Putting Audio Sermons Online

... publish audio sermons and music on the web

Putting your church's sermons online can be a great way to reach out to the (global) community. It also provides a great way for those who've missed a sermon (or want to hear it again) to be blessed by the teaching and keep connected.

With church123 it's easy to manage online sermons within your church website (see the step by step guide to online audio).

The hints and tips below are for those people who are running their own sites and are happy to experiment a little to get the best results.

As with any file on the Internet it's good to make sure it downloads quickly. A CD contains just over an hour of audio, storing about 650MB of information - that's a big file! A dial up modem would take about 30 hours to download it. To make audio available on the web it needs to be compressed (optimised).

Top tips for web sermons

  • Use a good quality microphone
    A poor quality source will only get worse
  • If possible record direct to CD or digital device
    You may be able to plug a lead from the PA desk straight in to a CD recorder or an old laptop / PC. Alternatively you may be able to record digitally directly to some handheld portable music devices. For example the Samsung Yepp (available from Amazon USA or Amazon UK) is able to record spoken voice from a line input (models may vary).
  • Make it mono (it will roughly half the file size)
    If it's a sermon then 99% of us will be recording from a single point mic in mono. It therefore makes no sense to have a bloated stereo file
  • Optimise it depending on content
    MP3 for music and possibly WMA for spoken sermons
  • Compress it further
    Whilst you'll lose a bit of quality your web users will thank you.
  • Edit carefully
    Remove sections without audio (silence) and other parts that are not necessary for the listening only audience (e.g. if a visual slide show with no useful audio is shown to the congregation as part of the sermon)


There are numbers of different formats that audio information can be made in. Probably the best known is MP3. This is an excellent format with many advantages however it is specifically designed for optimising music not voice. You can still do a reasonable job optimising sermons with it but there is possibly a better option. Windows Media Audio (WMA), which can play on both PCs and MACs, has a free optimisation encoder specifically for compressing the spoken voice making it ideal for sermons.

Windows Media Audio - Voice Encoder

Download Windows Media Encoder.

In a nutshell you give it your high quality source audio file, tell it how you want the file optimised (selecting Voice Quality and either 7Kbps or 11Kbps should work well) and it will churn out a new, much smaller, optimised file for you.

MP3 - For Music

Although not as good as WMA for spoken voice there may be times were you want to include music on your site and then MP3 is a great option. However you may still wish to reduce the file size you can do this in a number of ways. Even with music for casual listening on a website mono is often acceptable. In addition to this you can reduce the bit rate (many portable music players, such as iPods, can play as low as 16Kbps)

If you want to edit and change the audio files you can download a free editor call Audacity (it is available for Macs and PCs). If you want to make MP3 files you'll need the LAME encoder to go with it (PC Lame / Mac Lame).

Alternatively if you already have your church audio files in high quality MP3 format and just want to make a lower bit rate version then simply use iTunes software to output an optimised version (low bit rate version).

You will need to experiment with different bit rates and optimisations as the final quality will depend on your original audio.