The Cyber Hymnal™

How can I help?

1. We need trans­la­tions of the mu­sic play­er tool tips into a num­ber of languag­es. A tool tip is a small pop­up win­dow that ap­pears when your mouse ho­vers over the mu­sic player (lo­cat­ed just above the lyr­ics). If you don’t see tool tips ap­pear in one of our for­eign lang­uage sec­tions, we need a trans­la­tion of the tool tip in­to that lang­uage. Here’s the English ver­sion of the tool tip:
   

   Listen to the music in OGG format. Note: MIDI files (the 🔊 icon above) are about 100 times smaller than OGG files, so you can download and listen to MIDI files much more quickly. But if your computer or device won’t let you listen to MIDI files and see the lyrics at the same time, you can listen to the OGG file instead.

   If you can pro­vide a trans­la­tion from Eng­lish, send us an e-mail!

2. Many pages have re­quests for in­for­ma­tion or pic­tures. If you can help with any of these, it would be a bless­ing! Click here for spe­ci­fic in­for­ma­tion ab­out pict­ures.
3. Publicize our ad­dress in blogs, In­ter­net mail­ing lists, news groups, Web sites, news­let­ters, ma­ga­zines, news-pa­pers, ra­dio and TV pro­grams, etc. If you find Web sites that still point to the old cyberhymnal.org URL, ask them to up­date their links.
4. Proofread our pag­es and test the links. Tell us about any er­rors you find.
5. Click the Face­book Like and Share but­tons on our home page. Click here if the but­tons aren’t vi­si­ble.
6. If you’d like to help de­fray our costs for com­put­er hard­ware, sof­tware, sup­plies, etc., con­sid­er mak­ing a do­na­tion through PayPal to ac­count cyberhymnal@hotmail.com.

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How do I clear my brows­er’s cache? When you vis­it a Web page, your brows­er usu­al­ly saves the page in a stor­age area called a cache.

The next time you vi­sit the page, the brow­ser can give you the cached co­py, in­stead of re­triev­ing it again from the ser­ver. This tech­nique makes Web pag­es load more quick­ly.

However, it can some­times cause err­ors. Clear­ing the cache makes the brows­er re­place the old page co­py with a fresh one, which of­ten solves the prob­lem.

If you get a mes­sage say­ing you should clear your cache, but don’t know how, click here or here for in­struc­tions.

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Why don’t I hear mu­sic? If you want the mu­sic to start au­to­mat­ic­al­ly on each hymn page, check the box on our home page that says Play Mu­sic Au­to­ma­tic­al­ly. If it does­n’t work:

• See if you can find a brow­ser plug-in that can play the mu­sic. Sad­ly, Ap­ple Quick­Time, which we for­mer­ly used, has been found to have ma­jor se­cur­ity weak­ness­es and is no longer re­com­mend­ed. If you want to play the mu­sic man­ual­ly, see be­low. Oth­er­wise, you may want to use Goo­gle Chrome, which launch­es a mu­sic play­er when it sees the mu­sic link.
• Clear your brow­ser cache.
• Delete any brows­er cook­ies from our site (they’re ob­so­lete).
• Reset your brow­ser con­fig­ur­ation to the de­fault/fac­to­ry set­tings.
• On some ver­sions of In­ter­net Exp­lor­er (MSIE), you may need to add our URL to your Trust­ed Sites list or clear the En­able Pro­tect­ed Mode check box on the con­fi­gur­ation di­alog. On MSIE ver­sion 11, you can op­en this dia­log by choos­ing Tools-In­ter­net Op­tions and go­ing to the Secu­ri­ty tab.
• If you have se­cond com­put­er, try ac­cess­ing the site on that ma­chine (en­sur­ing, of course, that its brows­er has a mu­sic plug-in). If the se­cond com­pu­ter can play the mu­sic, then the prob­lem is in the first com­pu­ter.
• If that doesn’t solve the prob­lem, try an­oth­er brows­er (we like Fire­fox).
• Is the mu­sic si­lent on all pag­es, or just some pag­es? If on­ly on a few pag­es, let us know—the prob­lem might be in the page it­self.
• Do you have a sound card and speak­ers?
• Are the speak­ers plugged in?
• If the speak­ers use bat­ter­ies, are they in­stalled? Are they fresh?
• Is the speak­er vol­ume turned up? Is the sound mut­ed? Check the speak­er di­als and any soft­ware which con­trols vol­ume.
• Do you have an old­er sound board? If so, en­sure you have the lat­est dri­vers. You can oft­en down­load these from the ma­nu­fac­tur­er’s Web site.
• If you use the Note­Wor­thy Com­pos­er™ view­er, do you have the lat­est ve­rsion?
• Try play­ing a MI­DI file off-line (that is, while not con­nect­ed to the In­ter­net). Most com­put­ers come with sam­ple MI­DI files you can use. If not, down­load one of ours and save it on disk. If you can’t play MI­DI files off­line, the prob­lem is in your com­put­er.
• Other soft­ware may be chang­ing the vol­ume set­tings. Some ver­sions of Mi­cro­soft In­ter­net Ex­plor­er & Me­dia Play­er can cause this. Oth­er au­dio play­ers al­so mis­be­have this way.

