Morning Star Praise

Every worship team has a person called "the one making the PPT at 1 AM Saturday." Often that person was me. The same pain repeats every week:

• "The lyrics are in Word — I just want a .pptx with our backgrounds and fonts."
• "The worship leader sent a YouTube link; now I have to transcribe lyrics by hand."
• "We have a printed sheet-music scan; we want each slide to show music + lyrics."
• "We have an MP3 and want a karaoke / worship projection video."
• "The song is bilingual (Chinese + English) and translating + formatting is brutal."
• "We can't / won't send our church's data to a cloud LLM."

Five songs, four different sources, two hours of hand-assembly per Sunday. Commercial PPT tools don't understand Chinese-church needs (bilingual layout, custom backgrounds, liturgical flow). Morning Star Praise exists to turn those six "I want"s into one click — and to open-source it so every small church can benefit. The name comes from Job 38:7: "when the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy." The stars are the tools; worship is the purpose.

• Church worship teams — worship leaders, media volunteers, slide deck makers; the people pulling the late-Saturday shift.
• Small / mid-sized Chinese churches — limited resources but plenty of creativity; need a bulk reduction in media-production friction.
• Privacy-sensitive churches and ministries — those that can't or won't hand data to cloud LLMs.
• Developer / volunteer hackers — want automation without vendor lock-in; able to fork and customize.
• Cross-language gatherings — bilingual services, dual-language congregations, missionary outreach, all needing fast bilingual slide layout.

• One unified entry — text, YouTube URL, .pptx, PDF, sheet-music image all flow through the same pipeline.
• One unified output — a polished .pptx auto-styled with your background pool and fonts; the same React composition renders the browser preview and the final MP4.
• Word-level alignment — MP3 + lyrics → video, with slides transitioning at the exact moment each line is sung.
• Auto-expanded choruses — when a score writes the chorus once but the recording sings it three times, stanza matching replicates the lyric block automatically; no manual copy-paste.
• Bilingual auto-layout — Chinese + English side by side on the same slide, translation routed to your chosen LLM.
• Dual mode — pure-local (privacy-first) or seven-provider cloud LLM, switchable at runtime without restarting.

• 5 inputs: text paste · YouTube URL · .pptx · PDF · sheet-music image
• 2 main outputs: a unified-style .pptx + a word-level-aligned MP4 worship video
• Three-tier OCR fallback: Vision LLM (qwen3-vl / Gemini / GPT-4o) → PaddleOCR → oemer for sheet-music OMR
• Word-level alignment: faster-whisper (large-v3) + wav2vec2 forced alignment
• Karaoke mode: per-character (CJK) / per-word (Latin) highlight in lockstep with the vocal
• Edit Video: embedded @remotion/player for nudging slide timings + backgrounds, then re-rendering from a cached plan
• Background library: 84 bundled backgrounds (gradients, radial glows, motion landscapes) + user uploads
• Seven LLM providers: OpenAI / Anthropic / Gemini / MiniMax / Qwen / GLM / Ollama, freely mixable, switchable at runtime
• Pure-local mode: the core pipeline runs with no API keys (faster-whisper + wav2vec2 + PaddleOCR + Ollama)
• Bilingual UI: Chinese default with English toggle

• Apr 2026 · Already in use across several churches as a production tool.
• Core features stable: 5-input → PPT + video pipeline, word-level alignment, karaoke, dual mode, seven-provider LLM.
• GitHub repo · github.com/leveo/morning-star-praise · MIT License in preparation.
• Currently preparing: demo video, architecture blog post, one-click Docker deployment docs.
• Targeted public open-source: 1.0 release with complete documentation and examples.

• Sheet-music Phase 2: handwritten-score recognition (Phase 1 only handles printed scores) — the hardest piece.
• Real-time rehearsal mode: upgrade Edit Video into a full live-worship remote (slide control, video volume, etc.).
• Mobile: let media volunteers do 80% of the work from a phone (with the final 20% / preview on desktop).
• Integration with Spiritual Growth Garden: "post-worship devotion" — auto-push this week's worship songs' verses into the Garden's daily reading.
• Open ecosystem: invite contributors from other Chinese churches to ship backgrounds, templates, and bilingual translations.
• Reverse-apply: repurpose the generated videos for church podcasts and social-media shorts.