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[bbogart]

Hello,

I've taken to storing the lyrics to my songs in the tags and it is very conveneint.  When listening to a song I can see right away if I have the lyrics, and pull them up if I want to sing along.

So I was thinking it would be great if I could store the sheet music for some songs in the tags too.  My origional thought was to just use put it in the file in place of the cover art, but almost all of the songs I have sheet music for are serveral pages long.

Is there a way I can either associate the Songs in my library with the sheet music (tiff or pdf or whatever) or even better store the sheet music right in the tags of the file?

Sorry if its been discussed before, I searched but couldn't find any information on it.

Thanks for your help,
Ben

[KingSparta]

You might can create a user created field

then put a url\path to the file in that field.

then on a display template have it display that field

and maybe if it displays it you could click on it and it might then upen up the file in the default program for the extender of that file.

Just a guess

[bbogart]

Hmm.  I tried it, and when you click on the link it plays the file (rather than opening that link).  Makes sense really, it plays the file if you click anywhere else on the file's line in the display view.  So that didn't work but thanks for the suggestion.

I'd really like to store the image file in the tags if thats possible.

Ben

[KingSparta]

mC only supports 1 image in the file, however id3 standards allow for many more.

[hit_ny]

mC only supports 1 image in the file, however id3 standards allow for many more.

This idea would scale much better for large collections.

Imagine bio, lyrics, misc nfo, associated with the media file ( like cover art is presently) rather than stored in the tags themselves, making for increasingly larger library files.

I'm sure you understand what i mean here king.

For those that don't, King had to partition his collection into libraries of 50k files each to have acceptable performance with MC.

[Alex B]

You might can create a user created field

then put a url\path to the file in that field.

then on a display template have it display that field

and maybe if it displays it you could click on it and it might then upen up the file in the default program for the extender of that file.

I think King's idea is good. It is better to use a pdf file if possible. Then the link would open the music sheet file in a separate pdf reader window and it would actually be usable (=legible). I have not tried this, but I think it would be a simple task to edit one of the default templates to show the music sheet field as a link.

Another possibility is to import the pdf (etc) files to the media library, tag them properly and make a view that can show the sheet music files together with the audio files. Then if a file is searched by a search string or browsed by folders MC would show both files and a double-click would open the sheet music file in an external reader/viewer.

I would actually use both systems so there would be more ways to use the sheet music files and MC would be able to handle the sheet music files too.

[hit_ny]

I think King's idea is good. It is better to use a pdf file if possible. Then the link would open the music sheet file in a separate pdf reader window and it would actually be usable (=legible). I have not tried this, but I think it would be a simple task to edit one of the default templates to show the music sheet field as a link.

This is the part i did not think about...

What helper app would be used to read bio, lyrics etc if they were associated.

I'm not too partial to a pdf reader (are there any lean pdf readers out there ?) kicing off each time i want to see either of the above.

What file formats are bios (text ?), lyrics (text ?), sheet music  etc stored in ?

[bbogart]

I have the lyrics stored in the tags as text so for me that shouldn't be an issue.

I thought I was doing ok with media center but your post raises lots of questions for me.  First, where are the display templates stored?  (I'll do a search)

Also, what do you mean by showing the audio and sheet music files together.  Is that just to say that if they have the same name, and are in the same genre (for example) that when you go to that genre and sort by name that the files will be next to eachother.  Or did you have something else in mind?  Some way of making them stay together?

I'm off to search for display templates.  Thanks for the tips.
Ben

[Alex B]

The templates are in the [MC program path]\Visualizations\Track Info folder.
Here are some instructions: http://www.jrmediacenter.com/DevZone/Track%20Info.html
I could try to make an example track info templete and post it here.

Also, what do you mean by showing the audio and sheet music files together. Is that just to say that if they have the same name, and are in the same genre (for example) that when you go to that genre and sort by name that the files will be next to each other.

Just that. Like I have several album art images and album related txt and html documents here:



This thread has more info: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=30774.0

[bbogart]

Sounds like you guys knew this alreday but I went ahead and tried anyway.  I Stored the images using an external IDv3.2 Editor.  Disapointingly MC will not display that information.

So on to Editing the template file....  Thaks again for the info Alex B.  Here goes....

[Alex B]

Żou need to tag the image and document files inside MC.

You may want to use the Fill Properties From Filename tool for getting some of the info from the file and folder names.

By default MC shows the image files internally, but you can configure "right-click" external viewers here: right-click a file > Send To > Send To (external) > Add / Edit Programs...

Also, I found these instructions for making pdf documents from scanned sheet music pages: http://www.sheetmusicarchive.net/makepdf.html

[bbogart]

This seems to work.  And it's a decent solution.  I just have to enter the path to the sheet music in my new SheetMusic field and it displays in the display window as a link.  I seem to be able to control whether it opens in MC or with an external viewer as well.

I didn't realize that the track info display templates were just html files.  That certainly makes things easy.

Somehow I still have this strange desire to find a way to store the sheet music in the tags, but I don't think that is really necessary.  This solution is ellegant and works beatutifully.

Thank you,
Ben

[KingSparta]

This seems to work.  And it's a decent solution.  I just have to enter the path to the sheet music in my new SheetMusic field and it displays in the display window as a link.

that's what i was saying early-er

[bbogart]

Sorry KingSparta.  I didn't understand the terminology yet when you first posted.  Now I got it and your idea worked very well afterall.  I just didn't understand at first.

Thanks again everyone for all the help,
Ben