Five booth positions. One volunteer who can never get sick.
Plan AVL compiles your Planning Center plan into a fully wired service — X32 scenes, lighting cues, a printed cue sheet — then follows ProPresenter live and fires them as your slides operator advances. So sound, slides, and lighting — the core of your booth — run on two ordinary volunteers.
In development now. A free X32 scene generator ships first.
The math you already know
Running one service takes three to five trained people: front-of-house, slides, lighting — more if you stream. Rotate them every other week, like you're supposed to, and you need a tech team of six to ten genuinely technical volunteers.
At a church of 150, that team does not exist.
So you run the math the other way. The same two or three people serve almost every week. One of them is the only person who knows why the lighting rig works at all. When they're sick, traveling, or finally just done, you find out at 7:45 on Sunday morning.
The automation tools exist — Companion, ProPresenter macros, MIDI maps. But every one of them has to be hand-programmed by your expert, and re-programmed every time the setlist changes. The tools didn't solve the volunteer problem. They concentrated it into one person who can never miss.
The product is the programmer
Plan AVL doesn't give your expert better tools. It does your expert's weekly work.
Compiler — before Sunday
Reads your Planning Center plan — songs, keys, BPMs, item order — and generates the whole service: per-song X32/M32 scenes with tempo-synced delays and style-tuned reverbs, a lighting look for every section, and a printable booth cue sheet.
- Goodness of God B · 63 BPM
- Build My Life G · 70 BPM
- Living Hope D · 73 BPM
- Sermon —
- The Blessing B · 70 BPM
- 5 console scenes delay synced: 63 BPM → 952 ms
- Lighting looks song / sermon / response
- Booth cue sheet printable — the human fallback
- Plan ↔ ProPresenter map rides ProPresenter's native import
Conductor — during the service
A small app on the booth network watches ProPresenter. When your slides operator advances into the next plan item, Conductor recalls the matching console scene over OSC and fires the lighting cue. Nobody programs anything — no macros, no Companion button pages, no MIDI cues buried in presentations.
Your slides volunteer does exactly what they did last week: advance slides in ProPresenter. That's it. That's the training.
Slide click → console scene → lighting look. One action, three positions covered.
One-time venue setup — your patch, your DCAs, your fixtures. After that, every week compiles itself.
Five positions. Here's the honest math, one by one.
We're not promising a self-running service. Position by position:
FOH Sound
still humanNobody should automate mixing a live band. But the console configures itself per song, so the job becomes riding faders, not building mixes. A new volunteer can do it.
Slides
still humanVerse repeats follow the worship leader. That's judgment, not automation.
Lighting
eliminatedEliminated as a position. Cues fire from the plan as the service moves.
Stream
not yetBoth stream seats stay exactly as they are today. We'd rather do three things reliably than five things badly.
The core three — sound, slides, lighting — come down to two humans, and neither has to be your power user. That's the headcount problem and the single-expert problem, solved where they bite hardest.
If it dies mid-service, Sunday doesn't
You've heard the rule: don't change anything before a Sunday. We built the product around that instinct.
Here is exactly what happens if the live engine crashes during the sermon:
Nothing.
Everything Plan AVL generates lives on your gear, not in our app. Scenes are saved on the console. Looks are saved on the lighting controller. The cue sheet is printed and sitting in the booth. If Conductor crashes mid-service — or you simply never launch it — your volunteers recall scenes by hand and Sunday happens exactly the way it did before the product existed.
And the live engine is plain, deterministic code — no AI runs during your service. AI helps profile songs at compile time, during the week, in the cloud; the live path runs entirely on your booth network and never touches the internet. The same slide advance produces the same scene recall, every time, or it does nothing and tells you. The Conductor is a layer on top of a working service, never a dependency underneath one.
What about the other failure — the wrong thing firing? Recalls fire only when the operator advances into a new plan item. Advancing slides within a song fires nothing, and the engine checks state before acting, so a network blip can't re-fire the current scene mid-song. And manual recall on the console always works — the booth can ignore the Conductor at any moment.
Built for the booth you already have
No new hardware. Plan AVL targets the most common small-church stack:
- Behringer X32 / Midas M32 family — any model; the whole family speaks the same protocol, and your scenes live on the console, not in our app
- ProPresenter — we listen to its official network API and ride on its native Planning Center import, so your slides workflow doesn't change at all
- Planning Center Services — the plan you already build every week is the source of truth
- Lighting — QLC+ first-class, or any controller that takes MIDI or OSC
And about your console: generated scenes are additions you load and audit — not edits to your show file. We're settling exactly what each per-song recall touches (scene-vs-snippet scope, scene-safe behavior) on real consoles before anything ships, and we'll publish precisely what it changes. One rule is already locked: head-amp gains are never touched mid-service.
If that's your booth, this was built for you. If it isn't yet, we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise — broader console support comes only after this stack is boringly reliable.
Where this stands — honestly
What's true today: reading ProPresenter's live event stream works on the bench (~50 ms from click to event). X32 scene recall over OSC runs end-to-end against a console simulator, with the first real-console test scheduled. Lighting triggering (QLC+) is in progress. No product has shipped yet, and we won't pretend otherwise.
We hold it to the same rule you do: nothing touches a live service until it's proven. The live engine won't be offered to any church until it has run a long streak of real Sundays at our pilot church with zero service-impacting failures.
First out the door: a free X32 scene generator. Point it at your setlist, get per-song scenes with tempo-synced delays and style-tuned reverbs, load them on your console. Free at launch — and it stays free.
And so there's no surprise later: the full Compiler and Conductor will be paid products. We haven't set pricing — and we won't until pilot churches help us land on something fair for a church budget.
Leave your email and you'll get: the free tool the day it ships, occasional development updates written for tech people, and first crack at early access when pilot slots open. That's the whole ask.