LDS Tech

David April 6th, 2008

I posted an article on Thursday regarding the multimedia options available for the LDS community.  While the streaming video technology is still relatively new, video, audio, and transcription downloads are readily available within a short time of their original presentation.  The "official" transcription from lds.org takes a few days because it is reviewed for spelling and grammar, since this becomes the permanent record of the talk.  Here are a few resources available for obtaining Conference talks:

• Deseret News (local newspaper) - summaries of each talk, audio & text transcripts
• KSL Television - video, audio, and news stories related to LDS community
• LDS.org - official site for LDS Church General Conference, includes video, audio, and transcripts. 

As an aside for those who really enjoy listening to the inspiring music between talks, the download files for individual talks at LDS.org don’t include the music, but the full sessions do.  If you use an MP3 editing tool, you can extract just the music and save them to separate MP3 files.  When the General Conference audio files are released on CD to LDS Distribution Centers, you can also use these to save the music to separate files.  (I haven’t compared the differences between these to see how the quality of download vs CD files compare)

[EDIT] Here is an open source utility which can split MP3 files without decoding them.  Since the audio is encoded when it creates the original MP3 file, if your utility decodes it first before splitting it, there will be a loss in quality of the recording.
I have heard from some people who have compared the CDs of Conference with the MP3 files, and they have said that the CD quality is much higher.  That makes sense, since most downloads are created at a reduced bit rate to reduce the download size.

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