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!

Build using Earthly

The CI build of this project uses Earthly, which in turn uses container virtualization (e.g. Docker or Podman). You can also run the build locally (if you have Earthly as well as an OCI compatible container engine installed) by executing earthly +build. This will create a container with everything needed for the build, create the package inside it and then copy the results to the directory target for you.