Songs and the new v2.5 format

[davepartridge]

Hi there

I've tried to use my Songs of Fellowship files and the convertor to populate ZionWorx with songs, but I just keep failing miserably. I had to download ZW2 in order to be able to use the plugin, but even then it's now giving me errors when I try to paste files in the songs file.

That aside, I was wondering whether anyone could provide me with their songs file so I could import it into ZW? I don't know about the legalities but my Church does have a CCL licence.

I'd be really grateful for any help, because using the SoF plugin produced lots of problems anyway when I first got it to work, because so many of the copyright lines and verses were messed up!

Cheers everybody!

[kck]

This raises an issue that I have been meaning to raise myself.

When I installed V2.5 I converted the database from V2.0 using the very nifty DB convertor utility that comes with V2.5. (This was great by the way. It "just" worked!)

However, I subsequently got hold of the New Songs 2005/6 book along with its CD-ROM and wanted to import the songs into V2.5. The only way I could find to do this was to import them into V2.0 and then run the convertor again.

Is there any way of accessing the database in V2.5 using MS Access (or something) in the same way (or similar) that we could for V2.0?


Thanks,
Steve

p.s. V2.5 has been very well received. Thanks guys.

[webmaster]

the database used now in version 2.5 is a turbodB database.

This may help for creators of third party plugins.

Regards
Edd Stonham
Zionworx webmaster

[Christian]

Hi folks,

I'm considering focusing work now on a database utility to batch import songs to the new v2.5 format. One specifically for the popular 'SOF format' and perhaps another generic supported format.

If anybody has any particular thoughts or comments then please reply here...

Cheers,
Christian.

[kck]

I would certainly appreciate that facility. It takes me ages to import the data each time a new SoF volume or New Songs book appears - tidying up the formatting, making sure all the different bits appear in the right places. Not to mention duplicated song titles for different songs. Or slightly different ones for the same song.

I wasn't aware that SoF used a particular "format" though. I always seem to end up doing a lot of manual editing and tweaking.

I wish they'd put an XML version on the CD as well as the usual RTF.

Steve

[davepartridge]

Cheers for the couple of people who've offered help off the board.

Much appreciated!

I now have the songs database all sorted, which is good news

[Dave Chislett]

Hi, just downloaded v2.5.
Amazing that it has such a small footprint! Looks useful - except I can't find ways of getting songs into it.
I have wondered about getting the huge lyric base that comes with 'songselect', that is about 7000 songs. To be legal, each church has the CCLI licenses, then only £30 for the songselect software. The real value is all those lyrics. I'd like a way of importing all that lot into zw2.5.
Failing that is there a way of cutting and pasting from say notepad or word into zw?
Thanks
Dave

[webmaster]

You can add songs into the zionworx database. All you need to do is unlock the database.

Password is "password" without the quotes.

We only supply 10 copyright free songs but I have myself nearly 3500 songs as I have entered on by typeing or using the utils for converting SOF rtf files.

Regards
Edd

[Christian]

I have wondered about getting the huge lyric base that comes with 'songselect', that is about 7000 songs. To be legal, each church has the CCLI licenses, then only £30 for the songselect software...

Welcome onboard Dave!

Please, please can you tell us a bit more about this massive SongSelect database?! Are you in the UK or abroad? Is the database online, or can you download it to your hard disc?

It would seem like a very good idea for us to develop a way to get all those songs into ZionWorx, but we need more information...

Thanks in advance!
Christian.

[Dave Chislett]

Hi Chris
The zionworxs team could not buy the database and pass it on, I guess without an arrangement with songselect.

But, individual churches can buy songselect, which is a very basic service management package. The package costs about £30 a year then £20 annual renewal. It comes initially on CDRom with a huge database of songs (you could as a team download the demo from songselect - but choose the UK version). Then periodically, licensed users can download, in one swipe, say any updates - which can be thousands of lyrics, or hundreds at a time. These go into the database, which is powerful in searching. Take a look at the songselect website, http://www.songselect.co.uk I think.

As a church, we hope to buy songselect, and only use it for the database. We are separately licensed to project the songs with CCLI licensing. But we want to use the database of songs in zw.

I cannot tell you more. Take a look at their website and ring them. They are nice understanding Christian folk!

[Christian]

Thanks for that Dave...

Of course it would be totally illegal to distribute the songs from such a database, but to provide ZionWorx users with conversion tools would be very, very useful for getting thousands of songs into ZionWorx - legally, at low cost, and in just a few minutes

I'll be looking into this asap...

Cheers,
Christian.

[budafam]

I am using the Song Select Database (both the online version and the desktop client) with ZionworX, but the copy/paste method is very time consuming. They have over 70,000 songs in their database, and I have found that a license to CCLI combined with Zionworx is a very powerful combination for our worship services. Not only do I save a lot of money on hardware and software, but we also align ourselves very nicely with copyright requirements. The subscription to Song Select is about $120.00 US per year.

Building my song db in ZionworX has been the toughest part. I download each desired song .txt file from Song Select Online, add a new song in ZionworX, click import, navigate to the .txt file, and the whole .txt file comes in to the Lyrics field in ZionworX. I cut the title, author and copyright out of the data and put each into the correct fields for projection display. The good news is that I only have to do this once for each song, and they all come over accurately, with no typo's or incorrect data.

It would be wonderful if there was a direct import from Song Select. There are several other presentation software packages which are able to import .usr files, but the packages are quite costly.

Here is a list of the fields available in song select:

Title
Author
Copyright
Admin
Themes
Keys
Fields
Words

It would be very helpful if ZionworX could do a direct import of the .usr format data files available from Song Select. I can send an example of the .usr file and an example .txt file from the CCLI system for you, if it would be helpful for you. Here is the website: http://www.ccli.com/Index.cfm

[Christian]

Thank you budafam!

Please contact me directly by email so we can get this moving for everybody's benefit...

Cheers,
Christian.