I am new to website building. I want to build a website for my church. I want the website to include a forum. I also want to offer visitors the ability to download a sound file of the weekly sermon. I anticipate that I will only have about 10 people downloading per week. The sermons average about 45 minutes in length. I am guessing the the average .mp3 file size would be about 40mb or so. I have a few questions that maybe a few here would be willing to help me with:

1. I want people to be able to download .mp3 files but I also would like to offer streaming capability. (I don't need live streaming or video streaming.) There seems to be two types of streaming from what I can surmise: Http Streaming and RealAudio streaming. Which would be best for my purposes? Full fledged RealAudio using RealAudio servers seems expensive.

2. Personally I HATE anything related to RealAudio. I hate all the spam and spyware the load on your computer. I actually avoid listening to streams that use RealAudio just because I do not want the realaudio player on my system. So, can I use Windows Media player to stream audio? Do I need to pay extra for servers that have the capability to serve a Windows media stream? Will Windows Media Streams work on unix servers?

Thanks in advance for any guidance!

Hi,

I actually did a similar project for a church, although we setup dedicated servers onsite and had live video/audio streaming during services as well as archives. I found real media worked really well. And in the defense of real player they have really cleaned up thier act lately, alot less intrusive. They are also supporting helix player which is a large opensourced player.

If you don't want to go with real then mp3 is your best bet. Since its on demand streams there isn't any other cost effecient alternatives for a small operation like that. I would suggest encoding at a low bitrate and make it mono, stereo sound is uneeded in this case.

And you would need a Windows server to stream wm files. You could look into a service that lets you rent streams on thier servers...

You can easily make a .wma file with the windows media encoder package and stream the files on unix or windows servers.

for streaming You can try Flash Voice Buttons.It's the most powerful tool. Putting any sound or voice message to your website never been so easy.
A lot of button styles and the main thing is that all of the internet surfers can play sounds without any extra downloads or plugins.

Get It On:
http://www.reutera.com/Flash-Voice-Buttons/

or winamp streaming radio? hahaa

I have written a turn-key mp3 player solution that works on any webserver or host. All you would have to do is upload your mp3 file to your webserver and the player will do the rest. Also, it works in frames so your web visitors can browse the church site while listening to the sermon. I like Flash streaming tons better than RealAudio. Also, since your mp3 file will be simple speech you should be able to get a pretty small mp3 file out of a 10 minute sermon. Possibly under 10 megs. The mp3 format is very powerful afterall. I do not think i am allowed to post links so i can't link you to my mp3 solution. but here goes an attempt at putting the url here. hope this helps. http://www.gigfoot.net/software/1.html

Good luck with your site sounds interesting send me a PM when it is done. On a side note: make sure to look into a company with good bandwidth plans because your streaming audio will take up alot of bandwidth a month.