Unfortunately, the prob­lem may re­cur, so re­peat these steps if the mu­sic goes si­lent again lat­er.

Sorry, we can’t di­ag­nose prob­lems long dist­ance. If you still can’t hear the mu­sic, please see your lo­cal tech­ni­cian.

If you want to play the mu­sic man­ual­ly, click the 🔊 icon to hear a high fi­de­li­ty MI­DI ver­sion with your com­pu­ter’s mu­sic soft­ware (that is, out­side the brows­er)

You can list­en to a low­er qua­li­ty OGG au­dio file with the on-line mu­sic play­er, lo­cated just above the ly­rics. If your com­pu­ter, tab­let or phone won’t let you list­en to a MIDI file while you scroll through the lyr­ics, this em­bed­ded play­er is your best op­tion. Note: Not all pag­es have these play­ers yet—we’re add­ing them as time al­lows. Our goal is to ev­en­tu­al­ly have a play­er on each hymn and song page.

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What mu­sic do I hear from the OGG player? If there is o­nly one MI­DI file link on the page (the 🔊 icon), the OGG play­er plays that tune. If there are mul­ti­ple MIDI links, the OGG play­er plays the pri­ma­ry tune. Due to lack of time and screen space, we don’t create OGG play­ers for al­ter­nate tunes.

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What’s the XML mu­sic link do? Why do on­ly a few pag­es have one? It’s a hy­per­link to the mu­sic­al score in MusicXML for­mat. This for­mat is sup­port­ed by a num­ber of mu­sic an­no­tation pro­grams, such as Muse­Score. If you have one of these an­no­ta­tion pro­gram on your com­put­er, click­ing the XML link should down­load the score in­to your an­no­ta­tion pro­gram. This lets you view and ed­it the score ev­en if you can’t read files in our na­tive file for­mat (cur­rent­ly, Note­Wor­thy Com­pos­er™).

If you don’t have an ap­pli­ca­tion that sup­ports Mu­sic­XML, click­ing the link will prob­ab­ly just dis­play the raw XML (not the score) in your brows­er, or in an XML ed­it­or, if your sys­tem has one.

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I found tune XXX in the tune name in­dex (or on a bio­gra­phy page), but when I click the link, I end up on a page play­ing a dif­fer­ent tune. This can hap­pen if the tune is not the pri­ma­ry tune on any of our hymn pag­es. In this case, the link points to a page where it is an al­ter­nate tune.

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Why does the font re­siz­er ap­pear on desk­top com­pu­ters, but not on cell phones? Screen real es­tate is hard to come by on cell phones, plus cell phones have their own ways to change font size (fin­ger ges­tures, men­us, etc.)

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When I change font sizes, then re­turn to the page lat­er, the new font sizes have dis­ap­peared. The pur­pose of the font re­siz­er is to give you a quick way to tem­po­ra­ri­ly en­large or shrink text. If you want to per­ma­nent­ly change the text size, check your brows­er do­cu­men­ta­tion: Al­most all brow­sers let you set the font size to suit your needs.

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Why does the text in [lang­uage xyz] show rec­tan­gles, dia­monds or ques­tion marks? Some pos­si­ble caus­es:

Your com­put­er doesn’t have a font that can dis­play the miss­ing char­ac­ters. For ex­amp­le, the de­fault font used by Mi­cro­soft In­ter­net Ex­plor­er (MSIE) for Greek text un­der Win­dows XP is Times New Ro­man, which can dis­play some, but not all Greek char­ac­ters and dia­cri­tic­al marks.

