Show HN: Evernote for sheet music
getprimavista.com
getprimavista.com
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
* 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/...
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?
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.
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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
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.