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lyrics presentation on a digital projector, e.g. for church services

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Song Database

The Song Database is a program to show lyrics on a digital projector for worship in a congregation. It can also display calendar events or a slide show.

Features:

  • runs on nearly all systems because it is a Java application
  • presentation control window shown separately from actual presentation(s) (which means your graphics card has to have two or three outputs)
    • you have a control monitor to display the database and the presentation control while the seperate projection screen shows only the content which the congregation (or the worship team, respectively) wants to see - no confusion, very professional
  • show or hide the song title for the audience
  • guitar chords can be included in the database, but will not be shown when presenting songs to the congregation - but they are useful when printing song sheets and for displaying the lyrics including the chords to the worship team on a separate monitor
  • english user interface
  • fonts and colors are customizable
  • you can add remarks to every song
  • easy song search/filtering - just type a part of the title or the text
  • show the song beginnings in the song list (additionally to the song title) - you can find songs faster in spontaneous worship sessions
  • image slides possible in worship, among normal song texts
  • image slide show possible for announcements, e.g. before or after the service
  • remote usage possible using MQTT, there's also an Android app for controlling SDB2

Why use this software and not Powerpoint?

  • the database format is not binary, but XML (essentially a text file) - you can easily modify it manually if you wish, synchronize it using any cloud service or even put it into a Git repository (producing nice diffs)
  • the days on which a song is presented are counted automatically (in a separate statistics file) so you have the data ready when the collecting society wants to know which songs you used
    • you can export the statistics to an Excel file
  • the song texts are displayed continually, not on individual slides, so everyone sees how the song continues after the current part
    • animated transition when displaying another part of a song
    • fade effect when displaying another song (with configurable fade duration)

Getting started

  • download the latest SDB2 release (use the file named sdb2-... which corresponds to your system), unpack it and look for a batch file or shell script in the bin subdirectory
    • if you're on MacOS you have to install Java by yourself (use the most current version) and use sdb2-without-jre.zip

Contributing

The program has evolved since 2005 at Koinonia Calvary Chapel Hannover. If you find a bug or want a new feature, you are welcome to file an issue or even fix things yourself and create a pull request!