We’ve found the free font Gen­ti­um to be good a re­place­ment for Times New Ro­man in the case of Greek. For oth­er lang­uag­es, brows­ers and op­erat­ing sys­tems, you can find fonts via In­ternet search en­gines.

If the prob­lem per­sists ev­en with the cor­rect font in­stalled, your brow­ser may be ig­nor­ing the font: The mere pre­sence of a font on your sys­tem doesn’t guar­an­tee your brows­er will use it.

Our site gives font hints to brows­ers for lang­uag­es with non-La­tin al­pha­bets, but some brows­ers don’t bo­ther check­ing these hints. How­ev­er, some brows­ers let you ex­pli­cit­ly choose the fonts to use for par­ti­cu­lar lang­uag­es. For ins­tance, with MSIE, choose Tools-In­ter­net Op­tions-Fonts (though ev­en this does­n’t al­ways work).

Firefox seems to read our font hints cor­rect­ly. For oth­er brows­ers, please con­sult the help file or ask a com­put­er sup­port tech­ni­cian.

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The pag­es are hard to read on a small screen. How I can re­duce the clut­ter? Select the Short Ver­sion check box on the home page: It will re­duce the da­ta dis­played on hymn pag­es.

To tem­po­rar­ily re­duce the da­ta on a sin­gle page, click the black ar­row in the up­per right cor­ner of the brows­er win­dow. Re­peat­ed clicks will tog­gle be­tween the con­densed and full modes.

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Why is the text hard to read? We don’t spe­ci­fy a par­ti­cu­lar font for Eng­lish text. Your brows­er picks the font, so if it’s hard to read, you’ll have to blame your brows­er.

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Why do some in­dex en­tries have num­bers af­ter them? These in­di­cate pri­ma­ry ti­tles, names, etc. Most­ly, we this to count the num­ber of pri­ma­ry en­tries. En­tries with­out num­bers are al­ter­nate ti­tles or first lines.

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Is there an in­dex of hymns by date writ­ten, by au­thor birth/death dates, etc.? Sor­ry, no. We don’t have the re­sourc­es to main­tain such in­dex­es.

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Do you have hymn xxxx? If the ti­tle starts with A, An, or The, it’s in­dexed un­der the next word (that is, the in­dex­es ig­nore these short words at the be­gin­ning of ti­tles). If you still can’t find it, check the index for its first line. Some hymns’ ti­tles and first lines are used in­ter­change­ably. If you still can’t find it, try us­ing our search page.

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Why don’t you have my fa­vo­rite hymn, xxxx? If it was first pub­lish­ed af­ter , it’s prob­ab­ly co­py­right­ed. Click here to see fre­quent­ly re­quest­ed hymns in that ca­te­go­ry.

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Why don’t you have more con­tem­po­ra­ry mu­sic? Co­py­rights. We can’t post co­py­right­ed ma­te­ri­al with­out per­mis­sion. If there are fa­vor­ite hymns you’d like to see on­line, please get the co­py­right hold­er’s writ­ten per­mis­sion be­fore con­tact­ing us.

Our Po­pu­lar Hymns page lists co­py­right­ed ti­tles vi­sit­ors oft­en re­quest. Bot­tom line: please do your home­work.

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Do you need mu­sic? Yes, there are some lyr­ics for which we haven’t found suit­able mu­sic. Click here for de­tails.

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Why do some por­traits have gold-col­ored bor­ders? This is our way of re­cog­niz­ing the con­tri­bu­tions of peo­ple who have pub­lished one or more works on hym­no­lo­gy or the stu­dy of church mu­sic (hym­nals and song books don’t count for this pur­pose).

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Do you have high re­so­lu­tion ver­sions of pic­tures? Sor­ry—the on­line im­ages are the on­ly ones av­ail­able.

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Is your site avail­able on DVD or CD-ROM? Sor­ry, afraid not. As a low budg­et pri­vate site, we don’t have the re­sourc­es to run a pub­lish­ing bu­si­ness. Main­tain­ing this site is a full time job.

