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A couple of months ago, I blogged about my experience with the beta test version of ShoePhone for the TalkShoe conference calling and podcasting service. TalkShoe has just announced the general availability of ShoePhone, and the best news is that it's free for unlimited use! This means that TalkShoe will continue to be an excellent resource for conference calling and large group podcasting!

When we first moved into our current sanctuary in 2001, we set up a wild assortment of connections to feed cassette and CD recording, FM hearing assist, the 70V system for the cry room, and so on. This short-lived arrangement became very cumbersome until we found a good solution that included sensible use of the matrix outputs on our Allen & Heath GL4000 console and the addition of a Rane SM 26B splitter mixer.

I've been checking out TalkShoe lately, mostly due to my interest in the Church IT Discussion Podcast. Even though my IT and church sides don't overlap all that much, I love the format. An hour or more of somewhat moderated discussion between a mix of full-time and volunteer church IT people. I've been listening to the archived podcasts for a while, and finally got a chance to check it out live today.

I didn't want to tied up on a long distance phone call, so I decided to check out my Voice over IP options. I followed the instructions for using the SJphone from SJLabs, and it worked really well, but as it turns out, I did things the hard way.

Okay, this is a silly rant, but Jason Powell said on the Church IT Discussion Podcast to just do it. Blog about something, at least once a week. So here it is...

Last night was another one of those Microsoft days. A friend of mine got one of those cool Treo 700 phones that would drive me crazy, and needed me to come help him get it talking to his Exchange server.

I was recently asked about installing instant messaging clients to allow young teens and pre-teens to join the online chat community. The main question was whether or not the client software was safe. This entry is my response to the question, because I don't think this question holds a simple answer. In today's Internet culture, safety has many different meanings. Because there are unpleasant people who would like to exploit vulnerabilities in our software, there are certain things we need to do to keep our computers safe.

In the previous article, I explained how to use Audacity to process a recorded sermon to ready it for podcasts and radio broadcast. The resulting WAV file is rather large, and cannot be conveniently stored or streamed, and so it should be converted to MP3 format. The LAME encoder is used to create the mp3 files for streaming and archival purposes, and we will use the AutoIt V3 scripting tool to simplify the encoding process.

We normally record directly from the sound system onto the computer using Audacity, but there are times when the message must be imported from a CD for processing. Recording the audio portion of the CD introduces an extra conversion (from digital to analog and back again) that is not necessary. Instead, it is preferable to retrieve the contents from the audio CD as data. This process is known as CD ripping.

There are numerous ways to rip the audio from a CD. Most CD burning software includes an option to save the tracks to audio files. The problem with this method is that most sermons are broken into multiple tracks, and these tracks must be combined back into a single file.

CDex is a free CD ripper that can retrieve audio in several formats. One of its supported options is to rip designated portions (or the entire CD) into a single WAV file.

Pastor Tim's sermons are available on the Cornerstone Web site. We now support streaming, download, and podcasts as delivery methods. This page documents the methods used to prepare sermons for the web.

Update October 2007: These instructions are also being used to process the recorded intros and outtros for Pastor's radio show. However, I've recently made changes that require recording these components in mono. That would be fine - desirable, actually - for podcasting, but we need to create a stereo image for radio broadcast. Please review these steps for converting mono to stereo in Audacity.

Tools used for this project include the Audacity audio editor, VST plugins from Kjaerhus Audio, the LAME MP3 Encoder tools, and AutoIt V3 scripting tools for Windows. All of these items are free downloads from the Internet. Please use these instructions to install and configure Audacity.

Post-processing the message generally consists of the following steps:

• Trim the audio to the desired portion
• Apply equalization, amplification, compression and limiting effects
• Fade out the closing music when Pastor finishes speaking
• Export the processed work is exported back to WAV format
• Create MP3 files from the exported WAV

Audacity can be linked with the LAME library files to export MP3 files directly, but the steps shown below allow a greater level of control.