Songbee

What is Songbee?

In many churches, hymnbooks are on the out and computer projection of worship song lyrics are coming in. Some churches use Microsoft's Powerpoint to do this, but there are problems with Powerpoint. The main one is that a Powerpoint presentation is linear - you go from one slide to the next until you get to the end of the presentation.

But songs are not linear, and worship less so; you have a verse, then a chorus, then another verse, and then the worship leader might choose to go back to verse 1, or sing the chorus, or sing the bridge. If you're using Powerpoint you have to flick around between slides when something unexpected like that happens.

Songbee is a dedicated projection tool, which allows you to say "go to next chorus", "skip to next song", "go back to previous song in playlist", and so on.

For more about how to use Songbee, including some screen shots, see the manual.

What should I use instead of Songbee?

Songbee is designed for a particular situation, the Japanese church. There are many better alternatives to Songbee, which do not attempt to solve the unique problems of displaying Japanese song lyrics. If you are not going to be displaying Japanese text, you are encouraged to use one of the following instead:

• Easislides. It's Windows only, it's fully bilingual, (although it doesn't support Japanese ruby) it makes songbooks, it's got Bible text integration, and it's very pretty. If you're using Windows and you don't care about free software, and it does what you want, use this.
• openlp.org. It has a silly name, it's Windows only, it's open source, it does Bible text integration and Powerpoint integration, and it's very pretty, although it doesn't support Japanese ruby, and because I can't develop on Windows, I couldn't make it do so. If Easislides doesn't do what you want, use this.
• Opensong. This is Windows and Mac. It's open source. It's really good, although it doesn't support Japanese ruby, and it seemed like an awful lot of work to make it do so and besides I don't understand Realbasic. If neither Easislides nor openlp.org does what you want, use this.
• Lyricue. This is Linux only(!) and does all the usual stuff. As usual it doesn't support Japanese ruby, and I couldn't be bothered to make it do so because my target audience wouldn't be using Linux anyway. If you're a complete Linux-head, use this.
• Zionworx. This was written by a friend of a friend. I haven't tried it. It's not open source. It's Windows only.

Downloading Songbee

	Windows 1.0 Final release. (Requires XP or above)
	OS X 1.0b release. (Fixes XUL library dependency thing)
	Unix 1.0 Final release
	Manual (PDF)

Development

Songbee development, trouble ticketing, and source code is available at Songbee trac.

Songbee is released under the terms of the GNU GPL version 2. If that's insufficiently free for what you need to do, please mail me to make other arrangements.