Sunday School: 9:45 A.M.
Sunday Morning Worship: 11:00 A.M.
Sunday Evening Worship: 6:00 P.M.
Wednesday Evening Prayer Meeting: 7:00 P.M.
E-mail Pastor Al Gaspard
Step Two: Installing & Configuring the Software
Can You Hear Me Now?
At the moment, this is section is only for Microsoft® Windows. Mac and Linux users should make sure they have sound coming through their systems to their speakers and continue on to the next section, Installing Those Free Applications.
A funny thing about Windows: you can hear the audio pass through your speakers and still not be able to record it! So, let's make sure Windows is ready to receive the incoming audio. Click on the Start button, go up to Settings, then over to Control Panel and click on the Multimedia icon; (some Windows users will need to click on Control Panel before it displays all of its icons).
Now, a dialog box will appear like the box on the left. Make sure you are on the audio tab (there are several tabs across the top, Video, Midi, etc. Just click on the audio tab if you do not see something like that which is shown to the left of this text).
You do not need to adjust playback or any of the advanced options unless you want to or have a purpose for doing so. If the "use only preferred devices" box is checked, it's no big deal (mine is unchecked, and it's no big deal either way). If the "show volume control on the taskbar" box is unchecked, you might want to check it for convenience (but you do not have to).
Click on the square button in the Recording area (to the left of preferred device; it should look like a microphone in front of a slider). Clicking on this will give us access to another dialog box that controls our recording inputs.
I can't say you need to set your sliders to the same height as mine, but it's not a bad place to start. Compare your settings with the image below.
- If you are directly plugged in (thus hooked in to the 'mic in' input on your sound card), then you want to make sure the 'microphone' is balanced and the slider is up and the Select box below it is checked (compare with my 'Line In' settings below).
- If you are running through a mixing board (thus hooked in to the 'line in' input on your sound card), then you want to make sure the 'Line In' is balanced and the slider is up and the Select box below it is checked (like mine below).
Note that the Telephone is imbalanced (to the right), while Auxiliary is imbalanced (to the left); the other three inputs are balanced.
Also note: if you have a PC microphone and you are coming in through line in, turn down your slider for the microphone! Otherwise, you'll also record the microphone, adding room noise and anything you say to your recordings!
Auxilliary, Compact Disc and Telephone are OK to be in the up position as long as you aren't using them during recording. So if you plan to listen to music while recording a sermon, then you'd want to turn down the recording level for the CD. Better off, wait until you're through recording.
Installing Those Free Applications
As you probably already guessed, I numbered the software in installation order.
- LAME mp3 encoder - Win32 (Microsoft® Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP), Linux & Unix, BeOS, & Amiga. Mac users, check out this LAME page or this discussion thread on LAME for OS X.
- Audacity - Win32 (Microsoft® Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP); Mac OS 9/X; and Linux/Unix.
Lame comes in a zip archive. You have to tell it where to unzip (no installer). Let me recommend a folder called Lame396 in your progam files, or C:\Program Files\Lame396 for Windows users (that way it's named for the version).
Audacity auto-detects your LAME installation. If you install Audacity first, you have to tell it where LAME is after you install LAME (You'll see it when we setup the audio compression on the file formats tab, below. Don't worry if you installed out of order, you can correct it then). Follow the installation as prompted.
Audacity will allow us to record the audio in an uncompressed format and the LAME encoder will compress it to make it smaller and easier to download without significant quality loss.
There is nothing you need to do for the LAME encoder, but we are going to make sure Audacity is doing it's best for us. I will be tossing out some terminology with concepts, but I'm trying to keep this simple. If you don't care why we're setting the audio to certain levels, you can skip the box below. The box below is for people who can't help but wonder, "why do I need to tweak software I just installed?"
Since I can assume you're familiar with mono (one-channel audio) and stereo (two-channel audio), the main concern with mp3 audio quality remains with frequency and compression. The higher quality makes a larger file size. But in recording the human voice, bigger isn't better.
