

Show HN: Evernote for sheet music - fkefal
http://www.getprimavista.com

======
tsm
Semi-professional musician fairly involved with sheet music here (I made [0],
for instance). I was really excited to see this come up.

A few notes:

* It's not obvious at all how to get music into PrimaVista. "Evernote for sheet music" makes me think that you'll have a cute editor available. I signed up to try to find it, but it looks like it doesn't exist.

* So really it's more like "Dropbox for sheet music". That's much less of a value-add for me, but I guess searching and such could be handy.

* Even after I signed up and logged in, the index still showed large buttons for "Sign up" and "Demo".

* The Android link goes to the Play Store, but the Apple link goes to /signup.

* Using an icon of an iMac made me think there'd be a native OS X app.

* Pagination is wrong, which is a pretty serious bug: [http://i.imgur.com/YJPz0xa.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/YJPz0xa.jpg)

* From the screen shown in the above screenshot, there's no way for me to exit the modal. Neither pressing Esc nor clicking outside of it do anything. I had to resort to my browser's back button.

* The page count in the library looks very clickable (since it has the 3D appearance like a button), but in fact is not.

* I found the zooming effect jarring, but I suppose others may find it useful.

* I still don't understand how to edit the metadata for items in my library.

* I could write a separate post on everything I dislike about the upload form.

All of that said, it's easy for Show HN posts to be negative, so I wanted to
congratulate you on shipping and make it clear that I think PV could be a very
worthwhile product. Best of luck!

[0] - [https://github.com/tsmacdonald/first-
collection/blob/master/...](https://github.com/tsmacdonald/first-
collection/blob/master/releases/macdonald_collection_ebook.pdf)

~~~
fkefal
Thanks for the feedback!

1,2: We don't have an editor. It's more "Evernote for sheet music" than
"Dropbox for sheet music" for two reasons:

a. score organization/management with cloud infrastructure.

b. image processing (importing paper scores via the phone's camera) and OCR
features that we're working on (not released yet).

Which means it has intelligent features rather than just doing syncing of
scores.

3: Those should probably become "Upload" and "Library" respectively.

4: That was a tough call. We wanted to communicate in the landing page that
iOS devices are supported (through the web app). If we didn't put the icon,
people would think that there isn't iOS support.

5: Got it.

6: Sorry about that, we fixed it.

7: We will probably add Esc as a way to exit the gallery.

8: I can see what you mean.

9: Can you elaborate? You can also try the zoom functionality in the single
page view, it's different there. You can turn off split page view in the
preferences page (click on your username -> Preferences).

10: You can't do it from the web app at the moment. The Android app is needed
to do this (for now). Any edits done from the Android app will get synced.

11: Can you mention some of the things you dislike about the upload form?

~~~
tsm
OCR could be very exciting...I'll be interested to see how that works. That
said, I'm not quite sure what the value-add would be. Full-text search isn't
super-handy. Searching by musical phrase would be nice, but very hard to make
user-friendly. If it automatically parsed out the title and composer that'd
also be cool (especially when I upload a 64-tune collection), but from a ML
perspective that's not entirely easy.

I wish the website remembered my login.

For my taste the upload form is too cutesy. The faux iPad is a bit much (and
makes the site seem very tablet-centric, when in fact it works fine in any
browser), there's a lot of real estate devoted to each file and yet somehow
they look cluttered, showing PDF in huge letters isn't really necessary when
the file extension is shown (and the hover effect makes it seem clickable when
it's not), and most importantly there's no obvious way to exit the form—it was
a leap of faith to just go to a new page and assume everything had been
uploaded correctly. Also, "Remove file" doesn't seem to work—files removed
from the upload form (that had already been uploaded) still show up in my
library. And then there's no way to delete them from the Web UI.

\---

I realize I have a specific use case, but the ideal for me would be to snap a
picture of a tune I have in a music book, have your OCR magic autofill the
title and composer, and let me slap some tags on it. Once that happens I'll
become an active user up until I have a personal crisis regarding whether I
want to pay $9/month for that or not. But as it stands right now, it really
does just feel like an unpolished version of Dropbox

~~~
fkefal
"Remove file" is a "known issue".

Your criticism is valid (thanks). I'm not sure I understand what you mean by
"no obvious way to exit the form" though. Since there are progress bars and
checkmarks, what else would you suggest to indicate that uploading is done?
There's also a counter at the navbar.

What you described in the last paragraph is our current focus. It's not easy
but we think it would be very useful.

What do you think about OMR (Optical Music Recognition)? Would you find it
useful in any way? For example a use case would be to snap a picture of a
score and have it played back.

------
tlipcon
If this were more like Spotify for sheet music, I'd pay for it -- instant
access to music for any published song is valuable. Otherwise, I'm not sure
how it's much better than dropbox and PDFs.

