Hymnals 4+

Not Recommended

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!

Love this app

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!

2.0 Update Removed Functionality

While the new update adds lots of nice new features including cloud backups (although native iCloud backup support would be preferred to having to sign up for yet another service account), the notes said that no functionality would be removed. This is not the case!

One notable feature missing now is being able to access my imported hymns by number with the “Enter a hymn number” function. I specifically imported my hymns in number order when I noticed they were assigned a searchable value upon import so I could search them easily by number with this function, but it no longer works on imported music as of version 2.0.

I know imported music databases had to be updated with this version so I’m not sure if the original import order was retained, but I would very much appreciate the option to simply search imported music by hymn number again (I will have to live with the separate search function for now). Thank you for your hard work!

Developer Response ,

Ah. We didn’t think to test your use case. We’ll fix this in the next update.