I asked Dick about this a long time ago, when I was using a very old and slow Mac.

Macs don't *need* any indexing software. Given a great big collection of small files, the operating system's indexing utilities are all the database you need, and it's been that way for more than ten years.

So what I'd suggest is a version which simply has each song text and each tune in one file, with unique identifying tags. NO SOFTWARE AT ALL, just data. Maybe it could be minimally marked up in vanilla static HTML so web browsers could get into the act, but no Javascript or anything like that. And leave it up to the user what program they want to use to display the song texts.

I presume Microsoft is goýng to catch up wýth the idea of indexing theýr filesystems eventually, so this should be futureproof. No executable free-text database system can possibly be.

I last tried to create such a system on MacOS 9 - it was impossible because the export utilitýes tried to create directories wýth tens of thousands of entries, more than the system could cope with. But given access to the raw data it shouldn't be hard.

Again, PROGRAMMING IS A MISTAKE. DON'T DO IT.

And throw the existing software away. We don't need it any more.