I have just bought a laptop and projector for our Church. We have used an overhead projector for years. We are spoiled because it fills up a 7 x 8 foot screen sitting only about 7 feet away and that makes the whole song easily readable on one trasparancy. I've installed Screen Monkey and Easyslides. Neither one will work on my new 64 bit Vista Laptop . I installed Open Office last night and was getting used to it this morning. It does the dual monitor thing great. It imports Power Points great too! I have worked on and helped other people with thier PCs for years but have never learned PP or Open Office. Was just wanting to try some better made "quick scripture and song presenters" for "on the fly" type usage. I keep thinking about needing to insert scriptures on the fly because my pastor frequently uses scriptures that are not planned. I enjoy looking up scriptures quickly in simple bible programs and would love to put them up on the screen for all to see. I figured out how to cut and paste from e-Sword into a new slide in Open Office and it's rather easy to do, but everybody seems to say that some of these other job specific programs do this and the songs so much easier. BUT, I'm afraid this 64 Bit Vista is going to pose a problem with doing it the cheap way.

I can offer you a good deal on Media Shout - but-- you really need to download a few demos (SongShow, EasyWorship, ForHymn, MediaShout, etc.) and see which works best for you on your system. That would then be the best system for you to invest in. If it's Media Shout, great if it's something else - well, still great

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Ok, I'm going to install it tonight or tomorrow. I downloaded the 3.5 version. Price is very steep. Might download Express so I don't get used to something that is in the full version.
Open song worked this evening. Way easier than a Power Point or Open Office Impress 3 so I would think the pricy ones are awesome!


Thanks

We used OpenSong for a couple of months, and for what it does, it's great! For songs and scriptures, it's looks are very close to the commercial products.

Last I checked though, ppt and video integration weren't there yet, meaning you'd have to switch back and forth if you're using PPT for say sermons and/or announcements.

Currently I'm using Open Song. It has the ability to add text slides, which I use for sermon point. But I definetly miss the video integration of a higher end program.

You're probably going to find x64 support pretty lacking and a little touchy at the best of time. I work in the IT department for a large corporation with 25+ factories and 25+ sales branches. Some of our bigger locations have hundreds of PCs.

I have the only desktop PC in the entire corporation with an x64 OS (XP x64) and a lot of software either doesn't work with it or doesn't work properly with it. Drivers are often a problem as well. Windows 7 was originally supposed to be x64 only but it looks like it will have an x86 flavor.

As for worship software, there's lots of great ones. The 3 I like are:

- Easy Worship: Easiest to use (train someone in 10 minutes), does scripture on the fly better than the others in my opinion, has a site license, has the least number of features out of 3 but still works great. We use this at our church because of its simplicity.

- MediaShout: More features than Easy Worship, somewhat harder to use (a good 2 to 3 hours of training), I find the UI clumbsy for some things (especially song entry), strikes a good balance between features and ease of use.

- SongShowPlugs: Mega features, it will do anything you could ever want it to do an 100 times more, not for the faint of heart, use for a highly media-driven church where you have a dozen geeky teens at your disposal for the projection team.

All three are great products and there are other great products out there as well. I've only ever tried one that I absolutely loathed and found so buggy and cumbersome it was not usable.

We use Easy Worship and love it. We have a 12-year-old running it now (been running it since he was 10). I showed a 13-year-old how to run it in 45 seconds and she ran it just fine. If I had access to a bigger tallent pool of computer-savvy teens I'd be running MediaShout. But since I could need to train someone without a high degree of computer skills in under 10 minutes so Easy Worship it is.

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I'm not a Windows fan by any means, but I will say that Vista x64 seems to be way more stable than XP 64 ever was/is/will be.

One of my laptops is running Vista Ultimate x64 as well as Easislides and Screen Monkey and I haven't had any problems whatsoever. Will they not run or are you having other issues?

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I just got a new Dell PC with Vista 64 and I am so far very happy with it. I run Media Shout, Adobe CS4 and Office 2007 and have yet have had no problems. I went with the 64 bit version because I want to be able to take advantage of the increased memory. I put 8G in it and Adobe screams. I do not expect to much too put much more than that on it though.

The XP x64 system is actually quite stable - I've got no complaints there. What I have had trouble with is running a variety of software packages and installing some drivers. A lot of them are network management utilities and some older (but useful) apps. Initially I couldn't even run our corporate antivirus package, although a lot of viri wouldn't run on x64 either

I also have some older hardware devices that just won't work and never will work on x64 so I keep an x86 box around for that.

Over time, I have found more and more applications and hardware devices are catching up. x64 is getting to be very usable but there are a lot of things that don't and never will work with it. Your millage may vary.

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That was one of the reasons why I became a die-hard NT fan back in the days when 95 and 98 was the "in" thing. Prior to the 5th service pack, people who were creating viruses and chat room booting programs couldn't touch me.

While we are on the topic, does the 64-bit versions of windows have 32-bit compatability mode? One thing that I liked about Microsoft was that they always promised backward compatability to a certain degree and even though some of my older software will not run on XP Pro, most of it will work with the "Windows98 Compatability" feature.

It's kind of disappointing when doing an upgrade makes things worse.

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Shayward, I guess I should have rephrased that. XP 64 is stable, so long as you are running a 64 bit app. As far as drivers, I know what you mean there. I use to have a XP 64 box in my home studio running Sonar 5 x64 and that was quite a combination, but when it came time for drivers for new hardware (ie, interface) good night.

@ Ted, couldn't find the actual article in Microsoft's archives, but this pretty much sums it up.

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-Jake
Media Coordinator -NVM

x64 does have compatibility mode, but it can be touch and go. 16-bit apps are an absolute, total forget it. I even have one music notation program (32-bit) that won't run on XP in compatibility mode. Sometimes the API functions are just plain gone.

Anything (hardware, apps, etc.) going forward should be fine.

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