Songs

This page covers the song library, the song editor's sections and arrangement, importing from OpenLP, and the rule that turns lyrics into slides.

#The song library

Find songs from Add to Service → Songs, or from the Songs tab wherever a song picker appears. Type in Search songs… to filter by title or author. Hover a song to reveal Edit (pencil) and Delete (trash) buttons; click the song itself, or its +, to add it to the current service.

#Creating and editing a song

Click New (or New Song from the toolbar) to open the song editor, or the pencil icon on an existing song to edit it. The editor has two halves:

Left — metadata and sections

Below that, Sections are color-coded blocks, each with a label (type your own, or pick from the suggested list — e.g. Verse 1, Chorus, Bridge — via Add Section) and a lyrics box. Drag or use the ↑ / ↓ buttons to reorder sections, and the trash icon to delete one.

Right — Default Arrangement

Click a section in the palette to append it to the play order; sections can repeat (click the same one again). Use ↑ / ↓ to reorder the arrangement, the + to duplicate an entry, or ✕ to remove one. This is the default order the song plays in; when you add the song to a service, that service gets its own copy of the arrangement that you can freely reorder for that week without touching the song itself — see Services for the per-service arrangement editor.

Create Song / Save Changes finishes the edit.

#Importing songs

Import OpenLP (next to the search box in the Songs tab) reads an OpenLP songs.sqlite database and imports every song it doesn't already have — matched by title, so it's safe to run more than once. It carries over authors, copyright, CCLI number, lyrics, and OpenLP's own verse order as the default arrangement.

#How songs become slides

A song's lyrics turn into slides automatically, using its sections:

• Each section normally becomes one slide.
• A section marker can be a bracketed header ([Verse 1]) or a plain line like "Verse 1" or "CHORUS:" — both are recognized.
• A line that only says to repeat a section — "(Repeat Chorus)", "Repeat chorus x2" — isn't shown as its own slide; it re-plays that section in place.
• A section longer than the Lines per slide setting (Settings → Slides & Bibles → Lines per slide, default 6) splits across multiple slides, preferring to break on a blank line in the lyrics; a labelled section that splits shows as "Verse 1 (1/2)", "Verse 1 (2/2)", and so on.

#Related pages

• Services — adding a song to a service and reordering its per-service arrangement
• Presenting — how the resulting slides actually go out to the projector and stream