In the free world I like Audacity with LAME. If you can get a mac Garageband is great and is designed to do podcasts. Though Garageband outputs MP4 that will need to be down converted to MP3.

For ID3 there are a load of programs you can use. Why the speakers name as a comment and not the author. Or, is the church the author?

If you’re looking for podcasting software check out drupal with the audio module. It can produce your feeds, has a nifty flash player (actually 2 players you can choose from), can track plays on the flash player as well as downloads, with getID3 can read and write your ID3 tags, and a number of other handy features.

FYI, we use drupal for the Geeks and God podcast. So do all the TWiT podcasts and many more.

If you’re recording something over a distance skype is the way to go. It seems to provide better sound quality than the other options we have tried. Using the skype call recorder makes that easy and there are tools to split the tracks if you need that.

First, for the initial recording…I find that CD burners work OK if you need a simple solution, but they’re not NEARLY as good as recording directly into a recording software. Mostly, this is because you’re going to need to edit the audio for a podcast, so why add an extra step of having to rip if off CD. That fact aside, CD burners work OK…

Editing software: This is really a cost issue. The ones you mention are good free software. However, if your audience demands are more professional presentation, you gotta step up to a hardware/software system. Either a Pro Tools system or a Logic system, both with dedicated hardware. The A/D converters are where you get a huge quality bump.

Ripping MP3s? Why not iTunes? It’s on everyone’s desktop these days, has great conversion algorithms, is simple to use, and it’s free (not to mention you can store all your podcasts there for later reference.

You can also use iTunes to put in all your tags. Just get info on the track, and enter it all in. Also, feedburner will insert all this info for you…just give them a vanilla mp3 and configure your feedburner account with the proper tags.

I think your naming and ID conventions sound good.

The beauty of feedburner is that it really doesn’t matter what you’re using to create your feed. Just give it an XML file with an audio file linked in it, and you’re good to go. It’ll create the enclosure and do it all…Wordpress is fine, blogger.com, any CMS, etc…anyway you can create an XML feed…

Feedburner is a Godsend and a MUST for podcasting…it is like the swiss army knife that everyone should use…

That’s my 2 cents