Customer Reviews

The Presbyterian Hymnal

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This CD is a great way to copy and paste the songs of the Presbyterian Hymnal into Word documents, Powerpoint, etc. We also use it to import hymns into Mediashout for projection. One thing - to get it to work with Vista requires that two files be manually copied - dirdib.drv and macromix.dll into your c:\windows folder. Otherwise, you'll get error messages saying that the files can not be copied because the disk is full. What's happening is that the new Vista security features are preventing the files from being copied.

So where do you get these two files? Install and run the hymnal CD on a Windows XP computer. The files are only available while the program is running. They are removed when the program is closed. So - while the program is running, copy them to a floppy disk, flash drive or whatever and then manually copy them into the c:\windows folder on your Vista computer. You'll need administrator priveleges to do so.

After that, the CD runs as well on a Vista computer as on our XP computer.

I purchased this as a resource to help me choose hymns for worship on Sunday morning, since I can read music but cannot pick out a tune to save my soul. The MIDI file that accompanies each hymn is quite helpful for that, and in a pinch can be used in worship when a church is lacking a musician (as long as you can figure out how to patch a PC into your sound system).

The search feature is MUCH more robust and useful than the various indices in the back of the hymnal book.

HOWEVER.

This CD has a limitation that makes it less-than-useful for those of us who aren't working in Windows. It cannot be installed and run in anything other than Windows---WINE in both Mac and Linux environments cannot work with it, nor has my attempt to install the Hymnal in the Mac Classic environment met with anything remotely approaching success. The only option is to run it under a Windows emulator. Unfortunately, this prevents the copy-and-paste feature of hymn texts, and limits the use of the sheet music feature. It's faster and simpler to use on-line resources.

Having contacted the people who produced the CD, and gotten a limited (and not-at-all helpful) reply, I'd can only imagine this is a crippling limitation that may (and only MAY) be addressed in the release of the 2014 hymnal.