Sometimes, the daily life of a pastor is filled with all sorts of exciting things.
Sometimes, it's not.
Today's a not-so-exciting day, as I have spent much of the day trying to find a way to make our worship service recordings useful. You see, we tape sermons Sunday mornings and Sunday nights. However, we lack both the extra tapes and duplication equipment to do more than just simply stockpile the cassette tapes. Also, since most people don't even realize we're taping, very few folks ask for tapes. And some people that want to listen don't have tape decks.
Long-term, the deacons and the sound committee are looking at ways to record and duplicate on CD. The first step of that will cost a little over $1,000, and will use our existing sound board and simply replace the tape recorder with a CD record. We'll also try to have the funds to purchase a CD duplicator that will make 5 copies at a time of the services. We'll see how the final costs look and present it to the church soon. Eventually, if we want quality recordings, we'll need to start considering a new sound system. Of course, given some of the odd behavior of the sound system, we're going to have to look at that anyway. It's not usually operator problems. It really is usually the equipment!
Meanwhile, I'm trying to take the cassette recordings and digital convert them. Then take that file, and stream it online. One effort is here on the actual church website. Another will work through iTunes and other RSS feed subscribers. If you have no idea what these are, this method isn't going to work very well for you. I'll try to find ways that are more user-friendly.
For iTunes: click this link: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=351164758 that will open iTunes and direct connect you to the Podcast in the iTunes store. Click subscribe. It is, indeed, that simple.
For other RSS subscribers: if you use a different format of RSS feed for audio, here's the feed link:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/CbcMonticelloPodcasts or you can hit: http://cbcmonticellopodcast.blogspot.com/ to access it.
If you have any difficulties with these, let me know! I'll try the best I can to help. Just a note, though: all of this is being done through free services that have a limit to how much data we can move. Now, it's a lot of data! We can move 5 GB a month, and Sunday night's sermon was 20 MB, which means that sermon can be downloaded 1000 times! In all, we usually have 10-15 sermons, if we start recording Wednesday nights. So, once we get more than 75 downloads or so per sermon, we'll need to look at paying for what we're doing. Until then, thanks to FileDen for the space! Don't let the limit scare you, but just realize that if you can't access, we may be maxed out, so email me and we'll check on it. If we really hit that limit, we'll find a way to spend the $30-$50 a month to be unlimited.
Take a listen. Offer constructive help on the digital and audio issues. Thanks!
Doug
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