4 de agosto de 2026
How MyTools Helps You as a Church Choir Director
Fifteen side tasks that fill a church choir director's week, from sideways sheet music to rehearsal tracks, each with the free browser tool that handles it.
Directing a church choir is mostly music. Deciding whether the anthem sits better a tone down, coaxing a tenor line out of two tenors and a hopeful baritone, holding a fermata until the organist looks up. Sunday morning at 9:40, when everyone finds the first chord together, is the whole reason you took this on.
The rest of the week is files. Sheet music that arrived as a photocopy of a photocopy, scanned upside down by the parish office. A rehearsal recording made on a phone at the back of the nave, so quiet nobody can hear the piano. Four separate PDFs, one per voice part, that should have been one. A concert video shot sideways because the tripod was borrowed. A choir photo the newsletter editor rejects because it is nine megabytes.
None of that is music, and all of it lands between Wednesday rehearsal and Sunday service. Below are fifteen of those side tasks, with the free in-browser tool that handles each one. No installation, no account, no software licence the parish has to approve.
The Anthem That Scanned Upside Down
The parish office scans everything face-down out of habit, so the Howells you asked for arrives as eight pages of inverted staves. You can read it by turning the laptop over. Twenty-four choir members will not.
Rotate PDF fixes the orientation of the file itself rather than the way one viewer happens to display it, so the pages stay right way up when a singer opens them on a phone on the bus. Drop the file in, turn the pages that need turning, download. The whole thing is faster than walking to the office to ask for a rescan.
Two Inches of Photocopier Margin on Every Page
Scanned hymnal pages come with a black gutter down one side and an inch of grey nothing along the top, which is fine on screen and wasteful on paper when you are printing thirty copies for Thursday.
Crop Image takes the unwanted portion off a scanned page with a drag handle and a live preview, so you can see exactly where the staff begins before you commit. Trim the margins once, and the printed copies come out with music filling the page instead of the copier's shadow.
Eight Pages Out of a 300-Page Anthology
The Advent collection is a single PDF of every carol the publisher has ever set, and you need the Rutter on pages 112 to 119. Emailing the whole anthology invites the choir to learn the wrong piece.
Extract PDF Pages pulls exactly the range you name into a clean new file, either by typing the numbers or by picking thumbnails when you cannot remember where the descant starts. The original anthology stays untouched on your drive for the next time.
Four Voice Parts, Four Separate Files
Soprano, alto, tenor and bass arrived as four downloads from the publisher's site, and every rehearsal begins with someone saying they only have the alto one. Four attachments is four chances to open the wrong file in a dark church.
Merge PDF combines them into a single rehearsal pack in the order you choose, so you can put the full score first and the individual parts behind it. One file, one link, one thing for a singer to lose.
Twenty-Four Inboxes and an Attachment Cap
Scanned music is images pretending to be a document, which is why the rehearsal pack came out at 34 MB and the parish mail server refused it twice.
Compress PDF brings the size down without touching the notes, which matters because a bounced attachment costs you an evening of forwarding. Upload the pack, take the smaller file, send it once. Nothing goes to a server you do not control on the way, since the work happens in your browser.
The Order of Service, Typed in Word
You write the running order in Word because that is what the parish administrator uses, then send it to the organist, the vicar, and the person doing the slides. It reaches all three in a different font, and the hymn numbers wrap onto a second line for exactly one of them.
Word to PDF freezes the layout so what you saw is what they get. Convert before you send, and the anthem stops landing halfway down page two on somebody else's copy of Word.
A Rehearsal Recording Made From the Back Pew
The learning track you promised the altos was recorded on a phone propped against a hymn book, ten metres from the piano. On headphones it is faint. In a car, over engine noise, it is silence.
Boost Audio Volume pushes it to a normal listening level with a brick-wall limiter holding the peaks, so the loud bits do not turn into crackle. Nine decibels usually turns an unusable memo into something a singer can actually practise with on the commute.
The Bar Nobody Can Learn at Speed
Bars 41 to 48 go past too fast for the altos to hear their entry, and playing it slowly at rehearsal costs five minutes of everyone else's evening.
Change Audio Speed drops a track to 0.75× while holding the original pitch, so the notes stay where they are written instead of sinking into the basement. Send the slow version alongside the full-speed one and let people work at whichever tempo they need.
Ten Seconds of Chair Scraping Before the First Note
Every recording you make starts with a scrape, a cough, and you saying "right, from the top of the second page." It is thirty seconds of nothing before the music arrives, and the singer who plays it three times a day hears it ninety times.
Trim Audio cuts the fumbling off the front and the dead air off the back with two drag handles. The file that reaches the choir starts on the first chord.
Last Year's Recording as a Listening Reference
The choir sang this same Stanford in 2025, and there is a video of it on somebody's phone. What you actually want is the sound, not four minutes of the back of a bass's head.
MP4 to MP3 pulls the soundtrack out of the clip and leaves the video behind, so what you circulate is a small audio file rather than a large one people have to stream. It is also the fastest way to turn any concert recording into a practice track.
The Christmas Concert, Filmed Sideways
The volunteer with the phone held it upright, the tripod clamp was on its side, and the result plays as a rotated rectangle with black bars on both edges. It looks wrong on the parish website and worse on the big screen in the hall.
Rotate Video sets the orientation in one pass without a re-encode, so the file quality is the same on the way out as it was going in. Fix it before it goes to the webmaster rather than after somebody comments.
Four Minutes of Anthem Inside Eighty Minutes of Service
The whole service was livestreamed, which is wonderful, and the anthem sits somewhere around the fifty-two minute mark, which is not. Nobody is scrubbing an eighty-minute video to hear the choir.
Trim Video cuts to just the section you want without re-encoding the rest, so the clip you share opens on the introit instead of the notices. Set the in and out points, download, send.
A Choir Photo the Newsletter Will Not Accept
The diocesan newsletter takes submissions through a web form with a 2 MB limit, and the photo from the anniversary service is a 9 MB frame straight off a decent camera.
Resize Image brings the resolution down to something a printed newsletter column will never notice, and the file drops under the cap on the first try. Twenty seconds, and the form stops rejecting you.
Two Children in the Front Row
Half the junior choir has photo permission on file and half does not, and the group shot you want to post has both. The safeguarding officer is right to ask, and cropping them out would leave you with a photo of eleven people and a gap.
Blur Image obscures the faces you select and leaves the rest of the picture alone, so the post can go up with the whole choir in it. Choose the areas, adjust the strength, download a version you can share without a second thought.
The Anthem on the Parish Facebook Page
You have a clean recording of Sunday's anthem as an MP3 and a Facebook page with four hundred followers, and Facebook has never once accepted an audio file.
MP3 to Facebook wraps the recording in your own cover image, a photo of the choir or the east window, and posts the result to your Page as a video. The people who could not make it to the eight o'clock hear the anthem anyway.
Fifteen files, none of them music. Sideways scans, quiet recordings, an attachment cap, a face that needed blurring. All of it sits between Wednesday evening and Sunday morning, in the hours you meant to spend deciding whether the anthem really does want a slower second verse.
Handled in a browser tab, that work takes minutes instead of an evening, and it does not require the parish to buy anything or you to install software on a laptop you share with the flower rota. The time goes back where it belongs. Twenty minutes before the service, in a cold vestry, listening for the first chord to settle.