I have used forScore for many years to manage all my sheet music. It’s the perfect program for me and all my play-along sheet music. I can attach backing tracks to each piece of music, adjust the tempo, or get the program to turn the page - that is great.

Until now, I’ve used the program’s web interface to import new sheet music. It made it easy to simultaneously change attributes on many pieces of music, which is how I put them into different folders in forScore. The company behind forScore has chosen to decommission the web interface, so I needed to find out how I should import my sheet music from now on.

The best replacement that I’ve found is to use ForScore on my Mac and then sync with iCloud. The small ‘problem’ is that I must import all my sheet music again. Yes, I could let my iPad sync all the sheet music to iCloud and get them on my Mac that way, but I never got that to work 100%. I might have forgotten something in the process, making it my fault. But, it got me to think in different directions, and I discovered that forScore is able to import certain attributes from PDF files. I also found out that I could label my sheet music files better. All in all, I decided it was time to go through all my sheet music to rename the files and set attributes in the PDF files the way I wanted them.

At present, I’m renaming files and adding attributes to the PDF files; it will be perfect once I’m done. Along the way, I noticed that the way I register my sheet music in Notion really isn’t useful. Initially, I needed one place to see if I already had the sheet music book I was looking at in a music store. Now, I primarily use it to find the physical book when playing with someone, and the process is not optimal. First, I have to find out the book’s name, and then I have to search in Notion before I can see the number of the ring binder where the book is located. Now, I’m creating a file that is placed together with the pieces from a specific book where I can see the book’s location and the play-along CD (if there is one). That makes it very easy to locate the physical book - it is already tried and tested.

All that is left is several hours of work to get everything renamed. For those of you who are curious - at this moment, I have 28 ring binders filled with sheet music 😃