Not all of us have a home recording studio nor the luxury of one single place  to record sermons and praise & worship services.  It can be a great challenge to make a successful recording when the day is complicated enough with all the activities a ministry brings.

Some of the options available for recording include:

1. Analog cassette recorder
2. DAT (Digital Audio Tape) recorder
3. Hard Drive (sound card to hard drive)
4. Digital recorder (uses flash non-volatile memory)

The most convenient recording device is the digital audio recorder or "PCM recorder"  (Pulse Code Modulation) which is designed around recording analog audio to digital: that is the human voice or acoustical musical instruments.

One of the great technical contributions to spreading the gospel is a recording device and a means to copy the sermon for easy distribution.  Cassettes have been the common method of passing on the message and providing a revenue source for the ministry.  Cassette duplicators still exist and continue to be used in some regions for cassette ministries. 

Many ministries today rely on CD recordable discs to provide an extended reach to their parish beyond county lines.  Most people have CD players so the media is easily played and replayed.  In the kitchen or in the car the message follows along.  You can spin your own radio show with praise and worship along with scripture study.

One should not get caught in the one best method but rather having a program that can be distributed via disc and Internet.

Podcasts are an excellent method to open up to new worshipers and then provide a full sermon on CD  for a small donation.

We are often asked about how a ministry can make CDs and we have a few suggestions.

 Let's out-line the steps

To some  it seems an obvious thing. Just drop a  CD or DVD disc in the mail and it will arrive safely to it's final destination undamaged.  It's frustrating to then get calls from clients (if they call) about damaged discs.  How does this happen and what can you do about it?

CD recordable, DVD recordable  and Blu-ray recordable all have applied surfaces. The CD recordable and Blu-ray recordable have the reflective layer,protective layer and any specific print surface layer.  If they get subjected to extreme cold and then are put through a automated mail sorter the discs can have surface lifting and cracked polycarbonate.  Plastic becomes brittle in extreme cold so a disc that is not well protected, or at least protected and mail sorter friendly and your damaged disc calls dwindle to almost none.  

Audio compression formats come in a few flavors for digital recording and CD duplication. A CD can hold different formats but the limiting factor is the players support of the various codecs.  Audio CDs use a format called LPCM-encoded which is a special compressed form of a Wave file.  It's important to understand that Wave files are very large uncompressed audio files and audio compression methods, called lossy or lossless are designed to make the files small enough to be shared over the Internet, or to even fit on a CD or DVD. Some examples of Lossy are MP3, ATRAC, AAC and WMA. In the Lossless arena: FLAC, Shorten, Monkey's Audio, ATRAC Advanced Lossless, Apple Lossless, WMA Lossless, TTA, and WavPac are just a few on the list.

If you are making an audio CD then it's critical to get the right compression format or the disc will not play. Worse if you take an even marginally compressed MP3 audio file and 'expand' it to fit a LPCM type format for CDs it will sound terrible. It's best to start with an original audio file and compress it to the format you need. Trying to go backwards will just result in a poor recording. Lossy means parts of the recording are removed, very much like radio stations compression of music (bet you did not know that) to conserve broadcast transmission energy.

To make a DVD movie from a MiniDV digital tape You need a camcorder that records Digital Video or "DV".  MiniDV digital tape format is the most popular and what I use too. TDK mini DV tape is a brand I have been successful with. Beyond the filming part of the project you will need the MiniDV camcorder for playing back the tape into the computer's hard drive. This is for both editing and recording over to a standard DVD format or a streaming video format.Typically the connection is FireWire which faster for continuous transfer then USB.

Recordable mini DVD-R is also a popular alternative although I think storage based on flash is more practical when it becomes widely available in consumer video. I've never been a big fan of CDs or DVDs as the source disc for recording audio or video.  It's impossible to edit unless you use rewritable DVDs. The issue with  DVDRW is it can have compatibility problems between drives. DVDRW provides a quick and dirty method of producing DVDs but sacrificing compatibility in the process.    

Recording can proceed in any order you like. This can all be edited later into clips and rearranged. That's how the pro video people do it.  so relax and film the show.

I was writing an article about a new lightscribe disc publisher that had the added feature of automated audio ripping and it made me think back to when I ripped all my CDs over to MP3.

The recollection of  the time it took for me to work my way through 500 albums,  some double and triple.  It took a long time and I had to sit and load one disc in at a time and I kept thinking how badly I wanted an autoloading audio ripper DVD duplicator.  The whole audio ripper project was impulsive.  I wanted more shelf space and the massive collection were stuffed into the corner of the room. 

So I moved all the discs into my office and started loading one disc at a time using Apple iTunes (don't tell PC)  which worked flawlessly.  Days later I was done with about 40GB in my 64GB USB flash drive.  I have an iPod but it's way too small.  it's an old Nano or something.  Very cool and a very expensive gift.  My Nano is like a jewel.  At 4GB it's now just good for podcasts which I have become addicted to. 

Now I can carry around my music collection and just plug in anywhere with my library safely at home and the MP3 files on my flash drive. 

It's amazing to see the changes in music distribution.  I've used reel to reel tape, cassette, and then the big breakthrough with recordable CDs.

I remember wiring the home stereo into the computer after a sound card upgrade. Many a vinyl disc was 'ripped' as the process is now called.  All of a sudden the costs of producing your own music dropped significantly with the birth of digital audio and the CD audio recordable.  Garage bands gain a new tool of self promotion beyond the gig. 

Now anyone can be a disc publisher. CDs are the calling card of a band or musician with the ability to slip one into the right persons hands.  It's not always easy to slip a streaming audio file into someones hands.