Gloria groups music into hymnbooks. There can be up to ten hymnbooks in Gloria and the user can switch between them at any time. Hymns are organized by number within a hymnbook, from number 1 up to 999. Hymn numbers don’t have to be consecutive and don’t even have to start at 1. The Celebremos su Gloria hymnbook, for example, starts with hymn #2, skips #14, skips #29 and 30, and so on. The hymnbook officially ends at #652, but there are a few extras starting at #701, plus a few tuning scales starting at #801. So you can arrange hymns in whatever order you like. The only restriction is that you can’t duplicate numbers. There can only be one hymn per number.
Hymnbooks are made up of a collection of MIDI files, with a table of contents file to bring all the MIDI files together. These files all live together in a single folder, copied to a USB memory stick to import into Gloria. Even if you only want to import one song on one MIDI file, you will also need a hymnbook table of contents file to anchor the song to. Orphan MIDI files are ignored by Gloria.
A hymnbook table of contents is maintained as an XML file. An XML file (eXtensible Markup Language) is a plain text file in a standard format with a lot of free tools available on the internet. The examples in this manual will focus on XML Notepad (free at http://www.lovettsoftware.com/downloads/xmlnotepad/readme.htm) with Notepad++ (free at https://notepad-plus-plus.org/) as an alternative. XML Notepad will ensure the table of contents file is correctly formatted and makes it easier to see the overall layout of the file, but it’s somewhat slower to use than Notepad++. If you know what you’re doing Notepad++ is fast to use, but it doesn’t do any checks on the content of the file. It’s up to you to make sure everything is correct. A good compromise is to use Notepad++ to create and edit the table of contents file and afterwards load the file into XML Notepad for a sanity check.
This manual will explain in detail how to put together a table of contents from scratch, but in real life it’s easier to enter the details into a spreadsheet and have the spreadsheet automatically create the table of contents for you. Skip to the end to go the easy route if you don’t care about the details.