Sunday, December 20, 2009

Church Podcast bleg

Hey, I've got a minister friend who is thinking about podcasting
sermons. Is there anybody currently doing that who could answer some
questions and talk her through that process?

Sent from my iPhone

3 comments:

Unknown said...

The Anchorage UU Fellowship is podcasting a bunch of it's services (http://www.anchorageuuf.org/ and http://web.mac.com/auuf/AUUF_Podcasts/Podcast/Podcast.html) I am the web guy and I prepare and post the podcasts and would be happy to answer any questions that I can.

UUpdater said...

You could point her at http://uupodcasters.com/HowTo.htm. which is a UU podcaster. They also have a group mailing list. She can probably find support there. Both for getting going and ongoing support.

Steve Caldwell said...

CC,

I've been podcasting the sermons for our congregation since April 2007:

http://allsoulsuushreveport.org/blog/podcasts/

Assuming that your minister friend has a web site where the mp3 podcast files can be uploaded to the internet, the other costs for podcasting are free to very low-cost.

We use free software (Audacity) for editing the worship audio online to contain just the sermon (avoids music and hymnal reading copyright issues). Audacity also exports the file in mp3 format that can be used by others.

Filezilla is an easy-to-use free ftp client for uploading the edited audio files to the web site.

Both Audacity and Filezilla are free open-source choices that run on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.

Apple give free instructions on how to create the podcast rss feed and how to submit your rss feed for the iTunes music store. Marketing your podcast through their music store helps them sell more iPods and you might as well let their marketing efforts help you as well as them:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html

Our congregation is using a donated cast-off 2000-era Pentium III computer with 256 megs of RAM and an 20 gig hard drive as a free podcast recorder. This computer is using Ubuntu Linux and is plugged into the sound board to capture the worship audio.

To accomplish this, we had to buy an audio cable that takes the sound system mixer board headphone outputs and routes them to the input connector on the PC's sound board.

Everything (hardware and software) else was either free or donated. The web hosting was already purchased for the church and there is no additional cost with our hosting plan to podcast.

Take care,
Steve