Editing information with the metadata panel

All Categories / Organizing Your Music, Working with Scores

In the score, bookmark, and setlist menus, tap the blue circular button off to the right-hand side of any score or certain bookmarks to open the metadata panel where you can view and edit forScore’s information about that item. From the main screen, you can also tap the title in the menu bar for quick access to the current score or bookmark’s information. This article deals primarily with the elements found within the “Properties” tab of the metadata panel. For more information about the metadata panel’s other tabs, please visit forScore’s documentation.

Editing Values

The box to the left of each metadata value indicates and controls what will happen to any existing information once you close the panel. If it’s unchecked or empty, no changes will be made for that specific type of metadata. If it’s checked, the file’s existing metadata will be replaced with whatever you’ve entered in. The best choice is selected for you automatically as you work with these fields, but you can tap the box at any time to change it. For instance, if you want to clear out any existing values for a field, delete the text and then tap the box on the left so it shows a check mark. This replaces the value that was there previously with the one you’ve entered in: nothing.

Title

A score’s title is, by default, its filename minus the “.pdf” extension. If you change the title, forScore updates the filename to match as closely as possible. With forScore 11.2, you can change this behavior in the “advanced options” section of forScore’s settings panel so that changing a score’s title does not affect its filename. If you do, forScore will provide an additional “rename” contextual option in the Score menu so you can still rename files when you need to (without losing your annotations or metadata).

Multiple Values

Items may have one or more composers, genres, tags, or labels. To use multiple values, separate them using commas within each text field. For instance, “tag 1, tag 2” is automatically separated and creates two entries (“tag 1” and “tag 2”) in the Tags list.

Other Metadata

Other values include reference, rating and difficulty (which can be set by tapping or sliding your finger across their star or dot symbols), time, and key. While editing a score, you can specify a page offset to account for a preface or title page if needed.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks can be created by supplying a title, start page number, and an optional end page number. If no end page number is provided, the bookmark lets you quickly access that page but offers no additional abilities and does not maintain its own metadata values. If you do provide an end page, forScore creates a reference to that range of pages and treats them like any other score in your library: you can add metadata to them, add them to setlists, and more. (The rest of this section pertains to this second type of bookmark.)

There are a few differences between working with metadata for scores and bookmarks. Unlike with scores, a bookmark’s title has no relation to its PDF filename. Bookmark titles must be unique within their parent score, otherwise you can use any value you like. Page offsets are available for scores only, since the number of leading pages isn’t something that’s specific to a particular bookmark.

Batch editing

From most of forScore’s menus, you can use edit mode to select multiple items and batch edit their properties. When you’re batch editing, the Composers, Genres, and Tags fields will toggle between the same “checked” state—meaning that existing values will be replaced with whatever you’ve typed in—and an “append” state (a plus symbol). In this case, the + indicates that the values you’ve entered in will be added to the selected files, and that all existing values will be preserved.

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