You are here: Home / Featured Story / Practical Resource: How To Record Sermon Audio

Practical Resource: How To Record Sermon Audio

September 14, 2012 by 2 Comments

How To: Record Sermon Audio

There are several ways to approach this.

  1. A dedicated digital recorder set up to record sermon audio (from your sound board – or a mic running directly into the recorder).
  2. A direct line from your sound board into your computer.

1. Running directly into a digital recorder and then later importing into your computer might be the route you take if you don’t have a laptop or computer for audio capture to run at church. Many smaller churches don’t have a lot of resources and need an economic option to fill their needs. A small, affordable digital recorder might fit the bill for you.

2. Running a direct line from your soundboard into your computer is probably the most efficient way to do this if you have an available laptop or computer and can run a direct line from your soundboard.

Here’s what you want to do:

  • Find the headphone or “tape out” output on your soundboard.
  • Use an RCA to 1/8th cable (you might need some adapters from Radio Shack) and run that cable directly into your microphone input on your computer/laptop.
  • Make sure you have an audio capture/recording like Audacity (PC/Mac) or Garageband (Mac).
  • Run a few tests on your set up before you need to capture sermon audio! If you need to run more than one program while capturing audio, you want to make sure your computer set up can handle it without crashing!
  • Recommended option: Buy an external hard drive to save your audio to.
  • Recommended option: If you don’t have the hardware to make this happen, see if anyone in your church will donate an unused laptop specifically for capturing audio. It doesn’t need to be the newest, latest model, but if it’s fairly recent (within the last 5-6 years) it will probably be fine!

Do you have any tips or advice for capturing sermon audio? Feel free to share in the comments?

Be Sociable, Share!

Related posts:

  1. Practical Resource: Planning For A Successful Record
  2. Practical Resource: Beefing Up The Band With Digital Musicians
  3. Practical Resource: How To Develop A Worship Ministry
  4. Practical Resource: 12 Tips For Beginner Worship Leaders
  5. Seminars 4 Worship & Integrity Live Webcast – Audio

Filed Under: Featured Story, Media & Tech, Recent Articles, Worship Leadership Tagged With: , ,
  • http://www.facebook.com/DavidJordan687 David Jordan

    If you can use a aux send, this way you can mix the recording.

    This will give you more control over how the recording sonunds.

    Running from the tape out can cause problems. some mixers have a amp for the headphone out and it will cause a hum in the recording when going to a computer microphone input.

    With the tape out, you have no control over the mix. You only have control over the level that you send.
    The mix for the FOH will be different then what you will need for a good recording.

    https://www.facebook.com/groups/ChurchSoundMediaTechs/

  • http://twitter.com/YehoshuaKelley Joshua Kelley

    I use a Behringer FCA202 FireWire interface with our projection computer to get balanced audio in and out without hums. I also have an old program I found online called AutoRec, which I set up as a Windows system service so it runs in the background. It automatically records the whole service at the programmed time (easy to adjust).

    For the record, I take from two places. On the first channel, I take off the CCTV/CD recorder feed for the left channel so I have the option of a full mix. On the second channel, I use a spare output from the pastor’s wireless mic compressor to get an isolated feed of only his mic.

    Most of the time when I import to Audacity, I can just dump the mix channel and use only the iso, but I have the option, for example, if someone else is preaching and uses another mic, or there’s more than one mic used at once.

    We always record a CD of just the sermon, too, just in case. If something happens to the computer while recording, I lose the whole thing. AutoRec’s file isn’t saved anywhere that I can find if it gets interrupted, so I can’t recover it. It’s easy enough the next day for me to e-mail the office manager to pop the CD in the drive so I can TeamViewer in to rip the CD.