Guide

Sheet music offline: rehearsals and gigs without signal

How the Notenarchiv app keeps your parts ready offline – automatically before every event, via rules, as a Stage Mode setlist or for individual pieces.

Rehearsal rooms are in basements, marquees have no Wi-Fi, and on the coach to a competition the signal disappears exactly when someone wants to check a part. A sheet music app that only works online is useless at the decisive moment.

The Notenarchiv app therefore stores music on the device – on iPhone, iPad and Android alike. This happens on several levels that complement each other. The most important one is already running without you setting anything up.

You will find all the related settings in the app under Profile → Settings → Offline.

Level 1: whatever you have opened stays

Every PDF you open in the app is automatically kept on the device. Open the same part again later without a connection and it is there immediately.

This cache holds the most recently used music and eventually clears out the oldest. For “I looked at it yesterday” it is perfectly reliable. As a foundation for the weekend’s performance it is the wrong approach – that is what the next levels are for.

Level 2: events – automatically before every rehearsal and performance

If your ensemble has added a programme to an event, the app downloads your own parts for every piece in it to the device beforehand. After the event it frees the space again. This automation is switched on from the start – the whole point is that nobody has to remember it.

For each piece, the app picks the part like this:

the part you have marked as My part in that piece,
otherwise your part according to the event’s line-up,
otherwise nothing – rather than simply downloading every part of the piece.

The event itself shows where things stand: “Your parts are available offline (8)” or “Will be downloaded automatically before the event”. If it says “No part assigned to you”, you are missing from the line-up or have no instrument in your profile – worth a quick word with the librarian.

Under Events offline automatically you can adjust the automation:

Time window: how far ahead parts are downloaded – 3, 7, 14 (default) or 30 days.
Download when you … have accepted, have accepted or said “maybe”, or have not declined (default).

The Prepared events list shows which events are ready and how many parts are on the device for them.

The events themselves can be read offline too: the event list and details are kept on the device permanently, and the next 15 events are fully preloaded in the background. Without a connection, the top of the list reads “Offline – events as of …”, so you know how current the time and meeting point are. Accepting or declining has to wait until you are back online.

Level 3: marking individual pieces as offline

The detail view of a piece has an Available Offline button. Tapping it downloads every part of that piece you are allowed to see and protects them from the automatic clean-up. Afterwards the button reads Offline ✓.

This is the quick route for anything that is not in a programme – such as the piece the conductor spontaneously announced as an encore. Which pieces you have held this way is listed under Saved offline manually – there they can be removed individually or cleared in one go with Clear all.

Level 4: rules – “my parts from these books”

For everyday use beyond individual events, set up a rule once. A rule describes a combination of parts and books or setlists, for example “Trumpet 1 from the main folder and the march book”. Everything matching that description is kept on the device permanently – including newly added pieces.

You set this up in the Offline sync section:

Tap Add rule.
Give it a name – the suggestion in the field (“Trumpet – March book”) shows how it is meant.
Under Club, choose which ensemble the rule applies to – rules also work for other ensembles you play in and for your Private archive.
Under Parts, pick at least one part, plus at least one book or setlist. Without that the rule cannot be saved, because a rule without limits would quickly be half the archive.
Save – the sync starts straight away.

Two switches in the rule editor save work:

My part includes every part you have marked as “My part” in pieces – regardless of books and instruments. Handy if you sometimes play 2nd and sometimes 3rd clarinet.
Include substitute parts also downloads the best approved substitute part when your own part is missing from a piece.

During the sync the app shows progress as “3 / 47 PDFs”. Afterwards each rule states when it was last synchronised and how many PDFs it holds at what storage cost. Sync now triggers a run yourself at any time, for instance when the librarian uploaded something shortly before the rehearsal.

Otherwise it happens by itself: the app syncs in the background whenever the library has changed.

On stage: Stage Mode without signal

If you use Stage Mode with setlists, the set itself has a Make available offline button. It adds the set as its own rule (“Setlist ‘Spring concert’”) to the offline sync – with your part. Afterwards it reads Available offline ✓, and the app keeps it up to date by itself: if a piece is added to the set or a part changes, the next sync downloads it. After the concert, take the set out again with Remove from offline sync and the space is freed.

Without signal, on stage you can:

Page through the programme with your parts, including “My part” and the alternative part.
Search for a piece straight from the sheet – offline it searches the music on the device, and book numbers such as “MB 12” are found.
Prepare the set: changes to a set are saved locally without signal and sent to the server once you are back online.
Lead: whoever leads the set turns the pages on the tablets of the musicians in range via Bluetooth – no internet required.
Two tablets as one stand: in dual-tablet mode, two tablets on the same account show the left and right page. They too talk via Bluetooth – even a mix of iPad and Android tablet.

The stage display on a TV does need internet, and when leading, participants out of Bluetooth range only receive anything over the network. For dual-tablet mode without signal, each of the two tablets must have been connected to the internet once beforehand.

What you see offline – and what you do not

Without a connection, the music list shows a notice and limits itself to synchronised pieces. Everything else has not disappeared, it is simply not retrievable right now; if you open a piece that was not saved, the app says so explicitly rather than showing an empty screen.

Annotations, jump marks and cropping also work offline – they are saved locally and uploaded once you are back online.

The profile settings do not work offline – changing instruments, managing passkeys or switching ensembles needs a connection. The music already stored is unaffected.

If you play in several ensembles, the offline music of all of them is retained. Switching ensembles does not delete what you synchronised in the other one.

Checklist for rehearsals and performances

Set up once: one rule per own part covering the books actually played from – typically the main folder and the march book. That covers everyday needs completely.
Events with a programme: nothing to do here. A glance at the event for “Your parts are available offline” is enough.
Concert with a Stage Mode setlist: tap Make available offline in the set.
Everything else (encores, spontaneous pieces): mark the piece as Available Offline in its detail view.
Sync on Wi-Fi, not in the car park outside the marquee. Open the app the evening before and tap Sync now while you still have a signal.
Keep an eye on storage: every rule reports what it uses. A complete instrument across two books typically lands in the low hundreds of megabytes – no problem for a modern device.

How to get the music into the archive in decent quality in the first place is covered in the guide Scanning sheet music: resolution, format and settings.