Adding Songs for use with the ChurchBells System
 

To add songs to your schedule, in simple terms you need
to do three things:

1)  Get them into the computer
2)  Get them on the song list
3)  Get them scheduled.

Before you begin, you need to know that only the Organization
Level License of ChurchBells is able to make custom chiming
schedules.  Therefore in order to add songs you need to have
the Organization Level License.

1) Get them into the computer:

You will be adding your new songs to the computer's hard drive as wave
files (or as MP3 files).  I suggest that you use 22khz Mono 16 bit, pre-
emphasized wave files.  You can copy the wave files into the ChurchBells
directory where my tunes are located, and their file names must be 8
characters with ".wav" added to the end.  (Don't worry, you'll get a better
chance to describe them in a moment via the .txt file you'll be making.) 

There are extra hymns available for use with ChurchBells here.

If you don't mind spending the extra space and want to replace the stock
tunes with the elaborate stereo versions from InspiredCode's Harmonious
Bells CD, you can do so.  The result will be beautiful, and you'll get as few
extra Christmas Carols to add to the list. (The license allows this). 

The only music file that you cannot replace is shave.wav.  (This file keeps
home users from deploying outdoors). 


2) Get them on the song list:

It used to be complicated.  Now ChurchBells will automatically find and
mount every wave (or MP3) file it finds in its own directory when it starts. 
(If you upgraded from a version older than 2.1.55 you may need to delete
the dir.txt file from the ChurchBells directory to enable this automatic
feature.)

3) Get them scheduled:

Please read the primer on Making your own Custom Chiming Schedules,
located in the help menu of ChurchBells.

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Getting Sounds from Audio CDs:
     Before you can use sounds from audio CDs, they first need
to be copied into Wave files ("ripped").  You can do that easily
by using an excellent freeware application called CDEX.  (When
you are done "ripping" the CD, you will find your wave files in
the OutputFiles subdirectory of the CDEX program's directory.
You will need to rename each file to something that has no more
than 8 characters, with the ".wav" extension.