Use a computer for church music

You will need a stereo adapter cable that connects the line out jack (usually a small black circle with a hole in the middle) on your sound card and splits it into two RCA plugs (usually red and white). Most sound boards have RCA inputs.

 

And, a lot of the soundcards that I have used (or have seen used) are very noisy. This is just a head's up for ya saying that you might want to really listen to the PC that you are considering using for your services before committing to just any one. Otherwise, it's a great idea. You could build a playlist for each service ahead of time and have everything you need all cued-up. Oh yeah... get a CD burner and BACK IT ALL UP TWICE, or maybe even a DVD burner. The files can be real big depending on which file type you want to use.

 

You should be able to do this with any computer, but you will need good backup, a high quality sound card, and a large hard drive (or two).

1) Hopefully you already have somewhat of a powerful system with at least 1 PCI port open. Hyperthreading, dual-core, or SMP is a plus, especially when it comes to all the encoding you will be doing.

2) You will want to have a nice sound card. A good Audigy 2 ZS Platinum will cost about $175. It has all the ports you will ever need and some that you won't, and comes with a remote control.

3) You will want some sort of backup. Whether it be an extra hard drive (fast), a DVD burner (slow), or whatever.

Also, remember that silence is the key. This computer will be running during the entire service, so silence is really a good thing. Our church uses a laptop to encode the preaching and special music during the service since its quiet and can be portable for projector use. But we still rely on the soundboard, cd, and tape players for audio playback.