- Frequency is measured in cycles per second called hertz (abbreviated as Hz); mp3s are measured in thousands of hertz, or kHz (kilohertz). Music lovers want the kilohertz to be high (256 kHz is considered CD quality). According to Georgia State University's website, "The male speaking voice averages about 125 Hz, while the female voice averages about 210 Hz. Children's voices average over 300 Hz." And all of those are less than 1,000 Hz or 1 kHz. For speech, 11025 Hz (11 kHz) is the minimum acceptable level, but for music, you want to record at 22 kHz or higher. If we record sound at less than 11 kHz, the recording will sound like an old-time radio broadcast or even someone talking inside a tin can.
- Compression for mp3s is measured by bitrate. Bitrate measures the number of bits (computer data) used to store a second of audio. For mp3s, we measure this in thousands of bits or Kbps (Kilobits per second).
"But wait!" you may think, "surely a better bitrate or more frequency will sound better." So, for your listening pleasure, here are two mp3 samples, each about four seconds in length of Al Gaspard saying, "Are you ready to shout? I may take my coat off!":
Sample One exceeds CD quality, is in stereo, and it's more than 15 times larger than Sample Two. Do you hear 15 times better audio? 2 times?
Now, in theory, Sample Two even wastes some space, but it's good compression for speech. However, if your tape or recording has any imperfections, 16 Kbps can be a bit unforgiving. So for recording sermons, I'm actually going to recommend a notch higher: 24 Kbps, 16 kHz, mono. As far as recording standards go, this is "Low quality", but as I demonstrate above with the two samples, higher quality does not improve the human voice.
Now if you do not agree, and think the compression and/or frequency need to be higher (or lower), by all means use your own judgement. When I'm fiddling with settings below, feel free to set your settings as you deem best.
Real World/Life Scenario
I have a 30 minute, 14 second sermon. As a mono uncompressed sound file (a WAV file), the file size is 56,718 KB (kilobytes), which works out to 55.3 MB (megabytes). Compressed down to 16 Kbps, 16 kHz, mono, it's only 3,546 KB (3.46 MB) (at 24 Kbps, 16 kHz, mono it's 5,318 KB or 5.19 MB). If I recorded in Stereo, the Wave file doubles to over 100 MB. And if I make an mp3 like Sample One above, I can expect about 15 times the size of my 3.46 MB mp3 or about 50 MB!
Higher quality only means more file size when dealing with vocal files, such as sermons.
The Audacity To Tweak Audacity
Audacity needs only a few tweaks, and I'm including screenshots. When you first run Audacity, you may see a warning box like this:
Yes, I see it, too. My temporary directory is on a 25 gigabyte partition with about 5 gigabytes of free space. Using the conservative settings I use, I have never recorded a sermon in excess of 100 megabytes uncompressed, which is considerably smaller than 1 gigabyte. Furthermore, the compressed sound files have never hit 9 megabytes (and that's all I keep). So you can safely click the Don't show this warning again check box, even if you only have a few hundred megabytes free.
Go into the file menu and choose preferences (like keyboard shortcuts? Press Alt+F and then P).
Now, let's make sure we are on the "Audio I/O" tab and choose Channels: 1 (Mono). You get the pull-down menu by clicking on the downward pointing triangle beyond the Channels box. Stereo won't help sermons.
Now, let's make sure we are on the "Quality" tab. Here we are going to define the frequency, which we'll set at 16 kHz, which is 16,000 Hz. Click on the 'Default Sample Rate' and choose 'Other'. You get the pull-down menu by clicking on the downward pointing triangle beyond the 'Default Sample Rate' box. In the box to the right of it, type in 16000 (no comma!).
Now, let's make sure we are on the "File Formats" tab. First make sure you have a LAME library defined (I'm still using 3.95, and you'll likely have 3.96). If you don't have it defined, press the 'Find Library' button; it's likely hiding in C:\Program Files\Lame396 (on Windows, if you took my advice above).
Here we are going to define the compression, which we'll set at 24 Kbps. Click on the 'Bit Rate' box and choose '24'.
If you want to know where your temporary files are, or you want to change where they are, click on the 'Directories' tab.
You've configured Audacity!
Next: Step Three: Recording the Sermon!