BLB Hymns MIDI Gap Report

Generated: 2026-09-05

UPDATE (2026-09-05) — MIDI recovery from Cyber Hymnal

The BLB note naming Cyber Hymnal (hymntime.com) as the source of its hymns and lyrics was used to recover the missing tune-audio. Of the 1,463 files that were originally missing:

801 recovered from Cyber Hymnal's MIDI library (hymntime.com/tch/mid/) by matching each BLB hymn page's Music: tune/composer attribution to the Cyber Hymnal tune index, downloading the tune MIDI, renaming to the BLB slug, and storing under hymns/hymns_mid/.
662 remain missing. These are overwhelmingly modern gospel hymn-tunes (Sankey, Moody, gospel revival songs, etc.) that are not present in Cyber Hymnal's library, plus a set of ambiguous tunes whose Cyber Hymnal names are composer-disambiguated into multiple variants (e.g. two "Aberystwyth", two "Veni Creator", three "St. Catherine") where selecting the wrong variant would play the wrong tune, so they were deliberately left unresolved rather than guessed.

Files added: 801 valid Standard MIDI files (verified MThd magic, 1–3 tracks, real note data) added under hymns/hymns_mid/.

Current status: most (but not all) of the original 1,463-file gap is closed; the remainder affects 674 of 2749 hymn pages.

Summary

Hymn HTML pages scanned: 2,749 total; 1,925 (70%) have ≥1 dead midi reference
Distinct missing midi files: 1463
Total broken midi references: 2156
Existing midi files (hymns/hymns_mid/): 729 — tunes A–G only
Midi tune range present: mid_a_* … mid_g_*
Midi tune range absent: mid_h_* … mid_z_* (plus a handful of mid_g_*)

Root cause

The hymns/hymns_mid/ directory was ingested with only tunes A through G (729 files). The missing H–Z tunes (1,463 files) were never part of the source data — confirmed independently in:

the ingest manifest blb_manifest.txt (snapshot of the original WebDAV source at download time)
full git log --all history (no H–Z midi blob was ever committed)
the source WebDAV (files.thecookiejar.me/www/static/BLB/) — returns 404 for the missing files
the live Blue Letter Bible site (no longer serves these hymn pages) and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (no capture)

These are not broken links (paths are correct and resolve properly); the destination files simply do not exist anywhere reachable.

Missing files by first tune-letter

Letter	Missing .mid files
g	4
h	154
i	80
j	47
k	23
l	137
m	136
n	58
o	98
p	73
q	4
r	79
s	270
t	89
u	8
v	31
w	152
x	4
y	9
z	7

Affected pages

1925 pages under hymns/hymns_html/ reference at least one missing midi. Full page list is in broken_pages.txt.

Data files in this directory

broken_pages.txt — every page with ≥1 dead midi reference
missing_midis.csv — one row per (page, missing .mid) reference pair
missing_midis_unique.csv — one row per distinct missing .mid file
missing_to_pages.csv — each missing .mid and the pages that reference it
gap_index.json — machine-readable full dataset

Recommendation

Do not attempt link-only fixes — there is no destination to point at. Realistic remediation paths, in order of safety:

Accept the gap (documented here) until a source for the hymn-tune midis is obtained.
Synthesise/obtain the missing public-domain hymn tunes from an external archive, then add the files under hymns/hymns_mid/ (no HTML changes needed — the links will then resolve).
Optionally neutralise the dead audio controls on the 1,925 affected pages (removes 404s, loses audio).

Links are audio/midi MIME; page HTML constructs them as ./hymns/hymns_mid/<file>.mid relative to the BLB root (via basepath.js), so they resolve against /BLB/hymns/hymns_mid/.

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