OpenWorship

Wherever there’s a large group of individuals, presentations can help deliver a message properly to be understood by the majority. In this regard, OpenWorship wants to help you build, and run church presentations in real time, with options to configure playlists, lyrics, and more.

One of the application’s main advantages is it can be used on other types of operating systems, since it requires Java Runtime Environment in order to function. You’re not involved in a setup process to make it work, and thus at liberty to carry it around on a thumb drive, along with all created content.

Two components show up on launch. One of them is the editor, while the other represents the output screen. This comes in handy when working with a connected projector, or second monitor, because the output window can be resized, moved around, and even forced into a fullscreen mode for better visualization.

As far as editing is concerned, all categories, and preview areas are shown in plain sight, allowing you to manipulate resources in real time. A setlist needs to be created first, which can also be saved to file in case you want to use in other presentations later on. The setlist can contain multiple songs, each with customizable lyrics.

Unfortunately, the application doesn’t come with a built-in player. In fact, songs have nothing to do with any audio files on your computer, which need to be handled separately if you want to include audio background in your presentations.

Adding songs only requires you to specify title, author, and text. Lyrics are shown in the output window right on selection. Related options let you set slide time for songs, or even change the background either to a different color tone, or a picture.

Bottom line is that presentations need to be fitted with multimedia elements in a pleasant manner to reach out to the public. OpenWorship wants to enable this for church presentations, but is rather underprepared for what it wants to accomplish. With no option to play audio files, the playlist editor has little practicality, other than showing custom text in an output window.