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Joined: Jan 2002
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Who is the ‘audience’, who is the ‘prompter’, and who is the ‘performer’ at your church?
For these times of isolation and then when you are able to meet together again, answering this question will have a profound effect on the posture your church takes as well as the approach to the use of music in any church situation.
Many mistakenly believe the ‘audience’ are the people gathered together. This is the source of most church music problems and frankly the source of most problems in churches to begin with. It fosters a consumer mindset in the church. The audience is God.
Almost always hand in hand with the above mistake is the answer of the question about who the performers are. The same mistake of thinking the congregants are the audience puts the singers and keyboardists and band as the performers. Wrong posture again. The performers are the collected congregants offering a simultaneous act of worship to God; their audience. This is really not a possibility in isolation. That is without serious dedicated spend on technology. None of the conferencing tools allow for this real time, usable quality, time aligned participation. Even Jamkazam, a platform dedicated to music doesn’t allow for it.
This is the most devastating thing about isolation and quarantine for Music use in churches that have learned these roles of God as the audience, congregants as the performers, and musicians and singers as the prompters.
So I will pose the question: what is the basic point of the desire to put a whole bunch of work into this? Be wary of any answer that involves the word ‘talent’.
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eddie1261
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eddie1261
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MS Teams isn't free. That seems to be the major consideration around here. Dig up a couple of coffee cans and spend money if you want quality.
Zoom has had ZERO issues here and I do Zoom chats with people almost daily. And all the hooey about "security" was exactly that. Nobody used Zoom to get at your bank account. People were guessing passwords with random password generators and crashing meetings. As soon as some clickbait article says SECURITY people stop at that word and start spreading the 1/8th truth about the product in question. Add that to you all with your refusal to ever update anything, and there you go. So annoying when people who have a thimble full of computer knowledge that they read on the internet speak as experts.... wow.
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Thanks for your comments but I think this thread should end now.
My wife and I are not members of this church. We are hired to do what the church wants to do, and provide music (and in my case, technology advice).
I have received many good suggestions here and have come to the conclusion we will continue using Zoom for now.
Thank you.
BIAB 2026 Win Audiophile. Software: Fender Studio One 8, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Fender Quantom HD8 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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MS Teams isn't free. That seems to be the major consideration around here. Dig up a couple of coffee cans and spend money if you want quality.
Zoom has had ZERO issues here and I do Zoom chats with people almost daily. And all the hooey about "security" was exactly that. Nobody used Zoom to get at your bank account. People were guessing passwords with random password generators and crashing meetings. As soon as some clickbait article says SECURITY people stop at that word and start spreading the 1/8th truth about the product in question. Add that to you all with your refusal to ever update anything, and there you go. So annoying when people who have a thimble full of computer knowledge that they read on the internet speak as experts.... wow. I'll just leave this here .. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-teams/free
I do not work here, but the benefits are still awesome Make your sound your own!
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eddie1261
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eddie1261
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Free NOW, but will it stay free forever Harv? Do you think that once it gets extremely popular they will start charging? That seems to be how Micro$oft does things.
Zoom works fine, and all those horror stories of security problems were presumably overly dramatic. Possibly even started by Micro$oft. I am on Zoom daily, sometimes more than once a day and I have never had anybody hack one of my meetings and blow up my office as the rumors said. "They" were allegedly getting into computers and stealing back accounts, deleting files..... I wouldn't believe anything Micro$oft says even if they say "There are 24 hours in a day".
But ya know what? Whatever.....
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Our company, Raytheon Technologies - who has a VERY strict IT overall policy just replaced WebEx with Zoom.
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Zoom has worked better the past two weeks. There is a website that tells you which online services are having problems, and Zoom used to have significant problems on Sunday mornings. It’s been better recently. The site is https://downdetector.com/We never had any security concerns.
BIAB 2026 Win Audiophile. Software: Fender Studio One 8, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Fender Quantom HD8 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Thanks. Security was never the issue. And I think I may have more than a thimble-full of knowledge.
BIAB 2026 Win Audiophile. Software: Fender Studio One 8, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Fender Quantom HD8 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Add that to you all with your refusal to ever update anything, and there you go. So annoying when people who have a thimble full of computer knowledge that they read on the internet speak as experts.... wow. Haha, you're new here so we can let that go but you need to be around these forums long enough to know who you're talking to. Matt is a retired computer science professor but I know what you're saying because I've said it many times too but then I mostly know who everybody is. This particular thread is filled with computer and IT pros but overall, the PGM forums have a fair amount of people who have little clue about this stuff and need help with the most basic things. We try to be gentle about it because they're interested in making music and to a person who is both a music software nooby AND a computer nooby it can be challenging for them. I know this well because that was me 20 years ago. I knew squat about either one too. This is a very friendly and knowledgeable group of music fanatics who can help you if you're having issues with Biab, RB, other DAW's, plugins, recording techniques, all that stuff. Bob
Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.
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And welcome to the forum, Flemiis. I see you're from NYC.
Bob is right, this is a very helpful forum with little fluff, discord, or pretense. Why, I probably disagree with Bob as much as anyone but he's a great guy.
BIAB 2026 Win Audiophile. Software: Fender Studio One 8, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Fender Quantom HD8 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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thanks matt - worth a try although i think we'll probably need the congregation to mute their mics as shared responses are very ragged when everyone chooses their own timing. during a live service at least some common ground is established! singing will probably be worse. I realized when re-reading the thread that I did not add one technique we use to minimize this problem. For readings with responses, the pastor writes a series of very short lines, and people are instructed to pause after reading each line. What this accomplishes is to limit the effect of the latency. After a little practice, people learn to find the correct timing.
BIAB 2026 Win Audiophile. Software: Fender Studio One 8, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Fender Quantom HD8 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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