Guide to Authoring Podcasts at College Park

This is a guide for creating podcasts for the College Park web site. While not a complete instruction manual, it is enough to get someone started in the event that the usual podcast author is not available.

Software Needed

• CDEX for extracting audio files from audio CDs (ripping software).
• Cool Edit Pro, Adobe Audition, or Audacity for audio editing.
• ID3-TagIt for adding ID3 identifying tags to MP3 files.
• Macromedia Dreamweaver for creating and uploading web pages.
• Microsoft Word or compatible program for reading church bulletin files from the church secretary.
• Adobe Acrobat Pro or other PDF creation software for converting bulletin to PDF.
• Windows Media Player, Real Audio, or other media playing software to listen to MP3 files before posting.
• Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, or other web browser.
• iTunes to check podcasts. You may also want to check with a second podcast subscription program such as Juice.

Most of these items have at least one free option. The exception is Dreamweaver, an outstanding web authoring program. The best free alternative may be n|vu, but we have not tested this.

Get the CD

The operator of the sound system records each service as an audio CD. Pick this up after the service.

Click here for video tutorial on how to create the podcast audio file.

Extract Audio from CD

The CD audio is extracted to a monaural MP3 file using the free CDEX.

Settings:

• 64 kbps MP3.
• Mono.
• Use F10 to extract a "section" of the CD. This lets you extract the entire CD into one MP3 file

Equalize volume levels

Use Conversations Network Levelator to equalize the volume of various people speaking during the service. Just drag the file from a Windows Explorer window and drop it on the Levelator window. This creates a new file with ".output" added within the wave file name.

Edit Audio

Use Audacity to convert Stereo to Mono and to snip out unwanted sections.

Then export audio as an MP3 file, 64kbps, joint stereo.

Insert ID3 tags

1. Use the free ID3-TagIt to add Artist(College Park Baptist Church), Title(sermon title), album (CPBC 2006, for example), and a church photo to the Mp3 file.
2. Select "play" within ID3Tagit. This should bring up Windows Media player. Look for correct artist, title, and photo displayed with the player.

Create PDF of Bulletin of service.

1. Get Bulletin in electronic document (usually Word format) from church secretary.
2. Use application such as Adobe Acrobat Pro to export this as a PDF file.

Create web page and other files

Our standard web authoring program is Dreamweaver. It is essential that a web authoring program be used that:

• generates non-proprietary html.
• generates clean html that can be reasonably edited by hand (in other words, no FrontPage).
• supports SFTP file transfers.

Using this web authoring program,

1. Upload to the bulleting and podcast mp3 to the web site using SFTP secure file transfer If you look at the web URL you can figure out the directory structure..
2. Create links from the home page and from http://www.collegeparkbaptist.org/service/services.shtml to the web page of the service

Test web page

In your browser, check links from home page and the services page.

Create Podcast

1. In your web authoring program, edit the file "service.rss" in the root directory of the web site, adding a new "item" entry for today's podcast. Use other "item" entries as a guide.
2. Upload.
3. Run iTunes to confirm that iTunes fetches the new podcast. (You will need to have subscribed to our podcasts first.)
4. Visit the link "https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast?feedURL=http://www.collegeparkbaptist.org/service.rss" to tell iTunes to update its index to include this podcast.

College Park Baptist Church