'm curious if Calypso Score and iGigbook just have multiple copies of the book in different keys and are letting users pick the key they want. If so, I'm surprised that doesn't present copyright problems.

Mike

[GuitarHero25]

Thanks for the quick reply!  What I know is that the New Bob Book is freely available from Bob himself as a PDF.   However I have no idea how these other apps do the actual transposition or even whether they are doing so from a PDF.  However it’s done, I do think it’s very cool since it is not only the chords, but also the melody, that can be transposed.  For me it would be a key selling point for those apps.

[BRX]

I'm not familiar with iGigbook, but I think like Mike they are not transposing real PDFs and might work with multiple copies (and yes, copyright is a problem which they might accounter. After alls that's why iRealPro stopped providing melodies years ago.

If they are scoring and transposing the NBB within the app and truly transpose it hats off to them, but I doubt it. Also NBB is the only one I can see for transposing and you have to purchase it extra (like many other features).

That said, I believe that Bob also distributed his book in sib and mscz formats. If you got these you can transpose them yourself in Sibelius or Musescore and more importantly convert to ABC (via mxml).
And ABC is a format that MS does support now including true transposing of melody and chords with files that are only a few kb of size because of their ASCII format (and all of it without paying fpr extra features). Yes, it's a bit of effort to find, create or convert the ABC files you need, but well worth it.

[Cerio]

That said, I believe that Bob also distributed his book in sib and mscz formats. If you got these you can transpose them yourself in Sibelius or Musescore and more importantly convert to ABC (via mxml).
And ABC is a format that MS does support now including true transposing of melody and chords with files that are only a few kb of size because of their ASCII format (and all of it without paying fpr extra features). Yes, it's a bit of effort to find, create or convert the ABC files you need, but well worth it.

Thanks for the info, the files are actually on Sibelius and Band in a Box formats, and yes, converting them to ABC files to be able to have a transposable version of the book in MSP is a little bit time consuming, but it works great. 

Probably the developer of Igigbook did just that.

[GuitarHero25]

Many thanks for the interesting replies.   I have BIAB but have never used ABC... can I just use BIAB to convert to ABC format?  I guess I would have to do that song by song?  And how does MS use ABC (I could not find this in the ios manual)?  Thanks again for any advice.

[Cerio]

BIAB is a buggy program, export / import to ABC is not working at all on the last version, and musicxml import / export has nerver really worked properly. 

If you have the sibelius files, you can batch convert them to musicxml with a dedicated plugin:

https://www.sibelius.com/download/plugin...plugin=596

Then, you can batch convert the resulting xml files to ABC files using, for example, this free tool:
https://michaeleskin.com/abctools/abctools.html
After that you will have the whole Bob's collection in ABC format, that you can load directly in MSP. The conversion process is actually fast if you use the right tools, what is time consuming is editing them (if you're using custom format) or correct the mistakes you're about to see.

[BRX]

Hopefully Mike implements a JS converter for MXML2ABC soon so you don't even need manually convert MXML any more. But if you've got MXML files already (or can batch convert them from Finale or Sibelius) you can also easily batch convert to ABC with xml2abc. It works well-

https://wim.vree.org/svgParse/xml2abc.html

(And yes, Michael Eskin's too, but I think it's Wim's program begind that as well).