Carrubbers
Christian Centre
by Nigel Swinson, Website Ministry Leader from 2002, Carrubbers Christian Centre. September 2003
According to the Hear the Word.net Survey, April 2003, Carrubbers Christian Centre was (and likely still is) publishing more audio sermons online than any other church in the UK. The first sermon went online in March 2000, and almost every week since, both Sunday services have gone online shortly after they have been preached. Given these credentials, it seems possible that there might be some useful hints we could pass on to other churches who are looking to do the same. By reading this article we hope you can learn from our mistakes, build upon our successes, and make The Word more pervasive on the internet :o)
Publishing a sermon online permits it to be listened to from anywhere in the world (which is kinda the whole point), but along with the enlarged audience comes an element of risk. You will be declaring to the whole world what you believe, and there will be people out there who don't agree, so you may come under "attack" as a result :o(. The Church leadership need to be consulted to ensure that doing this is something that they feel comfortable with. If a policy is to be put in place, then visiting preachers also need to be informed that their sermon will be published in that format.
Ultimately, you will need to create a digital copy of the sermon which will be placed on the internet, but there may be several intermediate formats that will be transitioned through before the final digital copy. While you can have several goes at copying from one format to another, you only get one chance at the "live recording". If the quality of this recording is poor, you are stuck with it, so it is worth spending time investing in equipment and process to make sure you can have as high quality a master copy as possible.
Most churches, and ours is no exception, have a long standing tape ministry which will have been recording sermons for years. This makes tapes the obvious choice for using as a master copy, but they have always had problems with "hiss" which is why things like Dolby B/C noise reduction exist. The hiss really is a shame, and is easily and relatively cheaply avoided by using one of the other more modern formats available to you. Mini-Discs make a good alternative, cost about a pound each, and can store 148 mins when recording in mono. The players are about £100 or so and are easily hooked up to your existing sound system.
Ideally, if you have a computer at the Church near the sound desk, then you could record live, direct into the computer, removing the need for Mini-Disc (except as a high quality backup medium). When we started out publishing the sermons this wasn't the case, and presumably still won't be the case for many churches, so instead you have to take the Mini-Disc home and record from a Mini-Disc player into the computer. Either way you will need a sound card and an audio package such as Total Recorder on your computer to capture the sermon as a file.
There are several digital formats to choose from, all involving a trade off between quality and size of file produced. Each is designed for a specific target medium, the most relevant three are listed below:
| Format | Size of a 45 min recording | Compression | Designed for | Encoding programs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WAV | 100 MB | None | Digital Masters | None required |
| MP3 | 10 MB | High | Personal MP3 players are common | list at mp3.com |
| RM (Real-Audio) | 5 MB | Very High | Downloading and online streaming | HelixProducer |
If you can afford the space, we'd recommend that you record as WAV, and use this as a master format. If you intend to record two 45 min services a week, then you will go through 10 GB of space every year. At 2003's prices (£1/GB), this would cost about £10 ($15) a year for the storage of a years sermons.
Nobody will be prepared to download 100 MB of sermon every week (maybe even 200 if they want both morning and evening sermons), so you will need to put process in place for converting from WAV to one of the smaller formats like MP3 or RM. We'd recommend the RM format for publishing the sermon online due to the smaller file size and acceptable quality. At 5MB a sermon, it will take a user with 56K modem about 12 minutes to download the sermon, which is a "reasonable" amount of time to expect a user to wait. This format although highly compressed, is still leagues ahead of the hissy tapes that they can order for a few quid direct from your church.
Shortly after choosing a master digital format, you will then have to choose encoding and sample rate. There will be choices like this:
If in doubt, play about with the different options. Providing you keep your master, you can always re-record if necessary. If you are recording direct into the computer, and using only that copy as your master, then err on the side of quality.
With RealAudio file in hand you are then ready to upload it to your website as a .rm file. In order to actually "play" a real audio file, you need to create a .ram file that contains one line, which is the url to the .rm file. It is to the .ram file that you then create a link to rather than the .rm.
After you've created a few .rm files you'll find it gets pretty boring and error prone, so a good idea is to use a server side scripting language to automate the task. To help you along the way, here's an example of some PHP code that will create a temporary .ram file for the requested sermon and then draw an embedded real audio control on the web page that will have the sermon loaded in and ready to play.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<body>
<?
// Presuming you have a variable called $URL which contains the url of the sermon that
// the user wants to listen to:
// Generate a filename for a tempory ram file
$FileName = "ram/RAMfile".time();
// Create a .ram file and open it - if it cannot be opened, echo an error
$hFilePointer = @fopen("$FileName.ram", "w+");
if (!$hFilePointer) die ("Cannot create file!");
// Add the one line url to the .rm file into the temporary file.
fputs($hFilePointer, "http://www.myserver.org/rmfiles/$URL.rm");
@fclose($hFilePointer);
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
?>
These html lines will create an object on the web page that will automatically start to play
the sermon through the temporary .ram file that you have just created.
<object id=RAOCX classid="clsid:CFCDAA03-8BE4-11cf-B84B-0020AFBBCCFA" height="30" width="340">
<param name="SRC" value="<?=$FileName?>.ram">
<param name="controls" value="controlpanel">
<param name="autostart" value="true">
<param name="console" value="sermon">
</object><br>
<object id=RAOCX classid="clsid:CFCDAA03-8BE4-11cf-B84B-0020AFBBCCFA" height="30" width="340">
<param name="SRC" value="<?=$FileName?>.ram">
<param name="controls" value="statusbar">
<param name="console" value="sermon">
</object>
</body>
</html>
If you plan to publish more than a few sermons, then you need to be careful to create a suitable index. It's possible your users will want to listen to the latest sermon, but they also might want to search by passage. Having a database of all the sermons you have available soon becomes a must and your task then becomes a matter of providing a search form.
If you plan like we do to publish every sermon online, then you need to be very clear of the level of commitment that this will mean. To begin with at Carrubbers the following would happen:
The whole process would take about an hour per sermon, and commiting to do this for each sermon every week was consuming a large amount of "webteam" resources. Quickly we began looking into automating as much as possible of this task to save on man power. Eventually our goal is to do this:
Then a script would run automaticaly every week that would:
The above would reduce any human intervention to a couple of minutes during the service freeing up those extra hours to work on other ways to spread The Gospel :o)
Approximately 60 Carrubbers sermons are listened to online every week. Considering that there are approximately 300 in attendance at one of our Sunday services, that makes an additional 20%! Of that 60, it's likely that some are local members of the fellowship, who want to listen to a sermon again, or maybe listen to a sermon that they missed, but there will also be some who are abroad like our missionaries, or some who used to attend but have moved away. Most exciting of all we know of some who have little to no connection to Carrubbers, who found our site on the internet, and listen to the sermons every week!
In today's computer age, publishing sermons on the internet is a cheap and accessible way to spread the Word of God. While it may be time consuming to set up, with care it should be possible with the minimum of effort to have every sermon that is preached published online shortly after the real event. The service will be accessible by the fellowship, both local and overseas, and could even cross borders into countries where the Bible is illegal!
"Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." Matthew 28:19-20
