Tech Forum

Several years ago I was attending a Spanish ward where no one could play the piano or organ. The bishop acquired a Johannus midi hymn player. I spent a year scanning every page in the Spanish hymnbook, used optical character recognition to convert the hymn files to a Midi format that the hymn player could send to the organ. After completion it was simple to scroll to the hymn number, press the play button and the hymn would play the intro and all the verses. I could conduct the music and "play" the organ at the same time when needed. The ward was split and I am now in a small branch that still needs an organist. Our new building has an Allen organ with a built in hymn player with English and Spanish hymns. Half of the Spanish hymns are missing, Some are not played correctly, I discovered that the missing hymns can only be added by Salt Lake and cannot be permanently adjusted for tempo or stops. The new hymns coming out cannot be added, nor recorded into it by our Stake organist. The player needs constant attention, needs to be reset between hymns and is extremely difficult in comparison to my previous experience. The organ apparently has a midi connection within but it is unknown if we can attach a midi player like in the other building and use the files I labored over to create.

As an aside, I'm quite interested if there will be an effort by the Church to resolve these music player issues when the new hymnal is fully released (I have not heard anything "public" about this). As many know, there's quite a variety of issues with the different types of music players in Church meetinghouses. My personal thought is it would be great if there was an in-depth survey done by the Church to identify where music players are being used and what types they are, and then implement a plan to update them all to the new hymnal. Not only will all the hymn numbers now be identical between languages, but any copyrighted hymns would also be excluded from all installed languages so everything's the same. And with the unified hymnal, once one version of the midi file was created (maybe by the Church), that could then be shared worldwide and not re-created locally ad nauseum by those with that type of music player. But... that's an aside