Audio and Video

Your web site can become a source of teaching - making messages available throughout the week. Not only does this provide church members with access to material they may have missed or wish to listen to again, it expands your reach to visitors world wide.

If you are able to record your teaching messages digitally, it is easy to publish these talks online. You can upload audio and video in the Web Office, or transfer the files via FTP if you prefer. Many popular formats are supported including MP3, Real Audio and Video, Windows Media and Quicktime.

A recording represents a single message or piece of audio, and consists of one or more files. This arrangement enables you to provide multiple formats or quality settings for each recording.

Recordings are stored in groups, and can have security permissions applied in common with other forms of content. Published recordings appear within the Audio/Video area of the site and can be linked to from within articles or adverts.

Recording and preparing files

Ideally your messages should be recorded from your sound desk and captured digitally, using a mini-disc recorder, laptop computer or MP3 jukebox. This will preserve the best sound quality. You will then need to prepare the files using audio editing software.

Tips

Prepare the files well in software: good editing should create a clean and logical start and ending to a talk. Also adjust the levels to be consistent throughout, and so that they will play at a reasonable volume.
Save the edited file in a loss-less (ie uncompressed) format such as WAV. This will become your master file to create other compressed versions, and will be useful if you ever want to produce CDs of your audio.
In most cases there is no point in creating stereo audio, as the original source (usually a single microphone) is itself a monophonic source. A stereo file stores twice as much information as a mono file, which doubles the file size, and hence takes twice as long for users to download, for no appreciable benefit.
Use an encoding program to compress the master audio file to your chosen format. MP3 formats can be used by Windows and Linux PCs, and also Macs and personal audio players, so they represent a good universal choice. Windows Media will give a better level of compression and quality, but will only be accesible by visitors with Windows operating systems.
Instructions on how to upload the audio files are listed in the Media section of the Web Office or in the help file, along with details on where to download encoding tools and suitable settings.
Where possible, include supporting notes or presentation slides as an article that accompanies the audio. This adds tremendous value to the teaching.