Service sound for a rotating team of volunteers

The operator is whoever said yes

This is the distinguishing feature of the job and everything follows from it. Nobody on the rotation is a sound engineer, most have done it under five times, and the person who set it up is not there on the morning it goes wrong. So the machine has to be already right when it is switched on: set the startup to the starred order of service and it opens loaded, in order, with nothing to find and nothing to choose. The first thing a volunteer does is press play, which is also the last thing they need to know.

There is no login, and that is the point

A shared account is a password on a sticky note, and eventually a password that has been changed by someone who has left. There is no account here at all — no sign-in, no seat, no per-user anything. The license lives on the machine, not on a person, so a team of fifteen volunteers needs nothing issued to any of them.

Stone buildings do not have signal

A great many church buildings have thick walls, no usable cell signal and wifi that reaches the office and nowhere else. Software that checks a license, syncs a library or streams anything is software that fails in the one room it is needed in. This makes no network calls whatsoever — there is nothing to check, so there is nothing to fail. It works identically in a hall with fiber and a chapel with neither.

Print it for whoever is on next week

Print the order with every item, its length and the running total, plus a table of the pad wall and what each one holds. That sheet is the handover: it is what you leave on the desk, what the person doing it next week reads, and what you file with the service plan. The paper and the screen say the same thing because one generates the other.

And it costs once

Bought outright rather than per month, so it does not become a subscription line somebody has to justify at a meeting in three years. Charities and places of worship can ask for a discount — there is a form for it, and it is not means-tested theater.

Our volunteers are not technical. How much is there to learn?

The list is the order of service and one key plays the next item. Everything else — fades, pads, banks — is optional and can be set up once by whoever is comfortable doing it, then never touched again by anyone else.

The building has no internet. Is that a problem?

No. The application never connects to anything, including for its license. It behaves the same on a machine that has never been online.

Is there a discount for a church or a charity?

Yes — ask on the discounts page and say what you run. It is a short form and a person reads it.