Friday, September 30, 2016

Fix EasyWorship 2009 issues with new SongSelect site

We continue to use an older version (EasyWorship 2009) of EasyWorship for our church service projection screen management.

We’ve tried the newer EasyWorship 6 release – and it does have a lot of very attractive features – however the process and projection flow just doesn’t fit us as well as the older EasyWorship 2009 layout.

Anyway…EasyWorship has a plug-in like feature that allows you to sign into the SongSelect service with your associated account and easily import song lyrics directly into your EasyWorship song database.

Recently SongSelect updated their website design and it created several problems within the EasyWorship 2009 program.

First, the SongSelect webpage was “broken” in rendering within EasyWorship 2009

EWorship 2009 SongSelect Window - Pre-Fix

It may be hard to see but that banner area is all whacked out and the Sign In link didn’t work well at all.

Secondly, one could go to the SongSelect Classic page using the offered URL in that broken banner area and log in,

EWorship 2009 SongSelect Window - Pre-Fix - SS Classic

However while you could then log in normally, when we went to try to import song lyrics the “Import” button remained grayed out while using this “classic” login method. 

Our workaround was to download the lyric as a text file, then copy/paste it into a new song record in the database. This was less than ideal as you missed out a lot of the “meta-data” for the song item and had to manually put all that in as well.

I did some searching and found this helpful fix in the EasyWorship support forums.

SongSelect Webpage Fix for EasyWorship 2009 : EasyWorship Legacy  (URL change updated 2017-01-12)

Basically, you download an IE Fix patch from them for your Windows OS version and run it. It unpacks the EXE file to a temporary location, executes a batch file, and then applies a REG key fix to your Windows Registry to fix the issue.

In case you are curious, the fix just applies one of these registry tweaks depending on your OS (32 or 64 bit).

For x32 bit Windows OS:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION]
"easyworship.exe"=dword:00000000

For x64 bit Windows OS:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION]
"easyworship.exe"=dword:00000000

Once that was done, EasyWorship 2009 then displayed the new SongSelect website page correctly (compare to before as seen above):

EWorship 2009 SongSelect Window - Post-Fix 1

And the sign-in page displayed properly.

EWorship 2009 SongSelect Window - Post-Fix 2

After logging in this way and selecting a song’s lyrics we found that the EasyWorship application’s “Import” button worked again for full and normal song lyric importation.

Bonus Easy Worship 2009 notes:

While working this issue, I found that our installed version of EasyWorship 2009 is at 1.4 but there is a later version 1.9 that is available to fix some issues.

The upgrade process is very easy.

Upgrade 2009 1.4 to 1.9 Procedure? - EasyWorship Community

  1. Download the full EasyWorship 2009 v1.9 setup installer file
  2. Be sure EasyWorship is closed out on your system.
  3. Run the setup file you downloaded; resulting in an installation over your existing version.
  4. Done. (no license or registration information is requested or needs to be re-entered)

More information about the version 1.9 build change notes here in case you are curious: EasyWorship Community • View topic - EasyWorship 2009 Build 1.9 Now Available!

If you have to reinstall EasyWorship 2009, there is some information you want to capture first from your currently registered/working software:

Reinstalling EasyWorship 2007 and 2009 - EasyWorship Legacy (URL change updated 2017-01-12)

Locate Your Registration Information

If you do not have your registration info, you can get this info from the old computer.
Your Registration Information consists of the following:

  1. Name
  2. Phone Number
  3. Serial Number

To locate this information on the old computer open EasyWorship. Go to the main menu and select Help>About EasyWorship. The church name and serial number will be shown at the bottom.

To locate the phone number, select Register on the left side of the About window.

See also: Backup and Transfer Your Database (EW 2009) - EasyWorship Legacy (URL change updated 2017-01-12)

I hope anyone still using this older verison of EasyWorship 2009 like us finds this information helpful.

Cheers!

Claus Valca

Posted by Claus at 5 comments
Labels: ,

Prepping a USB stick to play music files in a Camry

A while back little bro adopted a new Toyota Camry.

One of the features it comes with is the ability to play music off a USB stick..

So he grabbed a very nice Lexar brand USB 3.0 64 GB USB stick while at a local office-supply store and copied his music files to it.

Unfortunately it didn’t play. His old USB 2.0 1 GB stick worked fine in the vehicle.

He thought it might be a bad stick (or that the sound system didn’t support USB 3.0) and was getting ready to return it to the store but I asked him a few questions.

First he confirmed it was NTFS formatted. That’s pretty common on many newer USB 3.0 sticks I’ve seen lately. I suggested he might want to try formatting at FAT32.

Note: Per the 2017 Toyota Camry Owners Manual (page 272) this requirement was later confirmed: file system format needed to be FAT 16/32. Other important points are that the USB device can only have 8 levels of folder heirachy, a maximum of 3000 folders, a maximum of 9999 files, and a maximum of 255 files per folder.  Files must be in MP3, WMA, or AAC format.

The next problem was that his Windows 10 system would only offer to format the device in exFAT.

So I had him go CMDo and run DISKPART.

  • DISKPART>list disk
  • DISKPART>select disk # <—picked # that represented USB stick on his system
  • DISKPART>clean
  • DISKPART>create partition primary
  • DISKPART>active
  • DISKPART>assign letter = E
  • DISKPART>format fs=fat32
  • DISKPART>exit

Only that netted him an error during the formatting process that the volume was too big.

