Podcasting and sound

[freespiritchurch]

I'm a pastor in a small church in a town of 7500 in northern IL. We have hooked a computer to our sound system and are recording the services; I burn them to CD on my laptop (which the church got for me--yay for them.

I would like to start podcasting the sermons and have no idea how to begin. I was a computer guy in my past life, and taught myself Perl and HTML. At this point, I feel like I'm fluent in Middle English.

The church has a basic DSL connection, which doesn't have much uploading speed...I think that our connection would bog down if people actually started listening to the sermons. Our web page is hosted on forministry.com, which is great for a church without a real Webmaster but not a good place to manage something like a podcast.

I realize this isn't, strictly speaking, a worship question, but this seemed like a good place to start. If someone wants to direct me elsewhere, I'd appreciate it.

 

[DZoolander]

Where to begin really all depends on how involved you want to be in the process. My church went through the exact same series of questions when we first began podcasting our sermons/activities/etc.

A podcast basically has two components. There are the media files (the files can be audio, or video), and there is what is called a "feed". The feed gives directions - pointing to the media files. When people subscribe to your podcast, they are actually subscribing to the feed. When you update your podcast, you're adding new information (new pointers) to the feed. Therefore, all the people who have subscribed to it, are immediately notified/updated with your new content.

I hope that makes sense

To get up and running, you'll need:

1: A place to house your media files
2: To create the feed
3: To submit your feed to normal distribution channels (like the iTunes music store, yahoo podcasts, etc)

The feed is an XML file, structured in a specific way. In that structure you define the show, and it's episodes. You can check out Apple's webpage for more information about how to structure your XML file.

That's how to do it if you want to do it yourself.

We did that for a while, and although it wasn't too hard, it was tedious. We also had issues with bandwidth. As our podcast became more popular - it started to cost us more due to our server's allotment of bandwidth on our plan.

Eventually we decided to contract out a podcast host. There are a few out there that specialize in Christian podcasting - but they tended to be REALLY expensive compared to normal podcast hosts. I guess they were going for niche marketing. One host we were with for a while was charging $49.99 a month.

After researching around, we found we could get a better plan, for a lot less money just going with a normal podcast host. After all - the user is looking at the podcast itself - not the company hosting it. There is no difference between a Christian Podcast in iTunes that is hosted by a normal podcast host over the same Christian Podcast in iTunes being hosted at a specialized "Sermon Provider", you know?

We eventually settled on a company called http://www.avmypodcast.com. They had the best tech support, got us up and running instantly, don't charge us for bandwidth, and it's so simple.

Anyhow - hope that helps. Good luck!