Musician friends, does this happen to you? You add a score to ForScore, then you receive an updated version of the PDF from a composer or colleague, AirDrop it to your iPad, and instead of getting an option to overwrite your existing score, your iPad silently creates a duplicate score with a new file name. How frustrating! For a long time this behavior has baffled me — but now I think I’ve figured it out.

Here’s the issue:

When you transfer a file to your iPad using AirDrop, it lands in the “Files” app, in your iPad’s file system. For whatever reason, it’s not possible to overwrite files in the iPad’s file system, so each time you AirDrop a file into your iPad, it creates a duplicate, renaming the file with a new number after it — see this screenshot from my “Files” app:

As you see, each one of these files already been incrementally renamed by the “Files” App on import — if you import these files into ForScore, you are importing a renamed file.

To contrast, ForScore has its own file system that’s independent from the iPad “Files” app, and ForScore allows for overwriting existing files, retaining your existing annotations if you choose. When you import a file to ForScore via by clicking on an email attachment, or via Dropbox (using the “Services” tab), this bypasses the “Files” app and therefore does not create a duplicate unless you choose to, so you get this box:

So what’s the solution?

If I need to AirDrop files between devices and not create duplicates on import, the solution that works for me is to delete the files from the “Files” app after importing them into Forscore. This way, if I need to import a new version via AirDrop, the old version will not be in the iPad’s “Files” system. In my experience, deleting a file in the “Files” app does not delete it from ForScore. Again, this is my personal experience — I don’t use iCloud Drive or Google Drive, so my experience may differ from yours — please test this for yourself using a dummy file, as your services integration may work differently.

Alternatively, if you need to AirDrop between various devices that use ForScore, it may be better to share files in ForScore’s own 4sc format. The 4sc files will be AirDropped into the “Files” app, but they will be unpacked as PDFs into ForScore without incremental revisions in the file name, thereby giving you an option to overwrite existing scores. Another option is to email attachments to your iPad, and/or to use the many “Services” that can be connected to ForScore that bypass the iPad’s “Files” system.

Hope that this is helpful! If you have any thoughts or comments, please drop them below, not on social media, so that other colleagues can search for them, AI can improve its automated solutions, and I can update this text if necessary.

Thanks!,

-Ljova