Automatic Indexing of PDF Real Books

Posted by . on Saturday, February 15, 2014
Working with music in PDF books can be really troublesome. Indexing and naming the individual songs in a large collection is something few applications handle well. To be honest, the Fakebook app was no exception, and importing e.g. a complete Real Book would be a timeconsuming chore.

Until now!

The new version of Fakebook (1.3.0, available on Google Play and Amazon) changes this. Thanks to PDFB script files downloading, indexing, filtering, sorting and naming is just a single click! The scripts are simple semicolon separated text files with all data necessary for the Fakebook parser to automate the boring work. Use them to extract a single page from a huge document or to import and index a complete song book.

The syntax looks like this:
PDFB1;playlisttitle;playlistcomment;url;
page;title;last;first;aka;style;tempo;signature;comment;
page;title;last;first;aka;style;tempo;signature;comment;

An example, extracting some Sonny Rollins songs from a scanned Real Book that is stored in the Download folder on the phone:
PDFB1;Sonny Rollins Book;;file:///sdcard/Download/therealbookvolume1.pdf;
24;Airegin;Rollins;Sonny;;Swing;;4/4;; 
340;Oleo;Rollins;Sonny;;Swing;;4/4;; 
359;Pent Up House;Rollins;Sonny;;Swing;;4/4;; 
506;Plain Jane;Rollins;Sonny;;;;;; 
510;Valse Hot;Rollins;Sonny;;Waltz;;3/4;; 

OK, but now you all say "writing these scripts still seems quite timeconsuming". Yeah, right.

That's why we provide more examples and ready made PDFB files for importing The Real Book (5th ed) and The Vocal Book on http://www.skrivarna.com/p/fakebook.html. Just select the Menu -> Import new songs -> Internet in the Fakebook app to get there.

More examples and book links will be added on request. And if you write a useful script, feel free to share it by mailing it to us or in the comment field below!

  

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