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VideoPsalm

 

Transfer songs from one PC to another

6/24/2022

50 Comments

 
This topic describes 4 methods to transfer and synchronize VideoPsalm songs from one PC to another.
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Method 1
Use the VideoPsalm backup/restore feature

In a common situation, you have VideoPsalm installed on your home PC, and on the church PC.

The initial setup follows more or less these steps:

On your home PC
1. Install VideoPsalm.
2. Add predefined songbooks.
3. Add Bibles.
4. Assign style attributes, like font, size, alignment, colors, animations, etc.
5. Type-in some songs.
6. etc.
7. Using VideoPsalm's integrated Backup/Restore functions, backup the VideoPsalm documents to a USB stick.

On your church PC
You want to get exactly the same setup as the one you have at home.
1. Install VideoPsalm.
2. Using VideoPsalm's integrated Backup/Restore functions, restore the USB stick backup to the church PC.
Additional read:
How to backup VideoPsalms' data or start it from a USB stick (portable VideoPsalm)

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Method 2
Transfer the songbooks directly

VideoPsalm stores each songbook in a file on your hard drive.
A handy way to transfer songbooks from one PC to another, is to copy their files from one PC to the other, for example via a USB stick.

To easily locate the songbooks on your hard drive, open the VideoPsalm options, and press the “Explore” button:
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Your songbooks are located in the “Songbooks” sub-folder.
Copy the songbooks onto a USB stick.
On the church PC, paste your USB stick songbooks to the corresponding VideoPsalm folder.
With method 2 (compared to method 1), you will want to manually copy the “Songbooks” and the “Base” style files located in the VideoPsalm document folder, stored in following files:
  • SongBookStyle.json
  • RootStyle.json
This will ensure that your songs at church will get displayed with the same “Songbooks” and “Base” styles as at home.

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Method 3
Use an agenda

This solution comes in handy when you have only a few songs to transfer.
It is something that will happen on a weekly basis.
1. On your home PC, type-in new songs and make song corrections.
2. Put all new or edited songs into an agenda.
3. Save the agenda onto a USB stick.

An agenda contains all that is needed to reproduce your presentation identically on another PC: 
  • Songs with their lyrics
  • Styles (the backgrounds, styles at different levels)
  • Songbooks definitions
  • Styles (Songbooks, Bibles, Base)
  • Slideshow images
  • Standalone videos
  • PowerPoints 
  • etc. 

4. On the church PC, open the agenda from the USB stick.
VideoPsalm will automatically:
  • Add to your church PC all the agenda songs, in particular those that are not yet there.
  • Create the potential new songbooks.
  • Add the song backgrounds to the image and video galleries.
  • If the songs are already on the church PC, their lyrics and other attributes are replaced by those from the agenda, depending on how you set up the “Agenda open” options on the church PC:
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“Agenda Open” options
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Preserve the text of my songbooks and Bibles
When this option is active, VideoPsalm does not replace the song lyrics on the church PC with those from the agenda (those from the home PC).
In case the church PC misses one or more songs from the agenda, VideoPsalm adds them to its songbooks, and, if necessary, creates the corresponding songbooks, regardless of the state of agenda open options.

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Preserve the styles of my songbooks and Bibles
When this option is active, VideoPsalm does not replace the styles of songs on the church PC by those from the agenda (those from the home PC).

Note  The “Agenda open” options are turned off by default. 
However, it is advised to turn these options on on the church PC, in order to protect the church song lyrics, their styles, etc. against changes propagated from your home PC through agendas, week after week.
Consider following example
Someone prepares an agenda on his home PC. Among the songs, one is called “King of kings”. In our example, this song contains an accidentally mistyped title “King of all kings”. There are possibly other misspellings in the lyrics.
To prevent these errors to propagate to the church PC, enable the “Preserve the text of my songbooks and Bibles” option on the church PC.

In case your shields are both set, only new songs will be added to your church PC. Songs that already exist on your church PC won't get modified.

4. Finally, save the changes produced by opening the agenda:
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If you forget to save your changes, VideoPsalm will remind you about it when you close it.

Note that the songbooks and the Bibles only take little space on your hard drive: 
A songbook with hundreds of songs occupies about a quarter of the space occupied by a photo. 
A Bible takes about as much space as a photo.

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Method 4
Use a service like Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive

This requires an internet connection for both your home and church PCs.
Solution overview
1. Move your home PC VideoPsalm document folder into a Dropbox folder and make VideoPsalm point to this folder via its options.
2. Setup your church PC VideoPsalm document folder to the same Dropbox folder.
3. At church, wait until Dropbox finishes to sync its files before you open VideoPsalm.

Detailed instructions
To sync songs between multiple computers, you can use a service like Dropbox or any other similar cloud solution.

VideoPsalm usually stores its songbook files in the following folder:
C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm

To setup your VideoPsalm to sync with Dropbox:

1. With a File Explorer, copy the "C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm" folder and its whole content into a Dropbox folder.

2. Start VideoPsalm.
It will load its documents (songbooks, Bibles, images, videos, etc.) from the usual location, namely from:
C:\Users\Public\Documents\VideoPsalm


3. In its settings, tell VideoPsalm to load its files from the Dropbox location:
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4. Click “OK” and confirm that you now want VideoPsalm to load its settings from this Dropbox folder.
The next time that you start VideoPsalm, it will remember to load its documents from this new location.

