Podcasting is the distribution of audio or video files over the Internet. It is a way to provide learning programs for personal computers and mobile devices so that the audience can listen to audio or video when they want, where they want, and how they want. These digital files can be downloaded and played on personal computers, MP3 players (like iPods—hence the name podcasting), or burned to CDs for listening on CD players.
Podcasts are often used in college classes and even by churches to provide religious broadcasts.
The Church already provides audio and video of general conference, and audio recording of monthly magazines and core curriculum manuals. These files can be streamed live or downloaded for later use. The quality of recordings of magazines and curriculum will be improved in the future with better voice talent.
What do you think about the idea of daily audio downloads of a portion of the Ensign, Liahona, New Era, or Friend magazine so you can listen through the magazine in the course of the month?
How about weekly audio downloads of the gospel doctrine lesson (including the scripture reading for the week, lesson manual, and any student supplemental material)?
I think those are excellent ideas. Even more helpful would be a weekly podcast of the talks from the most recent General Conference. That would ensure you could review the talks before the next GC. (And getting off the subject, why isn’t audio of the priesthood sessions included, is that a Distribution Center ploy to get us to buy the CDs? 🙂 )
Also a podcast feed for the “Recent Addresses” page would be nice too.
The BYU Speeches site does a very nice job of this.
Overall, I think it would be great to have RSS better integrated with the new church site, including the all the audio material as well.
Great blog!
The first thing I would like to see is a separate audio podcast feeds for each of the Standard Works. It took me forever to manually download the mp3s.
A simple click in iTunes and (after a wait) it all gets loaded onto my iPod.
I think a feed for each of the Magazines would be great as well. When a new issue is published each month the feed is automatically updated.
And… I’m not meaning to be critical but could we get some real tags on the mp3s for the standard works?
I think this would be a great idea. It can’t be too hard to throw the RSS feeds together, since the content is already online. LDSVoices (http://www.ldsvoices.com/) has been doing a great job of this, and I think the Church could only expand their potential audience by providing their content this way.
Regarding not posting audio of the priesthood sessions: it’s not a ploy by the Distribution Center to sell more CDs. It is a decision by the Church not to make the priesthood session quite so public. The Church has no vested interest in making money off products. The Church only wants to get materials to people in the most effective way possible–that’s why we’re offering so much in text, audio, video, handheld, and other formats for free on the Web.
I think both of these ideas are excellent and would be helpful for a lot of people. It’s wonderful that so much Church-produced content is already available online, but creating a few specific RSS feeds that could be used to download selections on a daily basis would make it easier for more of us to use that content more regularly.
I really like the simplicity of having a tool such as iTunes or iPodder automatically download fresh content each day for use on an MP3 player. There’s so much content out there now that is available in that way – once it’s setup, there’s very little effort involved in being able to listen to whatever is offered daily. There are a lot of ways the Church could utilize that model to distribute uplifting content. I’m looking forward to seeing something like that made available, and appreciate the links to those that are already going, such as LDS Voices & BYU Speeches.
One thought about the Gospel Doctrine downloads. Although I would love to have that available (it would make being prepared for the lesson so much easier!), I seem to remember that a similar thing was tried on one of the LDS email services. After a while, it was cancelled – I believe it was because there was some concern somewhere (among the brethren, maybe?) that those emails were replacing sincere scripture study, and could not be nearly as effective. I can understand how that could be a problem, but I still think there’s merit to this idea. Perhaps the weekly download could include a reminder to take time to study in the way we’ve been taught (prayer, pondering, reading cross-references, etc.) Listening to this content would certainly be better than not studying at all, and may even encourage/motivate some of us to study more.
This blog is a great idea, by the way! I hope we’ll see more church-related sites like this in the future. Keep up the good work!
I wonder if the Tabernacle Choir has ever considered offering Music & the Spoken Word in an MP3 format. That’s one of the first things my Wife went looking for when she got her MP3 player, but we weren’t able to find anywhere that such a thing is available. That’s certainly something I would subscribe to – that program always comes on while we’re @ church.
I wholeheartedly agree with the comments, and I would love to have more available from the Church in the way of podcasts. I listen to lots of sescular podcasts and there are a few LDS ones (mentioned above) that I enjoy as well. I too would love to get a weekly podcast of Music and the Spoken Word. Thanks
Jeremy, Music & the Spoken Word is a great idea.
I would enjoy listening to a podcast of the full talks that get edited down into the Teachings of the Presidents of the Church manuals. For some of the more recent presidents I would assumes that many of these talks were recorded and it would be possible to listen to the original talks. For others the talks could be read. The Mormon Wasp already posts the text of the talks online, but I’m not aware of a resource for the audio.
I would like to see a podcast and blog of the scriptures that takes this concept:
http://interconnected.org/home/more/davinci/
The idea is that the day you subscribe to the feed is the day the blog/podcast starts. So if I want to read the Book of Mormon at one chapter a day, I could subscribe to today’s feed (see the url) to start at the beginning and get a new chapter each day.
One other comment: There is a real need to re-index the audio version of the scriptures available at LDS.org. When you download the .mp3 files, their names and metadata are not labeled in a way that makes it easy to listen to them in order (at least when importing them into iTunes).
And one other thing about the audio scriptures… It would be nice if the files were set to be “bookmarkable” once they were downloaded. While listening on an ipod, if you come back to a track, it should start playing where it left off instead of from the beginning.
Here is a good article on this: http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/bookmarkablematrix.php
We have chosen to use MP3 files on Church Web sites rather than AAC apple codec files so they can work with all devices, not just Apple devices. The newer MP standards will include the “bookmarkable” feature in the future.
For now, any iTunes or iPod user can take our MP3 files and “upgrade” them to AAC files within the application, and then use the bookmarking feature.
I would love it if I could subscribe to a General Conference podcast via iTunes and every general conference the talks would automatically be downloaded to my iPod.
A video and audio podcast of General Conference would be great. It might also be a great missionary opportunity if they are listed in iTunes. I’m sure it would make the “top downloads” list following General Conference weekend.
When I want to listen to the Priesthood sessioin I just turn on the ASL copy to the right of the listed talks. Even though there is someone doing sign language in the foreground, I get more out of the talks listening rather than reading the text. Especially when I’m busy working on a different project.
J
As I have looked over some of the comments recorded in the blog, I have been very impressed by the many suggestions. I have on my iPod several podcasts from church sources such as the Ensign, General Conference and the Priesthooc/Relief Society lesson manual. I enjoy listening to each of them very much, especially when I have to work about 26 Sundays a year. On those Sundays, I am thankful for those podcasts. The one thing that I would like to listen to as well would be Music and the Spoken Word. I have noticed that this idea was first recorded on this blog site back in 2006 so I am wondering where this suggestion stands at this time? Is the Church thinking about making a podcast available to download and if so, how soon could we expect to get it?