This is a guest post written by Angela Mullins, a volunteer Technical Arts Director at Sixth Street Baptist Church in Alexander City, Alabama where she leads teams responsible for all audiovisual and information systems duties.
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I am a volunteer Technical Director of a small to medium size church with an average attendance of 250 each Sunday morning. Our area has also been hit badly by the economic downturn. Maybe you can identify, but needless to say, money is tight. I’m still a stickler for doing things as professionally as possible, so I am constantly on the lookout for quality ways to do things cheap.
When I assumed responsibility for our audio media ministry a CD recorder had just been purchased to make the move from recording to cassette. That process required ripping the recorded CD to the computer, editing the head and tail of the sermon track in Soundforge and then uploading via ftp to our church website. The whole process was a little more time consuming than I, as a volunteer, could keep up with at times. Not to mention the cost of CDs, labels, and cases – two per week.
We have since turned off the CD recorder and send the post fade auxiliary feed directly to the computer – the same computer we use to project from EasyWorship during the service. So far our Dell Dimension 9200 has had no problem recording and sending audio/video out. I purchased an M-audio Transit external sound card for about $80 to handle the dual I/O delivery, and it works like a charm. However this purchase is not necessary to the overall process.
Our program for recording is the free, but powerful Audacity. I used Mike Sessler’s tips on recording & processing to create a smaller file for podcasting. Usually the PC operator for the service runs the compression process then exports the Audacity file to mp3 and closes everything out. Later, I open the mp3 file in MP3DirectCut, which is also free, to clean up the head and tail of the recording.
MP3DirectCut is a simple mp3 editing tool that doesn’t have to convert to its own format. It’s convenient for us since I usually do my little bit of editing after the recording has been saved and Audacity has been closed out. Most audio editors save an editable file in its own extension which creates another file on the computer. For us we would have both the .mp3 and .aud audio files for each recording taking up space on the computer. By using MP3DirectCut we never save a .aud file. We only work with the mp3.
Next in the process is uploading files to our free account on sermon.net. Their Sermon Studio allows uploading of graphics, notes, scripture references, and audio file. You get your own sermon.net page where an archive of sermons is available for listening. Plus their sermon player is an embeddable gadget for your website with a built-in Bible for following along with the message. Sermon.net provides an RSS feed to iTunes as well.
Over the last couple of years we have developed a pretty streamlined process of recording and podcasting that now makes it possible to have our Sunday morning sermon available to the world by the time I sit down to lunch. The only cost is a few minutes of time.
Please comment with questions or observations, or better yet, join the discussion at the CTM forum.
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Follow Angela on Twitter: @acmul
Read Angela’s non-technical blog: Coffee House Conversations.
The new process seems like a great change in the right direction …. but it doesn’t seem to add that much more efficiency. I don’t see where you are saving that much time. Instead of recording, ripping, editing, uploading … you are now recording, editing, uploading. Am I right?
@Cecil By removing the CD recorder from the mix, they are reducing things by one step…and saving money by not purchasing CD’s
Our church has a similar setup to the one Angela describes above. The only major difference is that we do all editing and MP3 conversion directly in Audacity.
One other difference is that we have two separate audio feeds coming off the board. One for podcasting and the other for live streaming.
time savings is a minute here and a minute there, but every minute counts for me. this process helps me get the overall task done sooner and a little quicker. the biggest savings is in cost of cds, labels, and ink, and space to store the cds.