Media Shout vs Easy Worship vs Song Show Plus

Well, the evaluation continues. We finished our trial of Song Show Plus, and frankly we are relieved (sorry jp)! The software, in our hands at least, proved to be cranky and uncooperative. Video played jerkily and we just didn't have confidence that the cues would fire smoothly.

(Having just read over my notes from a few weeks ago, here are the other issues we had with Song Show Plus. Of course, your mileage may vary.)

When playing a PowerPoint file from within SSP, sometimes the first slide would be missing the background, and the slide had to be re-cued. Some PowerPoint transitions were not replicated accurately in SSP. For instance, when doing a text build on a single slide, the fly-ins (fly-ins are Ben's favourites!) would often come in from the wrong direction, at the wrong speed, and sometimes the build would come through in the wrong order, with point three coming before point two. The interface was difficult to get our minds around, and we felt therefore that usability was very poor, particularly for volunteers.

So far, Easy Worship is looking like a strong contender along with, surprise surprise, Media Shout. We are using Media Shout at the moment, and although it has a steep learning curve and a complex interface, not unlike SSP, it is doing everything we want it to. It has crashed occasionally, when alt-tabbing to PowerPoint while a transition is in progress, and we can't get the text templates to work. So there are some niggles.

Any suggestions?