Lyricue Gets Lifted to Higher Ground

LXer Feature: 28-Jun-06 With Lyricue, you can display song lyrics on the wall screens during worship. With Lyricue 1.9.3, you can easily add Bible verses, and manage the display across the network from the comfort of your pew, using a server and a tablet PC running GNU/Linux. Support for two more languages makes Lyricue usable by more people as well.

Putting song lyrics up on a wall screen has been a fairly simple task using Lyricue on GNU/Linux. With the recent release of Lyricue 1.9.3, churches can more easily add Bible verses, change backgrounds, and manage the database. And, if you speak Dutch or Swedish, you'll find Lyricue does too.

Lyricue includes the Bible Navigator, that allows users to quickly and easily pull up Bible verses. When the pastor calls for a verse "on the fly", there's no need to add the verse to the playlist. You can just find and display it. Additionally, the Lyricue supports an improved search feature as well as tray icons for quick access to common tasks. Users can also blank the screen to clear text or reset to the default background.

Churches that use the Christian Copyright License International system can now turn off auditing on individual songs. The CCLI feature allows churches to figure out licensing and whether they might be "over-using" any songs. Users can designate a special song, such as the announcements or any other frequently used item, which is placed first in the list, so it can be found quickly. Likewise, users can do the same with backgrounds and other images.

The new Lyricue further adds MySQL database management to the interface. Lyricue can use MySQL or SQLite. According to Lyricue's developer, Chris Debenham, "Currently MySQL is the main DB, but there is support for using SQLite if you don't want to install a full db (but then you lose the ability to run the interface and server on different machines, or to run multiple interfaces on different machines)." MySQL still needs to be installed and maintained separately, but the Lyricue database can be installed and upgraded from within Lyricue itself.

Debenham initially developed Lyricue for his church in Gosford, Australia. He frequently runs the server and interface on one dual-headed machine running, while running another interface on his tablet PC, and controlling everything with a stylus. The dual-headed machine runs Ubuntu Dapper, while the tablet PC dual boots Ubuntu Dapper and Solaris Express.

Footnotes, Links, etc.

• Download Lyricue
• Lyricue Home Page