Then I remembered a GUI utility from Ridgecrop Consultants Ltd that I used a long time ago.

It is free and can format FAT32 volumes beyond the normal 32 GB size limit that is sometimes encountered. It never let me down in the past.

He downloaded the tool, ran it as an admin, selected his USB drive, kept the defaut allocation unit size, and did a quick format on the 64 GB USB device. Done.

He tested and the USB stick (and media files) were now recognized with no issues by the sound system.

Mischief managed.

This seems to be a common issue many Toyota owners run into with newer/larger USB sticks so I thought I would drop a post for posterity.

Cheers!

Claus Valca

Posted by Claus at 0 comments
Labels: ,

Monday, September 05, 2016

Valca Windows KeyFinder Utilities

Last night I was culling my collection of Windows key-finding utilities.  There were some that had gone “404” and others that didn’t seem stable (or effectively work at all) on newer Windows 7/10 systems.

Many were collected back in the days of Windows XP so I decided to pick through them and dump the oldest ones and add some new ones.

This morning I saw that the TinyApps.org bloggist was hard at work on his own list!

Possibly we are being confronted with similar troublehsooting and service issues?

Here is my list and there are some similarities (as presented in semi-alphabetical order).

Some of these recover more than just the Windows OS key.

Some have not been updated in a while and may not work effectively on Win 7/8/8.1/10.

Then there is there is the manual method using CMD or PowerShell for most Win 10 / 8 / 8.1 systems.

I tend to prefer ProduKey, ShowKeyPlus, and Windows OEM Product Key Tool as my primary tools.

Cheers,

Claus Valca

Posted by Claus at 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , ,

Lenovo Y50 Hard Drive Replacement and Windows 10

About a month ago I was asked by a family at the church-house if I could give them some advice about their son’s two-year-old Lenovo Y50 laptop.

Apparently the hard-drive had failed and time was short before he headed off to college out of state.

They had purchased a new 1 TB Western Digital laptop drive similar to the one in it but despite good effort had been unable to get Windows 10 reloaded on the device. They suspected more was wrong with the system and wanted to confirm before picking up a new laptop before he shipped out.  Basically, they said the BIOS detected the HDD but they could not get Windows 10 reloaded on the laptop.

I asked them to let me look at the system along with the bits and pieces and then I would let them know.

So, armed with my various troubleshooting tool kits and USB sticks I sat down in our sound-booth with it and ran a quick assessment.

I’m more of a Dell-guy and hadn’t had much experience with the Lenovo line. As such, getting into the BIOS took a bit of research.

The trick was something called the “NOVO” button.

I booted into the BIOS (on the Y50 using the NOVO button to the immediate left of the power button) and checked a few things.

I was able to confirm the BIOS was picking up the new HDD. 

I look under the boot tab options and saw that it was set to EUFI.

I changed it temporarily to “Legacy” and saved. I needed it that way for the next step to work more smoothly in my troubleshooting assessment. 

I attached one of my custom USB sticks that I can use to boot a system and load/run an OS (Windows/Linux/Whatever) directly from the USB stick and not off the local HDD. 

I then hit the NOVO button again and selected to boot from my USB stick. That allowed me to load a WinPE build and run some commands to…

  1. confirm that I could see the new HDD,
  2. confirm that it was a 1 TB drive,
  3. rebuild the drive partition configuration (MBR type) and make it bootable, and then
  4. formatted it as NTFS using DiskPart from a command prompt window.

        1. Diskpart
        2. > select disk 0
        3. > clean
        4. > create partition primary
        5. > active
        6. > assign letter = C
        7. > exit

Followed up by a final

format C: /fs:ntfs /q /y

It worked perfectly. That confirmed the laptop recognized the drive while running under a Windows OS and it was working as expected. Now I needed to get the Win 10 OS loaded on the hard drive.

I shut it down and rebooted it again with the NOVO button. I went back in to the boot options tab and set it back to UEFI, saved the changes and rebooted. 

This time I had swapped USB sticks and now used a Windows 10 Installation Media USB that I had previously built when I was working on my own laptops a while back.

The Win 10 lnstaller loaded and the setup wizard started.

Only I had forgotten that the HDD was still configured as MBR with my pre-testing. 

Win 10 and UEFI BIOS support enabled didn’t like each other and the wizard refused to continue with the installation. So at that point in the installation options I had to just delete the MBR partition I had made so Win 10 could automagically create the partition again as a GPT type which it required. 

It did and then the rest was just watching Win 10 install, reboot a few times, creating a local user account, and dumping on the OS updates. 

Because it had Win 10 on before, it automatically loaded the license key from BIOS storage and activated Win 10 once fully installed and after I connected it to the Internet. 

Done. The Y50 was a sharp looking (and running) laptop and I was impressed during my short service time with it.

Note: I had planned on looking at the failed hard-drive to see if any data could be recovered and ported back over onto the new drive, but they said that wasn’t needed and would just go with a fresh-start. I left it to them to follow up with any remaining software application reinstalls as well.

I didn’t kick off the new Win 10 "Anniversary Edition" build update release since this was to be just a short “assessment” service but told them that it should eventually auto update in a week or so. I also let them know they could force it on early by heading over to this Microsoft site page and following the instructions. 

And I advised them to keep these link handy as well. 

                The family didn’t have to shell out for a new laptop and all was well.

                Cheers.

                Claus Valca

                 

                Additional reference notes:

                Posted by Claus at 0 comments
                Labels: , , ,
                Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)