Audio – Podcasts, MP3, iPod, iTunes and so on
We’re trying quite hard to record all the 10.30am Sunday services. You don’t need to worry about how we get it done but you should know the various ways in which you can listen to the recordings. And of course we’re always up for ideas about what else we could record and publish as audio.
The recordings show up on the website in the “Discuss” area. You can easily get to all them all by clicking the “podcasts” tag on the right hand side of the website:
(A “podcast” is the rather silly name given to audio that’s been published on the internet in a way that lets MP3 players pick it up automagically – so called because of the Apple iPod. And an MP3 player, just in case it’s not clear, is a gadget that can play digital audio files in the MP3 format, which is what is mostly used to send around music and so on. Many MP3 players are, like the iPod, portable – but they don’t have to be. My kitchen radio is also an MP3 player. Most mobile phones are MP3 players now too.)
Anyway on with the show. Once you’ve got to a page showing some audio you’ll see something like this:
The simplest way to listen is to click on the Play symbol, the triangle shape, which kicks things into life:
You should then hear speaking! (Note that we can’t put the songs up on the internet because of copyright issues.)
The observant will have seen the note about “pick it up on iTunes” with a link shown too. This is a reference to the Apple iTunes software and its rather nice podcast subscription service. But I’m racing ahead.
iTunes is software for your computer – PC or Mac – that is used for a variety of things. If you’ve got an iPod you’ll know all about it. If not then don’t despair – it’s free, and you can use it without an iPod, just as a music/audio player and in this context an easy way to get hold of the sermons without thinking about it, and doing other stuff like putting them on to CD.
If you haven’t got iTunes then go to the iTunes website and download it – it’s pretty big so I hope you’re on broadband, but then so are the sermons too – and then install it. It’s usually pretty safe to accept all the standard answers to all the questions you’re asked.
Once you’ve got it installed you can click on that link in the “pick it up on iTunes” link. This should give you a “One moment please” page for a second (or perhaps quite a bit more than a second) and then take you straight into the iTunes program at the St Jo’s podcast page, some of which looks like this:
All rather nice. Now you can see a very specific thing here – a “Subscribe” button. (Next to that nice “Free” item by our logo.)
Click that button and every time iTunes starts – and periodically while it’s running – it’ll check to see if there are any new podcasts and automatically download them.
If there are any you haven’t already got then there will be a “Get” button somewhere, if I recall correctly.
Once you’ve got things downloaded you can listen to them, copy them to your iPod, and burn them to CD right from in iTunes. There are some good guides to iTunes out there on the Internet and I’m afraid I can’t reproduce them all here! But one thing I must draw your attention to – iTunes will update itself but may also offer you other software such as “Safari”. Make sure you don’t download anything you don’t want – and this may need you to unclick a box on the Apple Software Update when it pops up.
The last thing to say is that I don’t currently publish them directly but you can pick up the “raw” MP3 files directly if you know the right thing to type in. All this year’s Sunday services can be found by typing the name of the file right into your browser address bar in the format http://saintjosephs.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/audio/sunday-2009-MM-DD.mp3 where MM is the month (eg 09 for Sept) and DD is the day (eg 06). So if you go to http://saintjosephs.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/audio/sunday-2009-09-06.mp3 then you’re going to pick up Sept 6th’s file. Quite how your browser (eg Internet Explorer) handles this will depend on how it’s set up, but you may be able to download the file directly and then do other interesting things with it. My Firefox browser does.
As usual drop me an email if you have questions!
