Getting good digital audio of sermons without spending a fortune
Thursday, March 19th, 2009
I’ve been included in, or told about, conversations in several churches lately about getting digital audio recordings of sermons, and a common theme is the fear that it’s too expensive. At the risk of sounding like a commercial, I can say that in our experience here at CICW, we’ve become huge fans of these little handheld Olympus WS digital recorders, many of which you can buy on Amazon for less than $100.
These are what we use for many of our audio recordings from Symposium and for some recordings in the sermon archive at our sister institute, the Center for Excellence in Preaching, and we’re consistently impressed by the sound quality we get when the recorder is placed within about 6 feet of the speaker (here‘s a recent example). You can also hook the recorder up to a lapel mike or to a sound board with an XLR adapter, either of which is about $20.
Then you just plug in the recorder to a USB input on your computer and download the recording (it comes out as a WMA file; you can convert it to MP3 with this free converter). If you want, you can edit the MP3 with the free open-source program Audacity. Then you can post the MP3 to your church’s website or blog, and easily create a podcast.
Here’s more info on how we capture and publish digital audio. But the bottom line is that good equipment for decent audio recordings doesn’t have to cost your church or organization more than $100 or $150.
Tags: audio, churches, equipment, sermons
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We are a small rural church (under 100 in the sanctuary on Sunday mornings). We digitally record each service using a low-end wireless lapel mike plugged into an old donated desktop computer. We use WavePad Sound Editor software which was very reasonable to purchase and download from http://www.nch.com.au/wavepad.The recordings are good quality. You can listen for yourself in the SermonCentral player at the bottom of my blog page.
We, too, are a small congregation. I use a low-end lavalier mic and receiver plugged into my MacBook Pro. I use Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba to record directly to mp3. Once I finish recording, my tags are already filled out and the file is ready to be posted to the internet. I bring it into GarageBand or Audacity if I need to clean the sound or add an intro.
how long does is take to download the WMA file onto a computer? is it quicker than ripping a CD to computer?
this may work for us. when we record through the lavelier we get a buzz cause of the old wiring and the interferance from the hanging lights. ??We may give this a shot.
I’ve tried a number of options. For our sermons we plug in a PC to the sanctuary audio feed and if everything is working right that tends to give the clearest sound. For recording our Sunday School which is not in the sanctuary I find my old IRiver H120, a 20 gig MP3 player with a terrific mike works best. There is a noise when the HD has to spin up but I find the mike is more sensitive, and the recording less tinny than cheaper audio recorders.