Skip to main content

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)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Did Moses know he was a Hebrew?

It seems to be a common notion, perpetuated by movies like Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments  and Disney's Prince of Egypt , that Moses grew up as a high-level member of Pharaoh's household with no idea that he was a Hebrew. But does that notion fit in with what it says in the Bible, or what Jewish tradition teaches about Moses? This week's Torah portion is Shemot, the beginning of the book of Exodus, so it's a good time to examine this question. We actually know very little about Moses' childhood from the Bible. Pharaoh had ordered all male children to be thrown into the Nile River at birth (Ex. 1:22). While that order was in effect, a boy was born to a man of the tribe of Levi and his wife, also of that tribe (Ex. 2:1-2). The parents are later identified (Num. 26:59) as Amram an Yocheved (that "ch" is pronounced like a throat-clearing noise). Yocheved could not bear to throw her beautiful new son to his death, so she hid him away for three mont
Read more

Being Jewish at Christmas

Last March, I heard a DJ talking about March Madness, the annual insanity surrounding a college basketball tournament. She wasn't interested in it, but everyone in her office was obsessed with it. They had an office pool, a constant barrage of emails and parties to watch every game on TV. The DJ didn't want to be a part of it, but her co-workers pressured her to get involved. They tried to get her to participate in the pool, but she insisted that she didn't even know the names of the teams. Her co-workers assured her that it didn't matter who she bet on, it would be fun to play. They wouldn't take no for an answer. She wasn't trying to spoil their fun, but she wanted to be left alone. As I heard her talk about her frustration, I thought, "Now you know how it feels to be Jewish at Christmas." Think of something that you're not interested in but that everybody else seems to be talking about. Maybe it's a sporting event: March Madness, the Superbo
15 comments
Read more

Afterthoughts about the Blessing of the Sun

I know it's a bit after the fact, and it won't really be relevant again for another 28 years, but this recently came up in a newsletter I received, and I simply had to say something about it. The Blessing of the Sun (Birkat Hachamah) is a blessing recited once every 28 years, commemorating the work of Creation, and specifically the creation of the sun. It was observed this year, 5769, on the morning of April 8, 2009. Now, many have noticed that the year number 5769 is not evenly divisible by 28. Dividing 5769 by 28 leaves a remainder of 1. One explanation that has been offered for the discrepancy, which appears to be a traditional explanation, says: The Sages have already explained to us that during the year of the Flood, the natural order of the world was suspended. That may be so, but it has absolutely nothing to do with why the division leaves a remainder of one. A better explanation is simple mathematics, and should be familiar to anyone who remembers the whole
3 comments
Read more