CCNJ Podcast

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This page descibes how Calvary Chapel North Jersey does their podcast. It is intended as a reference for CCNJ, and also to help other churches setup their own Podcast.

Purpose

First, the purpose of the podcast is to help spread the Gospel. Jesus tells us to "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." Mark 16:14-18. The Internet is a well suited tool for reaching the whole earth, and the costs are less than producing CDs or tapes.

Recording

One of the goals is to keep everything as simple as streamlined as possible. The initial recording is done with a hardware CD recorder. This recorder is plugged into the sound board, and is operated by a remote control. We paid $400 for ours and it works very well. We also purchase high quality recordable CD's. Low quality CD's can cause recording errors, so avoid them at least use as a recording master. One limitation of the CD is that you can only record 80 minutes of audio. For normal messages this has not been a problem, however, sometimes recorded discussions get cut off. We decided originally has discussed using a digital audio recorder, but decided on using a CD recorder. Here are some of the reasons why:

  • Simplicity: All the media person has to do is put a CD in the drive and press record.
  • Durability: Once they message is recorded onto CD, there is no worry about it getting accidentally deleted.
  • Quality: Many other recorders compress the recording, and loose fidelity. With CD, our master copy is uncompressed, and we can always compress it into any format.
  • Duplication: With the master on a CD, all we have to do to create a copy is drop it into a duplicator. It does not need to be transferred to a hard drive first.
  • Storage: We are able to store hundreds of messages in low cost binders.

Converting to MP3

At the end of the service we have the service we have the message on CD, and then we must convert it, and upload it to the website. By having the audio on a CD, the person who records the message does not need to be the same person who uploads it. We use a Windows XP computer to upload convert the CD to an MP3 and upload it to the Internet. A Mac would probably be even better suited to this task. The process is as follows:

  1. Insert the CD into the computer
  2. Launch a program called Audiograbber. Audiograbber is a free program which can 'rip' the CD, and turn it into an MP3. Many programs can do this, but I choose audio grabber for these reasons:
    • It's Free
    • It has easy to set options to control the quality. We encode at 64kbps Mono using the LAME encoder.
    • It makes it easy to set the ID3 tags - that is the artist, title, and album for the track.
    • It can 'normalize' the audio level. This isn't foolproof, but it can help make the messages from one week to the next have about the same volume.
    • It's fairly fast and has a nice user interface.
  1. Enter in the name of the message into the 'Track' field. For CCNJ this is normally the scripture covered.
  2. Enter in the speaker's name in the 'Artist' field. Normally this is 'Pastor Tim Gentle'.
  3. Enter 'Calvary Chapel North Jersey' into the 'Album' field. This makes all the podcasts group nicely in iTunes or your iPod.
  4. Enter 'Podcast' or 'Spoken Word' for Genre.
  5. Once the fields are filled out, all one has to do is press 'Grab'. This will read the CD and create the MP3 file.
  6. After Audiograbber is finished, one needs to rename the file. We give all of our files a consistant name, which is both used for the website and for making the directory readable. Our files are named [swf]YYYYMMDD.mp3, where s, w, or f is for Sunday, Wednesday, or Friday.
  7. Lastly, the person double clicks on the 'upload' script which is found on the desktop. Everything after this point is handled automatically, so the person is done after this step.