New songbook

[catsittingstill]

Okay, it would make better sense to squee about this when I've posted it. But I worked on it untill 11 last night and I'm quite proud of it.

I have been getting requests for lyric sheets for the CD, and since I had all the lyrics and all the sheet music entered in the computer, I thought putting together a songbook wouldn't be any big deal.

Well, it turns out to be a slightly bigger deal than I thought, but it's done. There are lyrics and sheet music for all the songs, and lead sheets on the facing page for most of the songs, along with a page explaining a little bit about what each song was about, and some nice pictures to fill in empty spots.

I am totally impressed with Photoshop's ability to optimize pictures for the web, by the way. I tried it in a fit of whimsy, and discovered it reduced jpeg sizes by a factor of 10. With that plus reducing total pixel numbers (there's no need to insert an eight inch wide picture into a six inch wide space, when a six inch wide picture would work fine and takes up less bandwidth), I cut the size of the final songbook from 50 MB to 16.1MB.

But 16.1 MB still seems awfully big. For instance, it's big enough that I'm going to go up to Carson Newman to upload it. Should I just dump the pictures and leave blank space? There's a picture of Peter playing his dulcimer, a picture of Dave Alway blowing a horn at GaFilk's New Years Party, a picture of me in Patience, a page of pictures of Judi signing (they don't do her justice--but they will print on paper and movies won't, and anyway, I don't *have* a movie of Judi signing) and some mimmoth drawings.

It would be possible to make it available on CD, so that people who are sipping the net through dial-up can still get it if they want. And I'm not sure how much demand there will even be.

Let me know what you think. And watch this space for uploads.

Comments

[aunty_marion]

Yay, songbook! I'd love to have a copy, either on CD, or downloaded, or hard-copy - however you want to produce it. I'd say don't leave the pictures out - they add depth and texture (as it were) to the publication.

[occams_pyramid]

Ooooh! Shiny! :-)

I would much prefer with the pictures, but I'm on broadband - I can leave a download running overnight if need be.

Would it be possible to have two versions, with/without pictures? Do you have download bandwidth / data transfer limits?

Re layout - will it work OK on international size paper as well as US size?

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I'm planning to put it up on the web for downloading--I'm just trying to work out if that will be sufficient or if I also need to set up a different distribution system

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Different paper sizes? I don't know. I assembled the pdf page-by-page mostly--the sheetmusic page came from a Finale NotePad file and the lead sheet (lyrics plus guitar chords) usually from a Word file, so I wouldn't expect things to flow across pages, but I have no idea .

I suppose I could put it up, and have you be my guinea pig. If it's necessary to adjust things, my major problem will be the sheet music; I can adjust the margins on the word files easily, but NotePad is dumb as rocks and has no margin controls whatsoever and no way to adjust where the staves fall on the page except that changing the size of the lyric text makes everything re-flow and sometimes staves will fall more advantageously.

[occams_pyramid]

It might work OK - the paper areas are roughly the same but the proportions are slightly different. That's assuming you're using US Letter size? I think A4 is slightly narrower and taller.

I'd certainly be very happy to try it out and tell you how it works.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

However you do it, yes please :)

[mdlbear]

I'd say make two versions: a PDF version (formatted for printing on letter-sized paper, which I assume it already is) and a pure HTML version with all the images but formatted as little as possible using a stylesheet. I format mine with a separate index page and an HTML lyrics page for every song. Both the index and the lyrics page link to each song's PDF page (just chords at the moment, since I suck at notation), and the ogg and mp3 files if I have them. It's ok to put images on the lyrics pages if they relate.

That way, somebody who wants the whole songbook properly formatted can get it, but somebody who just wants lyrics and doesn't have broadband can browse the website with images turned off and get what they want in no time.

You can see my version of this at http://thestarport.com/Steve_Savitzky/Songs/0Index.html and, for a single album, http://thestarport.com/Steve_Savitzky/Albums/bleeding/Xindex.html (which is more like what a songbook would look like).

[mdlbear]

I should mention that I do this kind of thing automagically using a pile of scripts; they occasionally do odd things, but on the whole make it very easy to keep up-to-date. All the metadata comes out of the lyrics files.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

w00t. Keep the pics; 16mb is small enough that folks can go to the library and save it to USB key. Gripping hand, I'm not the only one around here with a burner that could get it to bandwidth-challenged West Coasties...

(I seem to recall *somewhere* there's a movie of Judi signing...)

*sigh* I've gotten spoiled on dialup. I'd download 16mb without thinking about it; it would take you over an hour to shove that up a 56k pipe.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

One is curious.... how many pages is the 16mb?

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

It's now up, at www.hwaet.org/Catpdfs/

I hope it works for you, but will try to make alterations if it doesn't.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

It's up! My next post has the url.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Yep, the pdf version is formatted for letter paper. A pure HTML version is a bit trickier--the sheet music program I'm using doesn't have any method I know of for producing a GIF file. I could do the screenshot-capture thing, but it would be clunky and messy and involve a lot of messing about with trimming things. I may have to go that route eventually, but am hoping I can work out something more clever.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I get my husband to take me over to his office, unhook the ethernet from his computer and hook it up to mine. But it's less convenient than having high speed internet at home.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

36, counting the front and back pages, which aren't songs, and two pages of non-song stuff in the middle.

It's got 19 songs. (not every song got two pages)

[mdlbear]

GIF isn't especially good for music, either. I'd be inclined to just put the lyrics, chords, and images in HTML, and have a 2-page PDF for the sheet music+lyrics -- basically just the two facing pages out of the songbook. (At one point I considered getting fancy and making four-page booklets with a cover, sheet music, lyrics, and notes. Still worth considering in a few cases.)

Eventually more browsers than just Firefox will support SVG (scalable vector graphics -- basically PDF with XML syntax) or JPEG 2000/JPM (a scalable, compositing image format), and then it'll be possible to put sheet music in web pages. You can tell what I work on for a living...

[mdlbear]

USB keychain drives are great for that kind of thing. No need to change network cables...

Back when I had a slow connection I occasionally dragged a 160GB USB drive to move big files from work to home. One of my coworkers with cable occasionally goes the other direction -- all we have at work is a T1.