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How I restored Trope Trainer on my Windows laptop

If you don't want to hear the whole story and just want a quick answer, jump down to HERE (after opening the full text because the link doesn't work in the preview!).

Trope Trainer was a fantastic piece of software to help you learn to read Torah with its traditional cantillation (music), commonly known as Trope (sometimes spelled Trop and sometimes pronounced "trup" to rhyme with "pup"). This software was extremely popular, giving you a wide variety of ways to see and hear things and providing a calendar of Torah readings. It was a miraculous piece of work, replacing the cassette tapes that bar mitzvah students in my time used to learn their Torah portion. For the young folks reading this: cassette tapes are what people used to record and listen to their own music before YouTube, MP3 or even CDs. 

So why do I keep referring to this great software in the past tense? Well, Trope Trainer was the work of one man: Thomas Buchler. He wrote the code himself, with little outside help, and the only copy of the source code was on his computer. Thomas Buchler died on July 16, 2019, after a long battle with cancer, without making arrangements for the software to continue after his death. 

The website where you used to go to download the software and register it has been taken over by a domain squatter, as have other similar domain names. For a while, it was still possible for the software to connect to the website and register the software on a new computer, but that ability is long gone now.

So when the laptop I owned in 2019 broke down and I tried to install Trope Trainer on my new laptop... I couldn't register it! I didn't have a serial number because there was no physical media, the serial number that appeared for Trope Trainer on my old working laptop didn't work, and the only way to register downloads was through a connection to a website that doesn't exist any more. Without registering, you get only the use of a limited demo copy! What could I do?

I found that if I told it to register online and then cancelled immediately, I got into the full-blown software. It had no record of what my settings were or what I had most recently been working with, but it worked so that was good. But it was a real nuisance to work through that fake registration every time. 

I tried digging into the Registry from the old laptop to try to find the registration settings but nothing that I brought into my new computer's registry made the difference.

And then I found file ... buried on the old computer, created at the same date and time that Trope Trainer was installed on that computer. When I put that file on my new computer, Trope Trainer was registered!

So if you had a copy of Trope Trainer registered on an old Windows computer and you have access to that computer's hard drive (or a full backup including program folders), you can find the file you need here:

C:\ProgamData\Kinnor Software\Common\

In that folder, you will find a file named KinnorP. That's the registration file. Put that file onto your new computer in the same folder with the same name, overwriting the file that was created when you installed on the new computer. Trope Trainer will work fine!

If you want to know more about Thomas Buchler, his wonderful work and his wonderful life, this is a great article about him:

His software sang the words of God. Then it went silent. (inverse.com)

And this is his obituary:

Thomas BUCHLER Obituary - New York, NY (dignitymemorial.com)

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