Open Song review???

[Johnnycat]

Is there anyone here that has used OpenSong on a first hand experience? If so can you tell me about it? This is not to be a flame war, I'm only interested in OpenSong because it is free...we don't have the $$$ for others.

Thanks

My church and youth ministry recently switched to Opensong (8 months ago) and we are quite happy with a few exceptions.

- The Chorus in all songs, if you call it a chorus, it shows it in Italics, there is no option to turn this off or anything, so I have to call all my chorus' _C instead of C.

- Depending on the font you are using it can be slow to load a next verse/page. We use Akbar for youth and Helevetica for Church and they are both fine, with a split second delay, which is good if you are using the keyboard instead of mouse and want to skip a page

- Really Good Single Monitor and Deal Monitor outputs, Dual is obvisouly the desired effect.

- If there is one makor problem I have, is that we already ahve 3 LCD Monitors on our bench already, and it will be cramped with more, so I don't have a preview/confidence monitor, the data goes straight into our Newtek Tricaster. So you can check for connectivity, but you can't really check word for word.

- Lumped in with the above situation is the scripture display, which works well, but could be implemented better, 2 problems there, you can't preview the scripture you are about to throw up on the screen live, and if you choose verses 2-8, yet there is only room for 7-8 fonts permitting, then it will show 77-8 instead of 2-3 or whatever you might prefer.

- The Logo Display function, once you are in presentation mode, throws the opensong logo in front of your logo, thus makiing the logo function useless.

- And one final "problem" is in songs and slides there are extra feilds, i.e. copyright, author etc etc, you can't disable any of these boxs, or put them together, so my solution is to black text them, and they just get chroma keyed out on the tricaster.

So the above lsit is a list of idosyncracies that have annoyed me, but we work around them, and over all the program works really well and has been presenting our words for 8 months or so.

I think the reason i like opensong a lot is because my church at my home town used Presenter, which is an australian product made by Discovery Systems and Opensong operates in a similar method, one I havent found with other programs.

If I want to show a Powerpoint presentation I'll open powerpoint, and If I have a movie I will transfer it to the Virtual VCR on the Tricaster along with our other backgrounds etc. So the extra features of some presentation programs overwhelm me as an IT guy, and all I see is bloatware.

Opensong does one thing good and thats displays text on a monitor, I take it through the tricaster/any other scaler etc here, and display it on my projector, no frills, job odne.

[[Admin] danroth]

Originally Posted by Josh Withers

Opensong does one thing good and thats displays text on a monitor

I've tried out open song and I'd have to say that this is my evaluation of it also.

[Johnnycat]

Wow, thanks for the review!!! Seems like it isn't too bad, just some hurdles to get through...can you import PowerPoint slide presentations into it? That is the biggest thing, all the pastors use PP for their messages, so I need to be able to import it. Also how does it handle motion backgrounds?

Thanks
John

No, it doesnt touch powerpoint slides, to reiterate my point about what opensong odes well, text, it doesnt do much else, you can have image backgrounds, but everything else you do yourself, which suits me personally down to a tee, let the words computer do words only and I'll do the rest with my other tools.

[Johnnycat]

Any thought on OpenLP? I just found it tonight.

[kbob]

though opensong much more. I personally like one trick ponies-do one thing well.

Though in the case of opensong, it does have three other redeeming qualities.

1-it does also do chord sheets, with both transpositions and capos. Given that it is free and cross platform (it currently works on both windows and mac). Great for giving to the MoM and musicians. Since the song database is generated from individual song files (basically a customized xml format) at every boot, the MoM can just hand you a floppy with the weeks new songs-no more retyping.

2-it can print song sets-great for the musicians, singers, and the av team so they can all be on (literally) the same page.

3-very good Bible support.
For what its worth-the text over images looks great-probably the best of seen shy of easy worship.

The keyboard shortcuts are comprehensive, and it may be nearly as easy for volunteers to pick up as easy worship.

