I'm about to make the switch to OpenLP after using Opensong happily for many years. Ultimately what has made the decision for me has been:
- Some great features: linking to mp3 files, the ability to easily display the desktop without exiting the software (vital for switching between video feed and lyric projection easily), well integrated video and presentations, great remote control feature.
- The active and well organised developer community and the fact that the code is in Python (as opposed to RealBasic!).
What I will miss from Opensong (and so can I add them to the feature requests list?):
- Guitar chords. It would be ideal to only have to manage one database of music, where the musicians are using lead sheets produced by the projection software. This ensures that team members and congregation are all singing from the same hymn sheet... Also, if the OpenLP song file format included chords, it would be pretty straightforward to parse the files and produce nice PDFs complete with chord diagrams (I am presently doing this with Opensong files and a PHP library called FPDF).
- Opensong allows you to organise files into subfolders which means that when selecting songs for a service, you can narrow your search to just hymns, or just children's songs, or just liturgy, etc. Would it be possible to do something similar or alternatively, allow every song in OpenLP to be tagged by one or more tags and then in the main window, allow the user to display just songs with a particular tag/s (perhaps using a drop down box which allows multiple selections)?
One of your design objectives seems to be to enable everything to be done for a service from within one program. Would it be feasible to also include video and audio capture within OpenLP?
We're excited though about switching over - OpenLP does all we need and more than have been able to do until now. Thanks for a really impressive piece of software!
Michael