Category Archives: Free Software

Open Source Software:– WordPress

wp2Continuing my list of freebie software for churches, this one is a little obvious to anyone who has visited my blog before. WordPress is the software which drives this blog and is also used to run our church website. There are now a growing number of WordPress-Driven Churches all using WordPress to run their website.

By installing WordPress on your domain you can run a website or blog without worrying about technicalities.
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Open Source Software:– Song Projection

There are literally hundreds of song projection programs designed to project song lyrics and control your data projection in church. Most of them are actually pretty poor, with terrible user interfaces and what is more – they cost the earth. At one point I began writing my own, a project still lying incomplete, but then a number of FREE packages began to emerge, some of which are truly open source.

There is absolutely no reason why you should pay 300GBP for software like SongPro to do this. Here are five open source/free candidates that do the job well.

Easislides
The one I think stands out, above all these is EasiSlides, and is my personal favourite at present. The only thing I have to concede is that it isn’t strictly Open Source, but it is FREE.

Also, if you want to use PowerPoint resources, you don’t need Microsoft Office. Use OpenOffice instead – its free!

Found any others? What do you use in church?

Open Source Software:– Audacity

Talking to a few colleagues the other day made me realise that not everybody is aware of the huge potential of Open Source Software, particularly for church use. So I thought I’d create a regular feature here to highlight some of the Open Source tools that I have come across that might be of use in a church setting.Audacity

What is is?

We’ll start with Audacity, a free audio recorder/editor which is pretty hard to beat. Use it to record any audio source, single or multi-track (up to 16 at once if you have the hardware!) and encode to MP3 etc. Lots of editing and effects, including support for VST plugins.

It is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and GNU/Linux.

What would you use this for?

To record, process and publish audio. Record services/sermons and publish them as a podcast.

Learn more

You can check out an introductory video tutorial at helpTelly.

Download Audacity