I'm not sure about the future of integration with ppt-this is an open source (sourceforge) project, and they take the gpl thing VERY serouisly. There have been requests to integrate with impress from open office, but no release with that feature has been made. Video support won't be there until version 2 starts beta.

Neither of these two shortcomings bothered me-I was ready to choose it over EW myself-but our volunteers decided they liked being able to run everything from one program, instead of 2.

As for Open LP-already has ppt integration and video support. One other advantage over Opensong-you can edit the songs while you are projecting.

There is a very good discussion/review of both programs, as well as zionworks, at the opensong forum:

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.p...orum_id=373378

[[Admin] osborn4]

I never could figure out why PPT integration was such a big deal I find it very easy to switch back and forth between our presentation software and ppt.

But I'm a geek and most of our volunteers really like having everything in one program so they can just go through the program.

So, I guess it is a useful feature. But it can work fine without it.

The way we would do it is to load 2 sessions of PPT, one with the announcement loop and one with the sermon notes and minimize them. Then we would fire up our presentation software (being purposefully ambigious here, brand shouldn't matter) and display some sort of general graphic.

Then we'd switch to the announcement loop and display that show. When the pastor started the service, we would hit the escape key, to end the ppt presentation, and switch back to the presentation software for the songs and such. The graphic would reappear on the screen as soon as we ended the ppt show.

When it came time for the sermon, we'd queue up a general graphic in the presentation software, then switch to the ppt of the sermon notes and display them.

Escape at the end of them and back to the presentation software for the final hymn then back to the announcement loop for post service.

So it can be done. You just have to be in touch with your inner geek to have fun with it.

[Carl Godsoe]

Originally Posted by osborn4

I never could figure out why PPT integration was such a big deal I find it very easy to switch back and forth between our presentation software and ppt...So it can be done. You just have to be in touch with your inner geek to have fun with it.

I take it one step further with hardware: Computer "A" for the presentation software; Computer "B" for PPT; and if necessary, Computer "C" for whatever else. All the switching is done with a switcher/scaler (which I can also throw in DVD, VCR, and live video). Simplifies my life sooooooo much! It also affords the ability to edit on "A" while showing "B" or vice/versa. Of course I can edit on "A" (worship software) while showing "A", but I have yet to figure out how to do that in PPT on "B".

Originally Posted by osborn4

I never could figure out why PPT integration was such a big deal I find it very easy to switch back and forth between our presentation software and ppt.

....

So it can be done. You just have to be in touch with your inner geek to have fun with it.

Somehow I feel at ease knowing there are others like me

[kbob]

Originally Posted by Carl Godsoe

I take it one step further with hardware: Computer "A" for the presentation software; Computer "B" for PPT; and if necessary, Computer "C" for whatever else. All the switching is done with a switcher/scaler (which I can also throw in DVD, VCR, and live video). Simplifies my life sooooooo much! It also affords the ability to edit on "A" while showing "B" or vice/versa. Of course I can edit on "A" (worship software) while showing "A", but I have yet to figure out how to do that in PPT on "B".

exactly! To me, keep it simple means using more hardware instead of software.
Where possible use a second computer for ppt, and pre-load all videos (as some others have noted, we don't use video backgrounds-too distracting-per a few members of the congregation) to dvd for playback on a stand alone dvd player. We use the often maligned videonics switcher to change between the sources. mind you, as already mentioned in this post-the volunteers aren't comfortable with using different computers, they prefer having everything in one program. Personally, I think it creates as many problems as it solves-you can't be editing the ppt while it is loaded into a schedule without having very unpredictable results, for instance.

But they are my volunteers-I guess I gave them enough confidence to have their own opinions!

[Johnnycat]

Thanks for all the input...currently we are using just a PowerPoint presentation (welcome slide, music slides, etc..) that has two hyperlinks in it, one for the announcement slides and then one for the message. And this has been working fine for us, and might be all we need at this time. However, I wanted to branch out and try some of the free software to see if we can expand the video production. The reason behind the PPT integration is for the other "not so technical" folks on the video team and for the pastors who create the messages in PPT, I need to keep things as simple as possible.