Gig folder organization

Posting for a friend: I’m VERY late to the game, but wanting -. digitize use my enormous gig
folders. I’ve got everything saved as PDFs, both individual pieces and
pieces all together_ I’ve just started adding links with Adobe but it’s
going to take me forever as it’s hundreds of pages x 4 for each folder…
Urgh… I’m sure there are many better ways to do this!
need to have docs can send out to players to play from on iPads.

My friend plays gigs with quartets so the 4x - 1st violin, 2nd violin, viola, cello

Suggest looking at ForScore app. It allows the creation of set lists from individual PDFs

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More info: What I need is to be able to number each piece without it taking forever! I have 244 pieces in a folder, and need to be able to label them easily so players can just click on no 25 for example and it takes them to the page to play from… that’s what I’m hoping someone can tell me how to do :grin:

There are a lot of options. Depending on the amount of files, it is quite an undertaking.

I prefer one PDF per piece. I curate the PDFs’ metadata. More on that below.

I am a conductor (hobby, not my profession) for a local brass band. We have about 1,500 pieces of sheet music that have accumulated over the decades. About 700 are in use right now. I have digitized all conductor scores to be used digitally by myself. Each PDF file name starts with a index like LO001 followed by the piece’s title. LO001 is the location where I can find the score in our archive (which means that we have several filing cabinets with multiple compartments to hang files). I am doing that because the actual paper scores did cost us a lot of money over the decades and they prove that we own the actual scores. The index in combination with the title creates unique file names. There is no issue when we have multiple versions of the same title and we are able to find the paper file. Apart from that I have digitized all scores (not only the conductor score) of the pieces I bought over the last 15 years to hand them out to the musicians (on paper that is). Unfortunately, it is too much work for me to digitize our complete archive for all voices in our brass band (I would end up with more than 100,000 pages). Why did I write about this weird situation?

Well, the first thing is that your friend really should think about the question, how she will work with those files in the future.

For her situation (without knowing too much about the details), my idea would be:

  1. Create a folder for each piece of music. Create a separate file for each instrument inside of this folder, include the name of the instrument/voice in the file name, like TITLE VOICE,pdf or in other words “The lovely song 1st violin.pdf”. Make sure that the name of the instrument is being spelled the the same way across all files/folders. Those folders are your archive.

  2. Use automation tools like Hazel to automatically copy (not move, but copy) all relevant files to a different folder that is called like the instrument/voice: 1st violin. You will end up with a folder “1st violin” that contains all relevant pieces. And you still have nice folders with all your pieces containing files for all instruments.

  3. Your friend is done. Now you only need an app for her iPad. My recommendation: ForScore. Just import all files of a folder like 1st violin into ForScore. ForScore will create a database that is searchable using the metadata. More on that:

The advantage of the PDF solution (multiple files just with curated metadata) is that you are free to use basically any app that is out there or that eventually might materialize without being locked in.

Because being locked in … is not fun, especially after you have done so much work to digitize stuff. Adding links in Adobe is a hassle and it might be frustrating in the future, especially if anything changes in your friend’s scenario. And believe me: it happens sooner than one might think.

So - before you start anything: THINK. Think what you exactly want and need to do. Come up with a concept and put it into place afterwards. :slight_smile:

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There is an application called WarRoom which, for the legal field, is a Bates Numbering application. That might work for you…

Very complete and useful. . Thanks!!