Hymnals

I am the Director of Music at a very large parish. I downloaded this app (and unnecessarily spent a handsome sum of money) for a digital copy of Worship (Third Edition) to go with it. I would love to be able to play exclusively from my iPad. However, it simply isn’t possible using this app. Page turns are disastrous. Why can’t we swipe or tap left or right to turn one page to the left or right? Please make this an option. Currently, if we tap the down or up arrow with any side-to-side movement, we end up in a completely different selection, and then we have to scramble to get back to where we need to be. I’ve encountered this problem too many times - enough that I refuse to play from this app any longer. Instead, I use the printed books. Alternatively, if developing a new, more intuitive method of turning pages isn’t an option, the ability to print would be helpful so that we could import selections into forScore, which works wonderfully. Please fix this!

I use it every Sunday. Once you get used to it, very user friendly. It is a GIA Publications app and therefore geared to their music, but entire GIA hymnals can be downloaded, searched, music edited, annotated. Plus access to Dropbox, so imported music can also be added, annotated, etc., in .pdf format. The only issue is with the sensitivity of down arrow to next page which tends to move you over to next hymn in your set list instead of to next page of current song. But I’m told the next version will have a correction for this. I would love to be able to download and search digital copies of hymnals from OCP, for example, but not really fair for a mostly proprietary app. Unless GIA wants to ultimately transform this app into a stand-alone. IMHO, I think Hymnals App has the perfect structure to work in that capacity for choir singers everywhere. I tried ForScore but it is too steep a learning curve for my purposes to be used exclusively instead of this app. I’ve come to depend on this app and am excited every time a new version is released!

I have been using this app for a three years now and even though it was not perfect it was functional and it worked fast. This new update is a total disaster for me. I want to highlight my experience so that you can maybe fix those issues. The main problem for me is the amount of time that it takes to load a screen specially between the library and the service lists or when trying to add new songs to the service lists. It literally takes one minute and thirty five seconds to bring it up. I’ve never had a problem before the update. Another issue is the page turn arrows are not working so well anymore. Many times it changed to the next song instead of the next page. Maybe the allotted arrow surface to change pages should be bigger and the next song should be done by swiping the screen like it was before. I noticed that if you tap at the bottom of the page that it turns to the next song... that’s un-necessary if we just swipe in the middle of the page. The arrow to turn pages should not be so close to the song change tap. Note: I have three years of service lists on the service list so that may be why it’s taking so long to load but i never had this issue before the update. If I could have an extra feature I would ask for folders for the service lists so I can separate by year and by activity. Maybe have a binder option. Please feel free to contact me if that would be helpful. Thank you. I hope this helps, I would hate to go to a different app after all the work I put on this app.