5. Proceed from step 3 on all PCs that you want to sync your songbooks with.
Additional points and remarks
  • You will need to "share" your Dropbox VideoPsalm folder with the other PCs, so that they get the changes from the other PCs.
  • Make sure that the changes from other PCs are propagated onto the PC before you start VideoPsalm.
  • Modify documents (songs, settings, etc.) only on one PC at any given time, or else Dropbox will create a copy of the songbook, giving it a filename including the date and time of the conflict.
    (This enables you to identify at what time the conflict happen.)
50 Comments

How to adjust slide text margins / lower third display

3/21/2022

42 Comments

 
A slide has 3 text areas:
  1. the body, which displays the song verse text (or a Bible verse),
  2. the header
  3. and the footer.
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Area 4: VideoPsalm can display musical chords over the lyrics, this is a 4th text area.
This is how it looks like for a song verse:
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Usually, the header of song verses is not used, and is empty. The footer is used instead.

​Lower third: This is how it can look like with a green background and a relocated body area:
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This is how it looks like for a Bible verse:
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The header and the footer both can display text formatted according to templates/fields related to the body content, either from the song, the songbook or the Bible, etc.
See also
Edit the footer and header content or remove-it
Show the song slide rank/number in the footer

To set the size and the location of the body area:

1. Select the “Songbooks” style level (respectively for Bibles the “Bibles” style level):
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2. Press the highlighted button ("Display the resize rectangle" button):
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In the popup dialog, use the mouse to resize the body, header and footer area:
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Grab the corners to resize the relocation rectangle.
You can also resize it by grabbing the middle of a segment.
Before you move or resize the rectangle, make sure that you do it at the proper style level:
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VideoPsalm uses the concept of cascading style attributes, enabling you to define any style attribute at any level: song verse, song, songbook, all songbooks, base.
The flexibility of cascading styles
Automatic style level switching
How to correct a style mistake?
How to change the background of a song or a whole songbook - Cascading styles part one
How to assign a background to a song verse or to the whole song - Cascading styles part two
Three methods to display a background/logo between two songs
How to remove an image assigned to a song verse
You may want to adjust the text alignment:
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Now this is how your slide looks like:
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While the footer rectangle is selected (respectively the header rectangle), the style properties like font, font size, font colors, transition, etc., apply to the footer (respectively to the header).
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Here below, see a footer with a bigger font size and a different color:
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When you are finished with adjusting footer font attributes, don't forget to select the “Body” button again, so that changes that you do to style attributes apply to the body, which is what we do most of the time:
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Notes
  1. The size and location settings, like all style settings, are applied at the currently selected level: “Song verse”, “Song”, “Songbook”, “Songbooks”, “Base”. The same is true for Bibles.
  2. The preview area instantly reflects the changes that you do to the area size and position.
    However the higher style attributes are only reflected after you refresh the slide (you double-click on it).
    For the “Songbooks” style level, the higher styles are “Songbook”, “Song” and “Song verse”.
Save Bible changes
By default, VideoPsalm will not save changes that you do to Bibles, to prevent unexpected changes to the Biblical text. This also applies to the changes that you do to their styles.
​
Enable the saving of Bible changes in the VideoPsalm options:
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If you have any question, please ask us via email.
42 Comments

How to correct a style mistake?

3/20/2022

0 Comments

 
While changing a style attribute, you may mistakenly have changed it at the wrong style level.
There are several ways to correct a wrong style attribute.
Let's start with an example:
We will assume that I assigned a background image to a song verse instead of to the (whole) song.

Method 1 - Use style level badges

Press the green bullet, to activate the display of style level badges:
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This displays “Badges” above the style attributes:
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- A “Style level” badge (green) indicates the level where the style attribute is positioned.
Click on a badge to easily select its style level.

In the screenshot below, the font is set to “Century Gothic”, at the “Songbooks” style level.
Click on the green "Songbooks" badge to easily select the “Songbooks” style level:
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It has the same effect as manually selecting the corresponding style level in the style level drop-down:
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- A “Brush” badge (orange) indicates that the attribute is positioned at the current style level (in this case “Verse”).
Click the “Brush” badge to remove the “Background image” attribute at that “Verse” level:
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The song verse will then be displayed with the image defined at a lower style level (at the “Song” level, or lower).

Method 2 - Use the style level brush

The style level brush clears the style attributes set at the current level:
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This action will have the same result as pressing all the orange brushes displayed on top of the style attributes in the ribbon.

Method 3 - Use the style level brush sub-menu

In the case we are considering, where we need to remove an image assigned by mistake to a song verse, we could do the following:
1. Select the “Song” style level.
2. Press the “Delete all the above style attributes”.
This will delete all the song verses style attributes (of all song verses):
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Note  This will not only clear the background image of the song verse that we are considering, but also the attributes that may be set to other song verses.
Hierarchical styles:
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Method 4 - Use the style explorer

The style explorer is a panel enabling you to see what attribute is set at what level.
To open the style explorer, press the highlighted button:
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This opens the style explorer, where you can selectively clear each attribute at the right level:
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Method 5 - Selectively save your changes

When you press the “Save” button, VideoPsalm lists all changes that will be saved, and gives you the opportunity to select what items to save:
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Method 6 - Close VideoPsalm without saving

In the worst case, close VideoPsalm without saving your changes, then restart it.
This method is not very practical and should be used as a last resort.
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Note  In the screenshot on top, the changes done to the agenda will not be saved either.
You may want to operate in two steps:
1. Save the agenda, without saving the songbook.
2. Close VideoPsalm without saving.

Alternatively, before closing VideoPsalm, save the agenda through its specific “Save” button:
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