Newbie Trouble with Share Songs in Set List via pdf

[guarachon63]

Hi all, new to Bandhelper and loving it so far, looks to be an invaluable resource, except for one snag I am running into while trying to share songs in a set list via downloading a pdf.

(I'm using a Macbook Pro OSv 12.6, tried on Firefox & Chrome browser)

I created a set list of 17 songs easily, and can share and download a pdf of the set list with no problem.

When I click on "Share Songs" however, I get a list of the names of the uploaded lead sheets in the format "songtitle.pdf".

When I click the download button, I get taken to this URL: https://www.bandhelper.com/repertoire/set_list_share_songs_submit.html?action=download

However that shows a blank page, nothing is downloaded and in Chrome I get the error message:

This page isn't working
www.bandhelper.com is currently unable to handle this request.
HTTP ERROR 500

I've tried it both with all songs selected and no songs selected.

I've searched through the tutorials and the forum and I see that it's possible, but haven't seen that anyone else has run into the same issue. Looking forward to hearing back and signing up for a paid account.

many thanks in advance!
Barry

[arlo]

This function has been slow lately and I need to look into that, but I haven't seen it fail completely with an error. Please try a test set list with just one song and see what happens. If that also fails, please post that song's PDF here, or start a help ticket and include it. If the function works with the first song, you can keep adding songs until you identify which song is causing the problem, then send us that song's PDF.

[guarachon63]

Hi Arlo, thanks for the reply. Yes ok it seems that the files themselves seem to be the issue. For background, they were originally created in Google Slides (I was managing the band stuff on google docs previously), then downloaded them as multiple pages in a single pdf, then extracted those separately in Adobe Acrobat, before uploading to BH.

The files in a set list with recordings attached just show up as filename.pdf as described earlier.

Choosing a song with no recording attached gets me a bit further - it downloads a pdf, but with only the name of the song and a line, no info form the originally uploaded document.

Thanks again for your help!

[arlo]

The presence of attached recordings won't affect the Share Songs function. Attached documents will appear only as the document filename in the share preview, but the actual download will include the complete document.

I tried your document attached here and sharing it failed with an error message about an unsupported compression technique. I then opened the document in Preview on my Mac, pressed command-P and used the Save as PDF function from the print dialog to recreate the document. Then I attached that to a song and tried the Share Songs function and it worked. (That file is attached here.) So it seems that generating a PDF from Google Docs makes an incompatible file, but if you can reexport the file from some other software, that should work.

[guarachon63]

Yes! Actually downloading the pdf from Google slides doesn't seem to be the issue, it's when I extract the multiple pages from the downloaded pdf via Adobe Acrobat that makes the file incompatible with BH.

I used the Automator app to create a "Quick Action" to separate the files via Preview and now all seems to be working fine. Thanks for your help on this and again
got your work on this great program!

[arlo]

Okay, great. There are different versions of the PDF spec and maybe Acrobat is using a new version that the parsing code on my server doesn't support. In that case, setting Acrobat to save to an older version might also work.