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Why are some lyr­ics dif­fer­ent than those in our hym­nal? Our sourc­es may have been dif­fer­ent than those your hym­nal used. His­to­ri­cal­ly, hym­nal com­pil­ers have tak­en li­ber­ties with lyr­ics, ar­range­ments, etc., caus­ing the (usu­al­ly mi­nor) dif­fer­enc­es you see.

Sometimes ev­en we make small chang­es to lyr­ics, though we try to keep such mo­di­fi­ca­tions to an ab­so­lute mi­ni­mum. The most com­mon rea­son is to fix me­tri­cal de­fects, or make ar­cha­ic vo­ca­bu­la­ry, spell­ing, or gram­mar clear­er to vi­sit­ors whose pri­ma­ry lang­uage is not Eng­lish (due to the world wide reach of the In­ter­net). However, we don’t un­der­take such chang­es light­ly, and make our best ef­fort to re­tain the orig­in­al po­et­ry.

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Why do some words in the lyr­ics have ac­cent marks? These are sing­ing hints. An ac­cent ov­er a let­ter means the word should be sung with an ex­tra syl­la­ble. For ex­am­ple, you would sing bless­ed in one syl­la­ble, but you would sing bless­èd in two syl­la­bles.

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How can I get the lyr­ics? Feel free to co­py and paste pub­lic do­main lyr­ics di­rect­ly from the screen. Most of our lyr­ics are in that ca­te­go­ry. If the lyr­ics are co­py­right­ed, there will be a no­tice say­ing so. Please don’t co­py these lyr­ics un­less the co­py­right no­tice al­lows it.

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What are MI­DI files? First, MI­DI files are not re­cord­ings. Ra­ther, they con­tain di­git­al in­struc­tions for a com­put­er sound board tell­ing what notes to play, their vol­ume, tem­po, du­ra­tion, in­stru­ment, etc.

Click here for the his­to­ry and more in­for­ma­tion on M­IDI.

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What are the NWC files I get when I click the icon? This is sheet mu­sic in Note­Wor­thy Com­pos­er™ for­mat. See our Down­loads page for de­tails.

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What’s the dif­fer­ence be­tween PDF & NWC files?

1. PDF is a ge­ne­ral pur­pose file for­mat from Ado­be Sys­tems. The NWC for­mat, from Note­wor­thy Soft­ware, is spe­cif­ic­al­ly for sheet mu­sic. Both com­pa­nies of­fer free view­ers for their files.
2. You can’t change the PDF files, but—with the full ver­sion of Note­Wor­thy Com­pos­er—you can ed­it the NWC files (i.e., change tem­po, lyr­ics or font size; fix er­rors; trans­pose keys or re-ar­range the mu­sic; crea­te MIDI files; add com­ments; etc).

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How do I de­com­press the ar­chive files? You need an UN­ZIP util­ity.

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How do you choose the tunes? We nor­mal­ly use the tune found in the source where we found the lyr­ics. If the source doesn’t as­sign a tune, we pick one that seems to fit best. This is rare, though; the tune we use is usu­al­ly in a pub­lished hym­nal. Ex­cep­tion: Some ve­ry old hym­nals have on­ly words, no mu­sic. In these cas­es, we try to find a tune that fits.

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Why don’t you list tune xxx as an al­ter­nate for hymn xxx? The al­ter­nate tune lists are not ex­haus­tive, and due to time and space con­straints, prob­ab­ly ne­ver will be. We simp­ly give some that we have seen pub­lished in va­ri­ous mu­sic­al tra­di­tions. Al­so, please real­ize that a well known tune in one de­no­mi­na­tion can be vir­tu­al­ly un­known else­where.

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I have lyr­ics, but no mu­sic. How can I find a tune that fits the words?

1. Count the num­ber of syl­la­bles in each line to de­ter­mine the po­et­ic me­ter. For ex­am­ple, a line of 8 syl­la­bles, fol­low­ed by lines of 6, 8 and 6 syl­la­bles, would be Com­mon Meter.
2. On our home page, and click the Tunes by Me­ter link.
3. On the Tunes by Me­ter page, find the de­sired me­ter on the left side and click it.
4. When tune list ap­pears, click each one to list­en to it.
5. If you find a tune you like, you can go to a page that us­es it to get the sheet mu­sic. See the next ques­tion.

