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Youth Bible School 2008 Audio CD

Josh Champagne — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 07:59:28 +0000

Today I received the recording by Altar of Praise Studio from Chorus at YBS ’08. I must say, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the recording. It sounds better than it did live, at least to my untrained ear. Though it is not listed on their website, you can probably get yourself a copy of this recording if you contact them.

Here’s my favorite of all the selections:

Lord, I Want To Be A Christian In My Heart

Recording Sermons for Podcasting and Audio CD

Josh Champagne — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 05:56:28 +0000

I’m going to share my current method of recording the audio for church sermons and special events that I currently employ as one of the audio/tech guys for our church.

For sound amplification, we currently use a wired microphone on a stand, hooked up to a powered mixer with a built in amplifier. Basic 12″ speakers are wired directly to the amplifier. That takes care of the “live” sound.

Recording the sound turned out to be a little trickier. For years, we recorded with a line level feed directly to a 20+ year old audio tape recorder. When it came time to switch to a digital work flow, I did a little research to find the best solution. Recording direct to CD was one option, but what if the message went over 80 minutes? A line running to the sound card on my laptop was another option, but that could prove to be a little too complicated for my liking. I ended up going for the Olympus LS-10, a digital voice recorder that records at 24bit/96khz direct to either the 2GB of built in memory, or an optional SD card. The bonus with this recording unit is that it also has directional stereo recording with the built-in electret-condenser microphone which is great for recording live singing or family sharing times.

For standard sermon audio recordings I

use a line level direct connection to the mixer
copy the resultant digital .wav file to my laptop
down sample to a mono .wav file from the LS-10′s stereo file
record to audio cd and label it for lending out
“rip” the cd with iTunes (gets better quality sound with a very low bitrate for some reason) to .mp3 for the podcast
enter all the meta data for the ID3 tags and upload to the website

That’s it. There are a few steps that I haven’t mentioned related to podcasting, but wanted to focus on the recording aspect, mostly. So, what methods does your church use for recording sermons?

Podcasting Sermon Audio

Josh Champagne — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 01:59:42 +0000

For the last five years, I’ve been recording all the messages preached at my home church on audio tape, experimenting occasionally with different forms of digital audio.

At the beginning of this year, I took the plunge and started publishing the morning sermons as an audio podcast using WordPress and Feedburner. Here is my current (very inefficient) workflow:

Record the morning message on audio tape.
Create tape label in Avery Design Pro, print and paste on the master tape and 1 copy for the tape lending library.
Record audio from tape to digital with laptop using Goldwave Audio Editor.
Save as 16bit 44.1khz .wave audio and burn 1 Master Audio CD.
Rip MP3 version at 44.1khz 24kbps variable bit rate stereo and upload to the website.
Create entry for recording in Google Spreadsheets and link to audio file (for printable database).
Create WordPress blog entry at newhopemennonite.org with full link to audio file (Feedburner takes care of the rest of the podcasting goodness).

So, what I’m looking for, I think is an efficient way to incorporate live recording direct to digital. Maybe the best way is to just use a laptop and record direct to Goldwave or Audacity, though this may present its challenges in correct line levels etc. A standalone MP3 recorder would probably work. Problem is, which one? Any of you anonymous readers have ideas?