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New but having problems
10 July, 2011
6:40 pm
judahrn
Chicago,Il
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10 July, 2011
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Hello all, I am new to SermonBrowser and love the idea. However I am having problems setting it up on our website. I have the Itunes icon appearing, but I can't upload a scripture. I keep getting an error message after the download gets to 100%. Any help would be appreciated. Our church website is http://www.thehouseofjacob.us.

10 July, 2011
6:40 pm
judahrn
Chicago,Il
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10 July, 2011
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My fault the website address is http://www.houseofjacob.us

10 July, 2011
6:49 pm
judahrn
Chicago,Il
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10 July, 2011
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Very curious to post a sermon on my own site do I need to have an active podcast hosting company to post sermons to my website?? Sorry for all the questions, I just want to get the plugin up and running…

10 July, 2011
8:34 pm
scottlynn
Grand Ledge, Michigan, USA
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9 July, 2011
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You need to upload the sermon to your website and make it visible to the public. Your web host likely has some kind of space limitation, i.e. your website account is allowed 25mb or 1gb or something. You will then have to manage this carefully, especially as sermon files can quickly fill that space up. Compressing your sermons will allow you to fit more on the site and allow visitors to download them more quickly, but the audio quality is lower. The churches I know encode the sermons anywhere from 32 to 96 kbps in the MP3 encoding, we use a bitrate of 32kbps to save space and a typical sermon file is 6 to 10mb.

You can upload the sermon three ways, inside the Sermon Browser file area, in the media area, or directly through FTP. Since many hosting packages have an 8mb upload limit per file in PHP, I recommend uploading through PHP to a sermons folder. This also avoids some of the permissions problems with uploading through the browser. (FYI FileZilla is an excellent free FTP tool for uploading and downloading files)
Once the sermon is uploaded, then you can link to it inside Sermon Browser. If you specify the same path in Sermon Browser for your uploads, you will already see unlinked files you just uploaded.

I am willing to help further on the scripture display, but you should concentrate first on getting the MP3 uploaded and working. Then you can tweak which version for the passage display in the Templates section of Sermon Browser.

10 July, 2011
8:45 pm
judahrn
Chicago,Il
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Forum Posts: 12
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10 July, 2011
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Thanks Scotlynn for the info. I tried through the media area but there is a 2mb limit as the the files we have are 103mb. Is it possible to compress this more? And if so how and what program? I am new to FTP,but I have a tutorial I am going to use to see how it works. Any info is appreciated.

11 July, 2011
12:27 am
judahrn
Chicago,Il
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Forum Posts: 12
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10 July, 2011
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Hey Scotlynn,
I finally got the upload on the Sermonbrowser site but there is no audio. What am I doing wrong now????

11 July, 2011
2:59 am
judahrn
Chicago,Il
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Forum Posts: 12
Member Since:
10 July, 2011
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I have finally figured out how to make this work for my church. Now I have to learn how to make it look fancy.

11 July, 2011
5:46 pm
scottlynn
Grand Ledge, Michigan, USA
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9 July, 2011
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100mb sermon files seems huge to me. The sermon file size is pretty important for a couple of reasons.

1) You will quickly fill up your hosting account with large files. 20 sermons will take 2gb.

2) Visitors will have more problems downloading and streaming these larger files, especially with slower connections. A 30 hour sermon encoded at 32kbps will generate a 5 to 6 mb MP3 file, which is workable for even a dial-up connectionm as the kilobytes/minute is low enough that the sermon can be downloaded in the background while it is playing in their browser.

3) You are placing additional strain on your hosting server by streaming out huge files. If 5 people listen to a 5mb file, it requires the server to send out 25mb of data. If 5 people list to a 100mb file, it is 500mb of data, 20x more work with reduced bandwidth for everything else.

Look into get Audacity as a recording and editing package. You can record with your existing setup, or record directly into Audacity. If you install the Lame encoder in Audacity, you can create MP3 files directly from Audacity and specify the output rate before you export. We record directly into Audacity, which allows us to see the recording quality and control it better. Here is an example (this is a screenshot I just found on Google images, so it is just a random example):

http://windows7themes.net/pics/audacity-record-what-you-hear.JPG

Then we clean up the recording after service, clipping off the front and back and then we export it to MP3 at 192kbps for CDs and for our archive, and then we export the same file at 32kbps for our website. The first time we create the MP3, it asks for the tags, and we carefully enter the Author, Title, etc… making the file ready for podcasting as well. And sermon browser can create a sermon record from those same tags when we add it to the website.

We upload the web mp3 to our Sermon Browser upload folder, then go to Sermon Browser –> Files and tell it to create a Sermon Record for this new file, we fill in the remaining fields (Bible passage, Series…) and we are done. Very very smooth and professional result.

11 July, 2011
5:48 pm
scottlynn
Grand Ledge, Michigan, USA
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Forum Posts: 11
Member Since:
9 July, 2011
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Note, we upload the mp3 using FileZilla, which avoids any file size limits imposed when uploading through the website. This also avoids any permission problems, which sometimes happens when you upload to Wordpress without permissions setup propertly. Using Filezilla avoids all of this.

21 July, 2011
12:13 pm
michaelb
Member
Forum Posts: 5
Member Since:
15 July, 2011
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10

I will definitely check if my web host allows to upload sermon but I think this should not be a problem. I will try it and if it wont' work I will definitely come back and ask for help here.

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