Using MP3 Audio Online
This page describes how to create and upload an MP3 audio file to a website. Our method isn't necessarily the easiest, and will require some experimentation on your part, but we like it because it has the advantage of being virtually (or completely) free!
There are three basic steps:
- Copy the sermon onto your computer
- Convert the sermon into RealAudio or MP3
- Upload the RealAudio/MP3 file to your webserver
- MP3 player software choices
1. Copy the sermon onto your computer
To do this you will need:
- A copy of the sermon on tape or cdrom (cd is easiest).
- A tape player connected to your computer, or a cd-rom drive. Connect it using a lead going from the Line Out (or Headphone) socket on your tape player to the Line In socket on your computer's soundcard - this can be done with standard audio cables available at most stores.
- Sound editing software. If you don't already have this then you can download some - I recommend the following packages: However, there are a wide variety of choices, such as GoldWave and Cool Edit. Both Windows XP and current versions of Mac OS include basic sound editing and recording software as well. Feel free to try different packages out, and see which you like best!
Play the tape of the sermon onto your computer, using the sound editing software to record a digital audio copy of it onto your hard drive. Note that this recording should be much more high quality than you plan to put online. If the software you choose does not support directly writing or saving files directly to MP3 files/formats, then you should save the audio file in a wave (.WAV) format. The size of the end file will depend on the quality settings you choose, but for a 20-minute talk we would expect a WAV file to be around 50Mb in size.
At this stage you can use the sound editing software to remove the parts of the recorded sermon that you don't want, such as the gaps before and after the sermon.
2. Convert the sermon to the MP3 format
Your sound editing software may do this already, otherwise it is easy to find a free or minimal cost (shareware) software package online. If it does not, then I recommend the following package (which is free):
This is a fairly simple package with a lot of features. Best of all, it's free! And it produces excellent quality MP3 files, as well as giving you plenty of optimization choices.Using this software, the .WAV file produced in the first step can be converted to a compressed format which can be streamed from a webserver to the user. The choice of whether you use RealAudio or MP3 to do this is up to you, but it is worth experimenting to see what works best. One advantage of using RealAudio is that it is easier for users to listen to it online; often with MP3 they will have to download the sermon before they can listen to it.
We recommend that you use a very high level of compression (low bitrate), sacrificing sound quality for a smaller file size. This has the advantage that only a small bandwidth is required for a user to listen to the talk online.
As a side thought, once you have produced the audio file for online use (and before you get rid of the source WAV file, if you use that approach),
you may want to create a high-quality (192Kbps bitrate or better) for archiving purposes - just in case you need a higher quality file later.
3. Upload the MP3 file to your webserver
Contrary to what you may have heard, you don't need a special (i.e. expensive) webserver to play streaming audio files. Simply use your regular webserver and you shouldn't have any problems. Some of the functionality isn't quite as good as you would get if you spent lots of money, or have a special (streaming) media server available, but it works fine for online sermons.
If you are using MP3 then before you upload the .MP3 file to your webserver you need to create
a .M3U file which points to the .MP3 audio file. The .M3U file is made like the .RAM file —
create a one-line text file containing the location of the .MP3 file on your website
(e.g. http://www.mychurch.org/sermon.mp3) and then save this text file
with a .M3U extension (e.g. save it as sermon.m3u).
Then upload these two files to your webserver and provide a link to the .M3U file from a webpage.
Users clicking on this link will be able to listen to the sermon online!
(If you want users to be able to download the sermon then on the webpage link directly to the .MP3 file.)
4. MP3 player software choices
While most newer computers come with software already installed that can play MP3 files, following is a list of software MP3 players in case you want to make a list of such available to your listeners:
Further comments
It takes a bit of fiddling around to get the first few sermons available online, but it gets much easier once you've got the hang of it! One church which is using the method described on this page is Gospelcom.net's Bible Gateway. Try taking a look at their Audio Bibles offerings to see how it works in practice.
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