How To Auto-Advance Song Lyric Slides With Audio Tracks

I have talked before in a previous blog about alternative ways of leading worship without a band and mentioned attaching audio tracks to your song lyrics in EasyWorship. What I would like to do in this blog is show you how you can attach an audio track to a song in EasyWorship and have the lyrics advance automatically on cue with the audio track.

What this will allow you to do is set up your song lyrics with audio and when you’re ready, go live to it in EasyWorship and the audio track for the song will play and the lyrics will follow along automatically without needing someone at the computer advancing the slides manually. You will need to find your own audio tracks for your songs, and whether you want songs with accompaniment only or if you want the vocals with it.

For this example, I have an audio track of the song, Amazing Grace, and I have added it to my Audio Library in my Media tab in EasyWorship. I also have the song lyrics for Amazing Grace in my Song Library in EasyWorship.

The first thing you will want to do when setting up the song for auto-advancing with the audio track is turning off the slide-to-slide transitions in EasyWorship. You don’t have to do this, but it will make it much easier to set the timings for the slides with transitions off. If you leave them on, you will have to subtract the transition time from the slide timing. For instance, if you have a half-second slide transition, you will need to subtract that from the timing you have for each slide. Turning the transitions off just makes it easier.

Turning Off Transitions

You can turn the transitions off globally for all songs or you can turn them off per song. To turn them off globally, open EasyWorship and go to Edit > Options > Transitions and set the Slide Transitions to None. To turn them off per song, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Songs tab
2. Right-click the song you want to use
3. Select Edit Song
4. In the song editor, click Inspector in the top right corner
5. Select Transition and set it to None
6. Close the Inspector if you want to or move it out of the way since we will come back to it in a little bit

Attaching The Audio Track

To attach the audio track to the song, while you’re in the song editor, follow these steps:

1. Click on the Masters tab
2. Click the Media button on the toolbar
3. Click the selector dropdown and select Audio
4. Select the audio track you want to attach to the song
5. Open the Inspector from the top right corner
6. Select Media at the bottom of the Inspector window
7. Next to Media Usage, select Background (This will allow the audio track to continue playing even when slides are changed. If you don’t select Background, the audio track will restart every time a slide is changed.)
8. Next to Repeating, select Repeat Off (This will prevent the audio track from starting over automatically once it gets to the end.)

Setting The Slide Timings

To set the timings for the slide, while still in the song editor, follow these steps:

1. Click on the Words or Slides tabs (Either one will work. You just need to be able to see the individual slides in that song.)
2. Click on the first slide and in the Inspector, select Slide
3. Under Advance Slide, change the Advance selection to Automatically
4. Enter in the timing for how long you want the first slide to appear on the screen (The timing field, 00:00.00, is formatted in minutes, seconds, milliseconds. For example, if verse 1 is 28 seconds on the audio track before the chorus starts, you will enter 00:28.00 in the timing field for the first slide.)
5. Click on slide 2 on the left side of the editor
6. Under Slide in the Inspector, repeat steps 3 and 4

Continue following these steps for the rest of the slides in your song until you get to the last slide. The last slide doesn’t need a timing set on it and doesn’t need to be auto-advanced. Once you’re finished entering in all the timings, you can click OK on the song editor to save that song in your library.

Since the song was edited from the song library, these settings only need to be entered one time and once you save it, it will remain there until you edit it again or delete it.

Where Can I Get The Audio Tracks For My Songs?

As I mentioned in a previous blog, there are a lot of different styles of music. So, one church might sing “Amazing Grace” in a country style, where another church might sing it in a pop or jazz style. This is where you will have to find a source for audio tracks either online or have a band record something for you. There are links to a couple of websites I’ve found in my searching for audio tracks that might get you on your way to finding the audio files you need that you can find in my blog Worship Band Alternatives.