r/churchtech

We're a small church, only ever breaking 100 in the congregation for special occasions.

For our live music, we're aware that the cheaper wireless solutions (for guitars, or IEMs, etc) use the 2.4GHz wireless band, and that space is shared by 2.4GHz wifi, and also the microwave in the kitchen.

Is there a general rule for how many pairs can be used before the risk of dropout starts to become a problem, or are there any other special considerations I've missed?

We recently switched our worship team over in in ear monitors. I have one musician who is really struggling. He usually wears hearing aids and says he just cant hear as well with in the ears as he did with a wedge monitor. Does anyone have any suggestions for me to help them?

Hey all, we have been seeing a somewhat consistent issue in our livestream. every 24 seconds or so, the audio will fuzz/static out and desync from the video. another 24 seconds and it fuzzes/statics again and syncs the audio back up. We can hear the desync from the headphones connected to the PC, but not from the soundboard, so my hunch is on the audio interface for the PC.

Here is an example: YouTube.

Our sound equipment setup is the following:

Yamaha TF3 soundboard ->

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 [3rd Gen] ->

Streaming PC (Win11 25H2 - 26200.8655) running OBS 32.1.2.

Troubleshooting steps I've tried:

- reboot PC & soundboard & scarlett

- reinstall drivers for scarlett audio interface

- removed/readded scarlett audio interface in OBS

- verified file integrity of OBS

Any help or suggestions would be great, thanks!

Our current management system is getting too expensive, especially since our church covers the credit card processing fees. It sounds like we're moving to Subsplash, but after looking into it and reading reviews, it doesn't seem to be as flexible. Maybe its just becuase its still new and they are actively updating things, so if in a few years it will have the bells and whistles. We're a relatively large church with two additional campuses, so CCB made it really easy to manage everything. Plus, the Lead app was super helpful for our MPs.

Hey all, pulling my hair out here.

We recently replaced our cameras and it turns out one of them was capturing all of the audio from our soundboard to stream over the network. Since we got rid of it that's unfortunately no longer an option.

I connected the SQ6 via USB to our ProPresenter/slide computer. It seems to recognize everything just fine; the issue is getting audio over the network to OBS on our Livestream computer, which is in another room.

I installed NDI Free Audio, but it has to be run every single time from what I can tell, and then has to be setup every time afterwards too. Our congregation is older and on Sunday when I was out of town, nobody could figure out how to make it work.

I have been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to do this in a different way:

1. Buy the Dante card, which looks to be 1k+ (oof).

2. Write a custom program that launches NDI Free Audio with ProPresenter and inputs all of the parameters.

Is there a way to auto-configure NDI Free Audio or is there a better version that has a GUI? The inputs seem to be the same and I'm pretty sure I can configure OBS to point to the same NDI name every time, it's just that none of it sticks as soon as the computer is shut off.

If there's an even better option out there, great - I'm all ears. If I have to buy the stupid Dante card I guess I have budget for it, but I don't know if there's more configuration that needs to be done on the back end that's just as complicated for another person.

Thanks for the help!

TL;DR: Is there a way to stream audio from the SQ6 hooked up to a computer via USB to OBS over the network without the Dante card?

EDIT: I spent hours yesterday and today trying to configure Dante VSC, Via and Controller with zero luck. I think it might have something to do with the SQ-6 outputting its own USB channel audio that Dante isn't seeing, I don't know. I verified I'm getting audio out as I installed OBS on the soundboard machine, created an NDI capture on it and can use that to stream audio successfully to my livestream computer in the other room.

This isn't a viable long-term solution to me as someone could easily forget to run OBS at the beginning of a service or if the NDI gets corrupted. I don't think I can run a 100ft USB cable successfully from the soundboard to the livestream computer so I'm looking at the Dante card now.

What I'm super concerned about is running into the exact same problems I'm having now using DVSC and Via.

If I buy the dedicated card, do I still have to use Dante controller or buy Dante Via? I don't want to drop $800 on something if my network is configured incorrectly or there's some setting I'm missing that's going to create the exact same issues I'm having now.

I built a dynamic RSS engine to push scripture-memory music directly into custom church apps (Subsplash, etc.). Fully stateless, free use, parses parameters like `?q=ephesians`.

Hoping for some feedback from other church devs/admins

tech volunteer at a mid-size church in middle TN. we run two services every sunday plus wednesday night youth worship, so lights are on probably 6 hours a week minimum.

our old wash lights were dying one by one so the worship pastor asked me to find replacements before easter. budget was $1200 for 4 units. i ended up going with 4 Betopper LM3715R RGBW wash heads.

12 sundays in, plus the easter services which were longer than usual, and theyre still running fine. the RGBW mixing is actually really smooth for color washes during worship sets. our worship leader likes a warm amber during prayer and a brighter white for the sermon and switching between those is just a cue change. the halo ring is a nice bonus, we use it as a subtle accent during communion.

my concern going into summer: our sanctuary has AC but its an older building and it gets warm in there by the second service especially in july and august. the fixtures have fans that run pretty quiet (important when the pastor is praying and theres no music) but i want to know if anyone else is running wash LEDs in a warm room for extended hours. are these going to thermal throttle or start acting weird when the ambient temp climbs.

so far i havent noticed any dimming or color shift but were still in june. if you run wash heads in a church that gets warm id love to know your experience. im trying to decide if i need to budget for supplemental fans above the truss or if the built-in cooling is enough.

For those of you running cameras solo or shorthanded at your church — what's the most frustrating part of the job? Specifically curious about tracking speakers and switching between cameras during a live service.