Zionworx

by **stevehirst** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 6:16 pm

I have been in charge of projecting song words for church services for the past 10 years of my life, back when we had OHPs! Currently I use ZionWorx and PowerPoint, and there are few features I would like to see added:

1) I think that navigating a song could be a whole lot easy. If the worship group make a sudden jump in the song, you have to go through all the verses to get there. It would be immensely useful if you could just click (or double click maybe) on the verse/chorus you wanted to show, and it brought it up on the screen, rather than having to use the arrows to scroll through.

2) I think it would be great to have a constantly updated database that could be downloaded from this site through ZionWorx. The idea I have is of an 'update database' button, which automatically checks the site to see if an update has been made to a database of songs, and if it has, it downloads the words for the new songs. This way you could get everyone to pool together there song words that they have typed, and share them with everyone else - the result, a huge database of songs, ready to use.

by **Peter_in_Christ** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 10:04 pm

referring to part 2: having a to download hymns/songs from zionworx could infringe copyrights and would have to seek permission.

I remember this site had problems with hosting christian hymns/songs with music chords for people to copy and paste: http://www.pwarchive.com/

Peter

by **webmaster** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 11:14 pm

That is a great Idea however we have to abide by copyright law.

Imagine $2 for every song downloaded times over 3000 users and 4000 songs it would cost us a large sum of money and thats working on my database a cost of $24,000,000.00 so that would bankrupt us all.

We work very hard to stay within the law. and as Christians we should stay on the right side of the law too.

Most songs come on disc nowdays and can be imported by some means into zionworx.

I hope this helps clarify the issue.

Regards
Edd Stonham
Webmaster

by **Christian** » Tue Mar 08, 2005 11:41 am

Hi folks,

Regarding your first point, Steve, this 'click and display' improvement will definitely be in the next version. It's probably THE most requested feature, and looking back I can't believe I didn't think of it :oops:

but back in those days it was only little ol' me and no forum of keen users or development team to bring great ideas along, so I can forgive myself!

About the song database, as Edd has rightly said, there's no room to budge on this one. We simply cannot offer copyrighted song lyrics for public download from the website. It's just against the law. I did it before (in blissful ignorance) and was threatened with a Â£ 5-figure fine, which was thankfully dropped by the Christian publisher concerned (thank you Lord!)

We will try to work with publishers to negotiate some permissions in the future, but don't expect anything, because this stuff takes time and the legal side of things is complicated - especially when we're dealing with global distribution through the internet, and different countries even have different licensing and copyright terms.

Cheers,
Christian

by **chris_h62** » Tue Mar 08, 2005 1:43 pm

Hi guys, the planned feaures for v3 sound great - I'm looking forward to it!

I'm intrigued by this whole copyright issue because I've just had a look around the OpenSong website and found a link to here: http://www.evans2chemweb.co.uk/temp/gareth/opensong/opensongshare.php

Is this kind of online song sharing illegal??? If not, couldn't a similar thing be implemented for zionworx!?![/url]

by **Christian** » Tue Mar 08, 2005 2:07 pm

Yes - I guess... totally illegal!

by **Peter_in_Christ** » Tue Mar 08, 2005 7:18 pm

lol, yes illegal, who's going to pull the plug? someone will get to them soon...

Peter

by **webmaster** » Tue Mar 08, 2005 8:01 pm

It only takes an email to CCLI / MCPS and they start the legal side of things.

Regards
Edd

by **chris_h62** » Tue Mar 08, 2005 11:50 pm

Oh dear, maybe someone should e-mail the guy in charge of it and get him to remove it before he faces a hefty fine!?! After all he is working in the same kind of ethos as the zionworx team

Oh well, shame it's illegal :!:

Chris

by **MaFt** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 9:34 am

Christian wrote:It's just against the law. I did it before (in blissful ignorance) and was threatened with a Â£ 5-figure fine, which was thankfully dropped by the Christian publisher concerned (thank you Lord!)

mind me asking which company it was? or would you rather not say?

MaFt

by **chris_h62** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 10:05 am

Just to let everyone know, I have contacted the guys at OpenSong to let them know that their SongShare facility is illegal and that they may face trouble if they don't stop it.

Chris

by **Christian** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 10:57 am

Good stuff Chris...

..and the answer to MaFt's question: "The way of the King" :wink:

by **MaFt** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 11:01 am

Christian wrote:Good stuff Chris...

..and the answer to MaFt's question: "The way of the King"

somehow i already knew that... i despise kingsway due to the way they lied to a lot of their metal bands regarding sales in the early 90's. detritus, for one, but i won't go into all that here!! anyway, like i said, it didn't surprise me!!

MaFt

by **chris_h62** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 9:30 am

***UPDATE ON OPENSONG SONGSHARE***

Just had a look back onto the OpenSong SongShare site and it now simply reads "Sorry all, the OpenSongShare site has been removed due to copyright restrictions." Probably just as well I got in touch with them before they had any problems from publishers.

Chris

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