There are literally hundreds of song projection programs designed to project song lyrics and control your data projection in church. Most of them are actually pretty poor, with terrible user interfaces and what is more – they cost the earth. At one point I began writing my own, a project still lying incomplete, but then a number of FREE packages began to emerge, some of which are truly open source.
There is absolutely no reason why you should pay 300GBP for software like SongPro to do this. Here are five open source/free candidates that do the job well.
The one I think stands out, above all these is EasiSlides, and is my personal favourite at present. The only thing I have to concede is that it isn’t strictly Open Source, but it is FREE.
Also, if you want to use PowerPoint resources, you don’t need Microsoft Office. Use OpenOffice instead – its free!
Found any others? What do you use in church?
Toby 
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We use OpenSong, primarily because it is open source, which is important to me (although not necessarily to the church). Sadly the development is quite slow, and there is no powerpoint integration, which is a pain. But I like the layout and usage of it very much.
There is also http://www.dreambeam.de it is open source and easy to use. At the moment I use the Version 0.6 beacuse 0.7 is still a littel bit buggy.
At last! Some decent Open Source presentation software. I have searched so long to find this. Thank you so much.
I really dislike the way PowerPoint fails the church community and cringe at some of the work arounds we have to put in place to try and fake presentation software because we can’t afford it.
I’ll let you know how we get on.
Thank you.
I’m using dreambeam also but I’m looking around for something better I’m a strong advocate of free software for worship and church.
I’d really like somethign with a wiki style markup that can render into a single continuous screen for viewing.
We do use a specialized piece of presentation software at our church but the name escapes me right now. I am in the process of setting up a digital announcement board which will run on an old computer I’m setting up at the church. I was planning on using PowerPoint to display our information but hoped to find something a little more flexible.
We use open song. l think it’s great as you can also produce lead sheets and transpose songs. l chose it as the functions were better than comercial products at the time. There is also a good range of bible versions to download. 0ur pastor is particularly happy to have the amplified version.
We use Easislides and have for years. Overall it works very well. It was designed to allow bilingual lyrics so if you have a multi-ethnic congregation Easislides is a truly great gift to the Church. It was created by Wai Kuen Mo, a Chinese Christian in Ireland for his church and then shared on the web. Easislides has good PowerPoint integration and the ability to handle WMV and other video media. There are a great many Bible versions available for projection and a strong users group. At our church we have developed an extended database of song lyrics the way we sing ‘em including original songs. This is easy to do in Easislides.
I just tried EasiSlides and the screen shots looked good, but it crashes when it is run on Windows 7. Anyone else had this problem? Doesn’t seem to have been updated in nearly three years now too… (Dec 07)
I have it running in Windows 7 without a problem.
We use open song. it’s great software and easy to use and the functions were better.
We use zionworks in our church, and it works fairly well. I want to find something better because Zionworks has no spell check.
[...] Living Open Source Open Source Software Song Projection Posted by root 2 hours 10 minutes ago (http://livingos.com) Oct 6 2006 the one i think stands out above all these is easislides and is my personal open source software storyboard your next av with celtx 9 comments on the comment wall powered by wordpress and the eta theme Discuss | Bury | News | Living Open Source Open Source Software Song Projection [...]
Hey, thanks. My church were looking for something like this. Maybe I’ll tell them to check these stuff. We’re currently using EasyWorship.
Thanks for putting this up. Open source is the way to go. It’ll help especially when you need to do some customization work.
Thanks so much.
Really a great . Awesome. Thank you so much!
[...] Living Open Source » Open Source Software:– Song Projection [...]
I like Open Source Software because it can deverlop and used free
I too prefer Easislides but like you stated its not free so I tend to go with open source.
We use zionworks in our church, and it works fairly well. I want to find something better because Zionworks has no spell check.
We use ExpoSong (http://exposong.org) which is really easy to use and simple. It’s also open source and still being developed.
Just a heads up to another open source alternative I’m developing at the moment, Quelea (http://quelea.org). It’s still under active development and should probably be considered pre-release software at present, but it’s got a number of features that aren’t included elsewhere such as spell check, video support, ability to import songs from things like the survivor songbooks, ability to manage chords and that sort of thing. It’s also designed to be really easy to use. If anyone has any feedback or other features you’d like included then I’m more than willing to take suggestions on board.