5 applications to record sermons on a Mac

May 18, 2010 in for Churches

I’ve been using Wiretap Studio to record, edit and publish our sermons each weekend for about 12 months. It’s been flawless, and a great investment of $69.

One of the features I’ve loved about Wiretap Studio is that you can schedule recordings. I set it up to record every service each week, and this happens automatically. Every Monday I would then go in, edit each recording, and publish to the church website. For example, here’s how it looks (via a screenshot from Wiretap’s website):

It’s been working just fine – until now. Now, it’s not recording, and the services that are recorded aren’t opening. I’d like to give it the benefit of the doubt as it’s looked after me so well until now – but I’ve sent a support request asking what’s wrong.

In the meantime, and in case it continues to play up, I’ve been looking into alternatives. There’s not many for the Mac, but I’ve found the following:

Have you discovered any good applications for recording sermons – for Mac or PC?

  • Ben Hudson

    I Steve,

    I use QuickTime with QuickTime Pro to encode my MP3′s nice and small.

    No scheduling though, I’ve never thought to do that – that’s a nice idea.

  • http://www.pec.org.au/ Cam

    We use Audacity on an old Mac.

  • http://itsonlybarney.com Andrew

    We’ve been using Audacity on an Ubuntu computer. We had spare hardware lying around, and no Operating Systems, so decided to try something cheap and simple, and it has worked out to be perfect.

    I had never thought of scheduling the recording, so my query is how does that work? Do you start the computer at the beginning of the day, and it records the services based on the scheduler? Or does the computer go into a ‘stand by’ mode when it isn’t recording?

  • http://www.toongabbieanglican.org.au Simon

    We’re using HarddiskOgg on a PC.
    It has some nice features, built-in nomalisation, nice automatic filenames. Because it can be started from the commandline, we have set up one of those multimedia keyboards with the extra buttons to start and stop – meaning very easy for anyone to use.

    We combined this with a level meter, so the PowerPoint operator (same machine) can see that the audio is reaching the computer. PPM meter.

  • Steven Kryger

    Thanks for sharing what you do.

    Scheduling is one of the key benefits to our current set-up – i.e. in the past the people on the computer used to forget to press record.

    Now, the computer is turned on at the start of the day and each service is automatically recorded, and on Monday I edit the recordings to strip out the Bible reading and sermon.

    When it’s working (which it has, until recently), it’s been working very well.

  • http://www.dobox.com/ Bruce

    I Steve,

    I use QuickTime with QuickTime Pro to encode my MP3′s nice and small.

    No scheduling though, I’ve never thought to do that – that’s a nice idea.

  • Steven Kryger

    I worked out why it wasn’t recording – the library of recordings was too big, and it couldn’t handle it!

    I deleted the library (all the talks we want to keep are on the website), and it’s now working like a charm!

  • http://www.thelakes.net.au Adam

    Anyone record direct to an iPhone? Is there an app for that?

  • Boyto

    I’ve been using Audacity (on OS X) for years and decided this week to finally give up on it. When you save a file the keystrokes are issued to file program in the background, it’s crashed twice in the last two weeks whilst recording, and has deleted files when I tried to save them. Sure it’s open source, but it seems no one else cares about such bugs.