How to start recording your sermons
Like it or not, it's the latest trend. The rest of the world is doing it, and it's time the Church got its act together and started providing modern media types too. Podcasts are a great way to spread a message around the world quickly and easily in a way that doesn't require the effort of reading, and with the added bonus of being able to listen to it on the train, on the way to work, while jogging round the park, or just sat on the sofa at home. This is an ideal way of helping your weekly church sermons reach a much wider audience.
But won't it require lots of money and effort to set it all up? I don't like technology...
Don't worry, it's actually not as complicated as it sounds. In fact, if you're using microphones in your church then you've got the expensive bits already. Your sermons are being picked up by the PA system and piped out to the church speakers. It's not a huge leap to put in an extra step there and record whatever it is you're sending out to the speakers.
So here are a few recommendations to get your started. Obviously these aren't the only options, but it might help show you what sort of things you'll need. To do the actual recording I would recommend a Digital Recorder, which is the modern equivalent to a dictaphone. I'm going to recommend the Denpa VT-50, which is fairly affordable and records straight into MP3 format. All you need then is a computer to upload the file to the internet.
Note: this article is more focused on how to physically record the sermon, rather than the details of how to publish podcasts; you'll find plenty of info elsewhere on the web for that though.
Step 1: Recording from the source
I'm going to assume you've already got a PA system, because most churches these days do. If you haven't, you've got a whole other problem, and I suggest you address that first and get onto recording later on!
You'll usually find that your PA mixer has several audio outputs, some for the speakers, others for foldback for musicians, probably a hearing loop, and usually a headphone socket for the PA operator to listen in on. Consult your PA technician about how best to do this, but what you're going to need to do is plug your recording device into one of the outputs from the mixer. The VT-50 has a line-in socket built in, so all you need to do is connect it to the mixer with a suitable cable, make sure the levels are good, and press record. That's it!
Step 2: Transferring to a computer
After the service, unplug your recording device and take it to a computer. The VT-50 is effectively a USB stick with a recorder attached, so when you plug it into your computer it will show up exactly like a USB drive. And if you've remembered to press the record button, you'll find your sermon sitting there waiting for you, already stored as an MP3 file. Just copy that to somewhere convenient on your computer.
If you're not using a USB recording device, you'll probably find you'll have to record the sermon manually from the recording device. This means plugging its output into the computer's line-in socket, pressing play and recording the audio onto the computer with some recording software. Audacity is a reasonably good free program you can use, though there are many others available too.
Step 3: Editing out the mistakes
If you've got yourself a good audio editing program you can edit out the mistakes, the hesitations, the pauses while the speaker tries to get the next slide up on the screen. Audacity is a good starting point, but if you want something a little more comprehensive then you'll probably find you'll need to pay for some software. On the Mac you'll find GarageBand a superb choice, and for the PC I would recommend looking at something like Goldwave.
Step 4: Saving as an MP3
The MP3 bit is important. Audio is normally very data-heavy, which means that it uses up a lot of data to store it. A 3 minute song at CD quality can take up many MBs if stored just as the raw sound, so to make it more useful it gets compressed. Normally you'll find a song you download from iTunes will be about 3-4MB, which is much more manageable. But sermons can be a lot longer - anything from a 10 minute 'thought for the day' to a hard-core hour-long sermon. Thankfully, since it's only voice and not music, we can get away with compressing the file much further without it sounding distorted. I would recommend making sure your final audio file is saved in mono, 22KHz, 30kbits/s. With that setup you'll get a half hour sermon in about 8MB, which is perfect for putting online.
If you're using somethig like the VT-50 you'll find it automatically records as an MP3, which is handy, but you may have to play around with the options to make sure it's recording at the right quality. If in doubt, go a little higher in quality - if you compress it too much the sound will become distorted and hard to listen to.
Also remember to add in the ID3 tag details. These are normally used to store the name of the song, who it's being sung by, what album it's from, that sort of thing. In the context of sermons, I'd recommend interpreting those slightly differently - put the sermon title as the song name, the preacher's name as the artist, and your church name as the album. Obviously it's up to you, but I would find that the most useful interpretation.
Step 5: Uploading to the web
The simplest solution here is simply to upload the MP3 file to your web site and create a link to it on a page somewhere so that people can get to it. However, this does require people to go to your web site to find out if there is a new sermon available. A more popular way of distributing regular audio publications is with podcasts, which are fairly easy to set up and are also a great way to show that your church is 'with it', technologically speaking.
One of the easiest ways of creating a podcast is to use a blogging platform like WordPress, which will take care of all the complicated bits for you. Just insert a link to your MP3 in a blog post, and WordPress will put it in an RSS feed. Then you can use an online tool like FeedBurner, or even a WordPress plugin like podPress, to take that RSS feed and convert it into a proper podcast which will show up in iTunes and suchlike.
And that's it! At minimal cost you'll be able to record your sermons and put them on your web site, sharing your message with the world. Do leave a comment below if you've found any other solutions that work well for you.
Matthew