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How can I get the sheet mu­sic? We don’t pub­lish or sell mu­sic. Much of the ma­te­ri­al on this site is out of print, so if you want a pa­per co­py, check used book stores, es­tate sales, flea mar­kets, or an­ti­quar­ian book­sell­ers. Or, just click the icon and print it (re­quires Adobe Ac­ro­bat Read­er).

Another pos­si­bil­ity is to down­load the hymn­al or song book where it was pub­lished from an on­line source. Ma­ny, but not all, of these books have been di­gi­tized and are av­ail­able for free on the In­ter­net.

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How can I get sheet mu­sic for a spe­ci­fic tune?

1. Click here, or go to our home page, and click the Tunes by Name link.
2. A page will op­en show­ing all tune names start­ing with the chos­en let­ter. Find the tune you want, then click one of the ti­tles at the end of that row (far right).

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How can I tell where the mu­sic came from? The com­ment sec­tion of the Note­Wor­thy Com­pos­er™ file usu­al­ly shows the source.

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I use mu­sic no­ta­tion soft­ware XYZ. Can I im­port your Note­Wor­thy Com­pos­er™ (NWC) files? Yes, if your soft­ware can read MusicXML files. Click here to vi­sit a site that con­verts NWC files to Mu­sic­XML for­mat.

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Why does the mu­sic sound tin­ny/like a harp­si­chord/weird? You prob­ab­ly have an out­dat­ed soft­ware dri­ver, or a low qua­li­ty sound board/speak­ers. It’s prob­ab­ly worth some time and ef­fort to fix the prob­lem. With the right set­up, your sound should be al­most CD-qua­li­ty.

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Why is the mu­sic so fast/slow? Speed is large­ly a mat­ter of per­son­al taste. If you want to change the tem­po, you can down­load Note­Wor­thy Com­pos­er™^™ and cre­ate a MIDI file to suit your needs.

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Can I play your mu­sic on a re­gu­lar DVD/CD player? Not di­rect­ly, but with some ef­fort and the right soft­ware, you could con­vert the MI­DI files to MP3 format, then burn them on­to a DVD/CD. You might see if your con­gr­eg­ation has a will­ing and able teen­ag­er: that age group oft­en has ex­pe­ri­ence in DVD/CD cre­ation.

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Where can I get MI­DI files for oth­er types of mu­sic? There are ma­ny Web sites spe­cial­iz­ing in MI­DI. Try look­ing on a search en­gine like Goo­gle.

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Can you show gui­tar chords? Sor­ry, we don’t have that ca­pa­bi­li­ty. But there are oth­er Web sites that spe­cial­ize in wors­hip mu­sic played by gui­tar.

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Our Web site links to the Cy­ber Hym­nal™. Can you tell us when your pag­es change, so we can up­date our links? Sad­ly, no, due to lack of time. But our Re­cent Ad­di­tions page lists the new ma­te­ri­al when it goes on­line.

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Do you have any fa­mi­ly his­to­ry on the au­thors or com­posers? This is ou­tside our scope. We re­com­mend you vi­sit one of the ma­ny of gen­ea­lo­gy sites on the Web, or click the Finda­grave link if shown on one of our bio­gra­phy pag­es.

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Can I down­load your en­tire site? There are ma­ny pro­grams on the In­ternet to down­load en­tire Web sites. For pag­es on our site which have re­strict­ive co­py­right no­tic­es, you should first ob­tain pe­rmis­sion from the co­py­right own­er.

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Why do I get the mes­sage Ac­cess De­nied in Mi­cro­soft In­ter­net Ex­plor­er (MSIE)? We haven’t seen this mes­sage our­selves, but it seems to be caused by er­rors in MSIE. This link shows dis­cuss­ions of the to­pic and pos­si­ble so­lu­tions. If you still get the er­ror, we re­com­mend us­ing a dif­fer­ent brow­ser, such as Fire­fox or Chrome.

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Who are you? What’s your de­no­mi­na­tion? This is a pri­vate Web site, do­ing our best to ad­vance God’s king­dom, us­ing the gifts He gives us. We be­long to the same de­no­mi­na­tion as Je­sus: Chris­tian.

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Are you af­fi­li­at­ed with cy­ber­hym­nal.org or the Face­book group that calls it­self Cy­ber Hym­nal? No, and they did not re­quest per­mis­sion to use our name.