It’s True – Any Church Can Podcast

Posted on June 8, 2009 by Greg Simmons

While many churches today have their sermons available online and many others are streaming live, there are still churches that want to learn how to make their content available online.

This video is a very basic primer about how ANY church can podcast. I worked with the South Carolina Baptist Convention to make this available in their podcast series.

While there are many different ways to record, encode and post your content, this was just one way – specifically on the cheap. How does your church do it?

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6 Responses to “It’s True – Any Church Can Podcast”

  1. Stuart on June 8th, 2009 3:44 pm

    Thanks Greg – this is one less argument I have to make to my pastor to convice him that modern doesn’t necessarily mean “not for the church”.

    Instead of explaining it myself I’ll just direct him at this.

    I reckon a follow up post should be a listing of suggested and or recommended hardware, software and links. And why!

  2. John on June 9th, 2009 1:26 pm

    How does my church do it? I use my personal MacBook Pro and take a line-out from our audio gear. (The MBP also supports digital optical input, if your gear offers that type of connection.) On the MacBook Pro, Garage Band (part of the iLife suite) does a great job of capturing the audio, applying filters such as noise-reduction, compression, speech enhancement, EQ, and effects to give it a clean, full, rich sound. Garage Band also allows the embedding of artwork and hyperlinks into the podcast at specific points to further enhance the listening experience. We tack a home-made intro (courtesy of our amazing Worship Arts Pastor) onto it, cross-fade into the sermon, and then publish an “enhanced” podcast file that includes the audio as well as the still-image art-work, along with a hyper-link to the church’s website.

    Sermon notes and a brief text description of the sermon can also be embedded into the file.

    On the back-end, we host the podcast files on a pre-existing server and use a combination of FeedBurner, WordPress, and LiveWriter to publish the podcast so that it’s available through several sources, including the iTunes Music Store (as a free subscription).

    Since the focus of this article is “on the cheap” it’s worth noting that since I’m using my personal MacBook Pro and I shelled out a whole $10.00 out of my own pocket for the appropriate audio cables, the only cost to the church is a tiny bit of electricity to run my computer while I’m recording and editing. In other words, it is virtually free.

    The only down-side of the high-tech goodness available in the Enhanced Podcast format is that listeners need an appropriate M4A codec to listen to it – not an out-of-the-box Windows component. Installing iTunes in Windows solves this problem.

  3. Matthew Irvine on June 10th, 2009 11:03 am

    Thanks for sharing this. We do it on the cheap to be sure.

    We’ve got a $9.99/month hosting package with 1and1 (http://www.1and1.com/?k_id=9399216) that allows us to upload up to 250GB of files… that’s years and years of sermons that we can archive.

    I then built a very simple web app that allows our recording tech to enter the sermon title, length, file name, Bible references, etc. The app then builds the XML file that is nabbed up by iTunes, Feedburner, and several other syndication services.

    It also updates our Web site by adding the sermon to the sermons page, updating the “latest sermon” feature area, and creating a permalink to that sermon where people can comment on it, play it, and download it.

    You can see our system in action at http://www.fbcbelton.org/sermons-online/

  4. Greg Simmons on June 14th, 2009 5:39 pm

    Thanks for the feedback guys.

    To give more detail on what we’re doing:

    1. Audio out into a PC via a compressor gate.
    2. Looking to move to a USB audio input, but not really critical at this point.
    3. Audacity is our capture software
    4. All editing is done within Audacity and exported in MP3 format for upload
    5. Sermon.net is our host site. It’s FREE and includes hosting for both the MP3′s and the sermon notes. In fact, you can upload audio and sermon.net will convert it to 32 bit or 64 bit MP3 for you. They also have a built in conversion engine to convert PPT or DOC files to PDF for sermon note download.

    You can see everything in action here:

    http://www.rrbc.org/media

    Yes, I’m behind on editing the sermons as I’ve been out of town.

  5. Ross Clark on June 22nd, 2009 1:26 pm

    The next video needs to e how to get your content from say sermon.net to iTunes.

  6. Greg Fish on June 23rd, 2009 3:44 pm

    Nice job, Greg!