One of the ministers here has been called upon to speak about blogging at the North American Christian Convention as part of a panel. He is beginning to get concerned that he may be asked about more information than what he has on hand for the following topics:
- Blogging
- Podcasting
- E-Newsletters
He has asked me to pull some information together. We currently have three separate podcasts being published through the church, so I know how to do it, but I want to pull together as many resources as possible.
This is what I am looking for:
- Tools for the initial recording: (we have CD recorders hooked up to the sound systems, but a computer with good software would be even better). What tools do you know of and/or use?
- Editing Software: We currently use an older version SoundForge for the editing. We have also discussed Audacity, but not moved to it.
- MP3 creation: Since the version of SoundForge we use does not export mp3 we have been using CDEX for mp3 creation. Audacity could do this, but it requires the LAME plugin. CDEX was chosen because when I started doing the podcasts I would just grab the sermon on the CD for the bookstore and extract it from there. CDEX was the first CD ripper I used back when I bought my first mp3 player (a Diamond Rio)
- ID3 tag editing (if not included in the MP3 encoder): CDEX does limited ID3 tags for ripped CDs, but not for converted .wav files (which we sometimes use). Fixtag (which requires Java) does a good job of adding them.
- Your Naming conventions: I am a very orderly person when it comes to cataloging data. Some of our sermon podcasts are name based upon Service-Series_Name-#-Sermon_Title while one which does not rely on sermon series is done as Service-YYYYMMDD-Sermon_Title. No blank spaces due to the fact that URLs make blank spaces look awful. I want sermons to be nicely sorted when they are all placed into a directory and ordered by name.
- ID3 conventions: We include the preacher’s name as a comment in the tags as well as date information in addition to the sermon title and series name.
- Podcast Posting Software: We use WordPress with The Audio Player WordPress Plugin for some podcasts while one of them is currently hand coded by the resident web dweeb (me). We used LoudBlog for 1 year, but it became a hassle. I started handcoding in order to bring in some features I had been considering, but I plan to move to something automated in the near future.
- Feed Distribution: Our feed goes out through FeedBurner so that we have some good information on feed usage and because it makes the moving to a new posting software easier. One reason I kept up with hand coding was so that the podcast address would stay the same. We have also been posted on iTunes, but our sermon podcast is considered a resource for the church and not intended to climb the iTunes charts.
Anything else you would like to add or correct (PLEASE?). Post in the comments or follow up at any of the forums I am going to cross-post this to.
Ok, here’s my thoughts…hopefully I won’t sound too opinionated…because I am
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
Audio player plugin is fine BUT Podpress rocks the party that pocks the PARTAY.
http://www.mightyseek.com/podpress/
and for tags? a freebie
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html
To add to what Rob Feature wrote…
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.
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article ng for Podcast/Vidcast Information at The Open Source Ministry Blog, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.