Five booth positions. One volunteer who can never get sick.
Plan AVL compiles your Planning Center plan into a fully wired service — console scenes, lighting cues, presentation files, a printed cue sheet. The planning half is live and free to use today. The live runner that fires it all as your slides operator advances is what we're building next.
Live now: the free X32 scene generator and the full planning Compiler. In development: the live Conductor runner.
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. It comes in two halves — and the first half is live today.
Compiler — before Sunday · live now
Reads your Planning Center plan — songs, keys, BPMs, item order — and builds the service ahead of time: per-song X32/M32 scenes with tempo-synced delays and style-tuned reverbs, a lighting look for every section, presentation files for your slides software, and a printable booth cue sheet. It also holds your reusable song catalog, your console and lighting layouts, and your roster — so next week compiles itself.
- 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
- Presentation files FreeShow / OpenLyrics / OpenSong
- Booth cue sheet printable — the human fallback
Conductor — during the service · in development
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.
This is the half we're building now. It runs on the bench today; it won't go near a real Sunday until it's earned it (see below).
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 — once Conductor ships. 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're building the live engine around that instinct — because it's the whole reason a church would trust it.
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; 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 — and the smaller X-Air / M-Air and the flagship WING: the Compiler reads and writes each one's scene files, so a new console is a drop-in. 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 (full fixture, scene, and chaser authoring with a 2D stage), 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 the live engine 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 — live-runner support for a new console comes only after the current stack is boringly reliable.
Where this stands — honestly
Live today, free to use. The planning half of Plan AVL is real and running — you can create a free account and use it right now:
- 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
- Full planning Compiler — Planning Center import (plans + team), a reusable song catalog (ChordPro charts, transpose, structured sequences, a hymn library, key/BPM lookup), console-model authoring for X32/M32, X-Air/M-Air, and WING, QLC+ lighting layouts, ProPresenter playlists, and multi-org team management
- Take it with you — export a service to FreeShow / OpenLyrics / OpenSong, or subscribe your calendar to your service schedule
- An optional AI helper — bring your own model (a local one or your own key) for a planning assistant that never touches the live path
It's an honest beta: broad, in real use, and improving every week. It's planning and prep — your console, lighting rig, and ProPresenter stay the live engines.
What's next
The headline product — the live Conductor runner that follows ProPresenter and fires your scenes and cues automatically — is what we're building now. It runs on the bench today; it is not shipped, and we hold it to the same rule you do: nothing touches a live service until it's proven. Before it goes near any church's Sunday, it has to run a long, unbroken streak of real Sundays at an early pilot church with zero service-impacting failures. That soak hasn't started. When it has run, we'll say so plainly, with the numbers.
After that: streaming hooks (fire OBS/ATEM on plan sections), direct lighting output for booths without a controller, and more consoles and plan sources as churches ask for them.
Pricing. The free X32 tool stays free forever. The full Compiler and the Conductor will be paid — 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: occasional development updates written for tech people, and first crack at early access when Conductor pilot slots open. Or just create a free account and start using the Compiler. That's the whole ask.
One note on accounts: signing up is free, but every new account is reviewed and approved by hand before you can log in — currently allow 3–5 business days for review and approval, and we may contact you before approving. It keeps the beta small enough that we can actually help the churches in it.