After some experiments I found an almost perfect manner to get my BIAB files at the iPad with notes and chords directly available for transposing on the spot. The only app I know which shows a very good picture ( much better then Notion which I mentioned earlier in the discussion) is "Avid Scorch". Avid Scorch is capable of transposing .sib files with music notes and chords on the spot. Of course Sibelius files can only be created by the Sibelius notation program so that's the one you need to get first. You can try it for free for a month: ( http://www.sibelius.com/download/index.html )

How to get your BIAB files into Sibelius? BIAB files can be printed to PDF. PDF files can be converted by PDFtoMusic Pro into XML. ( http://www.myriad-online.com/cgi-bin/download.pl?prod=PDFP&lang=EN ). For one page the program is free. Most of my BIAB files I try to print at one page anyway, with a maximum of 14 or 15 staves. In a few cases I used the Leadsheet Prints by adding repeats etc. to reduce the number of staves if it is larger then 14. You need to add the repeats in Sibelius.

The program "PDFtoMusic Pro" does a pretty good job to create very usable XML files. The best results for me was using chords in "Arial Narrow" in BIAB. Some chords were not correctly translated so I wrote a "find and replace" .bat file using the free fnr.exe ( http://findandreplace.codeplex.com ) which created the right corrections in the XML files for wrongly translated chords. PDFtoMusic Pro is making a beta version with suggested corrections ( not yet available ). Since my .bat file works as a batch file you can correct a whole directory full with XML files in one run if you want. Apart from the chord corrections I introduced a whole bunch of changes and corrections in the XML file. That sets all the parameters in the XML file to create a directly usable 1 page .sib file which hardly needs any corrections and many timse even no corrections at all to get a perfect .sib file identical to the original pdf file from BIAB. The only thing you need to do is to set the character size of the chords to an appropriate size for perfect reading. The main extra changes in the XML file created by the .bat file is setting page margins, size text positions, stave positions and chord positions such, that the whole iPad screen is 100% used and chords are positioned correctly above the notes and additionally no strange credit-words are messing up the page anymore.

Also some ties are detected as slurs. Some short ties are detected as fermata's or articulations like staccato, accents, etc. Also ties can be detected as notes. All backup notes I saw were all mistakenly recognized due to ties. The backup notes themself are never recognized. So all that stuff has been changed into comments. All mentioned corrections are automatically implemented by the .bat file in one run. Right now the .bat file runs some 20 "find and replace" actions to make the XML file suitable for Avid Scorch at the iPad. I used it already for 100 or more files with excellent results.

3 examples of original BIAB pdf files side by side (on PC only)with the Avid Scorch SIB files (light yellow background) can be found here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17816826/Compare%20BIABpdf2SIB.pdf
One single page file, One lead sheet page file and one 4 page file from the Real Book from BIAB.

The bat file which filters the XML file before feeding it into Sibelius can be found here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17816826/P2M-XMLtoSIB-XML.bat.txt

Since in Avid Scorch no annotations or notes can be written the next step is, after having transposed to the wanted instrument key, to make a screen photo from the Avid Scorch result. Then use the "Photo to PDF" app to convert the screen photo to PDF, give it a song name and open the PDF in forScore or any other PDF reading program where you want to organize your files and can edit them and/or put annotations to the files. This conversion to pdf can be done at your iPad and takes less then 1 minute.

In other words all my BIAB files which previously were printed only in PDF for use at my iPad are now additionally converted into .sib files, which takes me only a few minutes more. Both files are stored in Dropbox. Both files can be opened from Dropbox at the iPad and can be used as needed anywhere in a gig. Transposing can be done on the spot and send to anyone's iPad either by e-mail, Bluetooth or AirDrop.

For those who are curious how easy it really functions and want to try it, I created a PDF file which shows the iPad steps in the in more detail. Tryïng will cost you only a few box for the 2 app's "Avid Scorch" and "Photo to PDF" for the iPad and downloading Sibelius and PDFtoMusic Pro at your PC is free..

Dropbox import and Transposing and converting to a PDF copy for any other music application is shown here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17816826/Import%20and%20Transpose.pdf

Let me know if you experience problems or need more detailed information.

Last edited by robvh; 01/21/14 05:25 AM.
Musicians and music publishers are still wasting too much paper...come on men we live in the digitised age...Wake up!