Adding songs to EasyWorship is a simple process and can be done a few different ways. Typing them in manually or copying and pasting from another document or internet are just a couple of those ways. But, once you have your song in your database, now what? How do you add a background to it? How do you change the font? Where do you adjust the shadow and outline? Do I have to display the copyright information?
These are just some of the questions I will answer for you here. There are many options available for setting up your songs in EasyWorship. These things can be done either globally for all songs in the Options under the Edit menu, or can be accomplished per song using the Inspector in the song editor.
Global Song Settings
To get to the global song settings in EasyWorship that will change all songs using the default settings at once, go to the Edit menu in the top left corner of the main EasyWorship screen and select Options. Then, go to Live > Song. The first option available is the Song Font. When you click the drop-down menu for Song Font, you will see five tabs. Font, Outline, Shadow, Margins, and Format.
Song Font
Font Tab:
Change the default song font name, size, color, and style. At the bottom of the tab, select the vertical and horizontal alignment you would like your song slides to have. If you want to Reset all the song settings back to the global default settings, click Reset in the bottom right corner of this tab.
Outline Tab:
You can set the style, color, join, size and opacity for the default song outline. Style gives you the options for none, outer, center and inner. Join options are round, square or bevel. This means that on any corners of the text the outline will be either rounded, square or beveled. The size of the outline, or the thickness, can be set using the slider or typing in a number manually. If you want the outline to be more transparent, you can lower the opacity.
Shadow Tab:
There are similar settings here as there are in the outline tab, however, there are a couple of different settings. Style and color are also available here, but for the shadow, you can set the angle, where you want the shadow to display from the text. Offset is how far away you want the shadow from the text. Blur is how crisp you want the shadow to be, and opacity is how transparent you want it.
Margins Tab:
You can set a text margin for song slides here. By default, there is a small margin set for the song text so it doesn’t touch the edges of the slide when going live.
Format Tab:
By default, EasyWorship is set to “Resize text to fit element” so that it will always fit inside the slide no matter how little or much text is on the slide. If you don’t want to let EasyWorship auto adjust the size of your songtext, you can select “Do not auto-size text”. As a warning, if you select this option, you will need to also select a font size. You will need to check each slide to make sure your text will fit on the slide with the font size you have selected. If you’re using “Resize text to fit element”, you can also check the box to “Normalize text size across slides” which means that EasyWorship will keep the font the same size on every slide. For example, if EasyWorship needs to shrink the text on one slide because there is more text than what will fit at the default font size, it will also shrink the text on every other slide in that song to match so the font size is consistent throughout the song.
You can also turn other options on or off like Word Wrapping, Capitalize all words, and Capitalize the first word of each line.
The last option on this tab allows you to turn on or off the ability to automatically capitalize the first character of certain words that may be in the song text and were not capitalized but you want to be no matter what. There is a default list of these words like God, Jesus, Him, and You, but you can add and remove words from this list by selecting a word and deleting it or typing in a new word.
Show Verse/Chorus Label
Also in Live > Song, the Verse/Chorus label allows you to name a slide and color code it to make it easier for the operator to tell what a slide is in a live setting. The label can be added to a slide whether this box is checked or not. If it isn’t checked, nothing in the label field of your song slides will be displayed on your live output. If it is checked, everything in the label field of the song slides will also display on the live output. Also, with this box checked, you can select the Label Font drop-down menu and edit the font, outline, and shadow of the label separately from the song text. If you want it to use the same settings as the song text, don’t make any changes to the label font.
To edit or add new labels, select the Labels drop-down menu. In this area, you can edit existing labels’ names, colors, and shortcut keys. You can also add your own custom labels and set the color and shortcut keys.
Copyright Info
By default, EasyWorship will display the copyright info of the songs in the bottom left corner of the slides. You can turn this option off by unchecking this box. If you do want it to display the copyright info, keep the box checked. You can change the copyright font, outline, and shadow by selecting the Copyright Font drop-down menu.
If you have a subscription with CCLI’s SongSelect Lyric Service, when you import a song into EasyWorship, it will automatically add the copyright info to the imported song. To display your CCLI License number, you can type it into the License Info field.
If you only want the copyright info to be displayed on the first displayed slide of the song you’re going live to, check “Show on first displayed slide only”.
To get the top 5 questions asked about copyright and to get more information about the legalities of displaying the copyright information, click here.
