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 slide show possible for announcements, e.g. before or after the service

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 an executable in the bin subdirectory
  • if you're on MacOS you have to install Java 17 or later by yourself 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!