Getting ready…
Checking your setup.
Pick the channel the speaker is on — watch for the bar that moves. Pick more than one only if two people talk on separate channels.
Green = speech. Voice should cross the notch; room noise should not.
Following the room: the notch sits above whatever the input is hearing when nobody is talking. Right on a console or Dante feed. On a preamp with real hiss it can settle above a quiet talker, and the mic goes dead while the bar still moves — set it by hand and put the notch just above the room, under the voice.
What it is hearing
Send each language's voice to its own physical channels — English on 1+2, Spanish on 3, and so on — into Dante, Waves SoundGrid, a console over USB, anything the Mac can play to. Phones keep working exactly as they do now; this is an extra output, not a replacement.
Click a number to send that language there. Two channels side by side join into a stereo pair — the voice is mono, so both carry the same signal, which is what fills a stereo pair on a console. A language with nothing selected is not sent to hardware at all.
The source language carries the live room microphone, not a translation — there is nothing to translate English into during an English service. Give it channels and it feeds an assistive-listening transmitter. Keep those channels off whatever feeds the app's input, or you will build a loop.
Languages on the front page
Always translate
Pinned languages are translated before anyone arrives.
Corrections
One per line: what it heard => what it should say
Voices
Pick a language, press ▶ to hear a voice read scripture, then Use it. Built-in voices download the first time you play them.
Plain English, told to the voice before it speaks. Only the Local (this Mac) voices listen to it — Piper built-ins have no such control and will ignore it. It changes delivery, not volume: measured, "whisper this softly and intimately" stretched the same Spanish line from 4.0s to 6.2s. Wording is not predictable — "speak loudly and forcefully" came out quieter than plain — so try a few and judge by ear. Press ▶ on a voice below to hear it with this direction.
Premium voices
Human-sounding voices from a paid service. Keys stay on this Mac. If the service ever fails, the built-in voices take over automatically.
Voice dynamics
The translated voice gets quieter when the preacher drops to a whisper and louder when he leans on a line. Applies to built-in and premium voices alike.
Compressed on purpose. The room spans about 40 dB between a whisper and a shout; reproduced faithfully into headphones or a hearing-aid pack the whisper is inaudible and the shout is painful. This keeps the shape and holds the range to about 14 dB. Level only — the voice cannot actually whisper.
Stream delay
For livestream viewers: hold captions and audio so they line up with the stream's own delay. The room always sees live. 0 = off.
Bitfocus Companion
———Cough button
Keeps translating and keeps you watching it — the congregation just stops receiving. For a prayer request with a name in it, or anything said on a live mic that was not meant to leave the room. Starting a service always clears it.
———Stream delay
Nudge while watching the stream until the captions line up. Change
by= for a bigger step — one button at 1s for fine work, another at 5s.
———For button text and colour
———Generic HTTP → GET. One word each: Status is live,
ready or offline (a held service still reads
live — it is live), Hold state is held or open,
Delay now is a number of seconds. Keep the key off the projector.
Set a Companion URL below and the server pushes
translate_state, _hold, _delay and
_listeners straight into custom variables — no polling.
Operator page PIN
For running the desk from a phone or tablet on the church network. This tab never asks for it. The operator page is refused outright to anything reaching the server from the internet — there is no setting to change that, so the PIN only ever faces someone already in the building.
Advanced
Only if something else already uses it.
Another campus
Carries the work: corrections, languages, pinned languages, voices, output channel map and trims. Does not carry this Mac's PIN, control token or device ids — each campus keeps its own, and premium-voice API keys stay on the machine they were typed into.
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