This page is aimed squarely at those of a technical, inquiring mind, and also at those who may be in a position to implement similar projects in their own churches. It seeks to explain how various aspects of our recording ministry work, and why we choose to do them the way we do. We hope you find it helpful and/or interesting. If you have any questions not answered here, please feel free to drop us an e-mail.

Master Recordings

Our master recordings are currently made onto MiniDisc, using a Sony MDS-JE330 deck owned by one of our members. The church will purchase its own recording device in the near future, but we are still undecided as to what medium is best for mastering.

MiniDisc seems to work well, and decent rack-mount MD recorders are actually available fairly cheaply in comparison with the other main alternatives of computer-based recording or a CD recorder. The fact that MDs are not that popular is not a significant worry, since the master recordings will only ever be used by the copying team.

Theoretically, it is potentially advantageous to use the least popular format for the master, since it decreases the likelihood of a copy being required to the same medium - we are unlikely to have to produce copies on MD, and the fact that the MD deck would always be the playing device is therefore not a problem. In practice, this is of little relevance, since CDs can be copied more quickly and easily by computer, tapes can be duplicated very easily, and MP3s and the like can always be copied at the touch of a button anyway.

About Recording Codes

The recording codes make our database easier to manage, because it gives us a short string by which to refer uniquely to every master recording.

Let us consider an example to give a brief explanation of how the codes work:

   SMS-14/05

SMS - the three letters at the start of the code denote the type of service in a very simple way; in this case, the recording is of a Sunday Morning Service.

14 - the pair of digits after the hyphen are then a week number - since we rarely, if ever, have more than one of the same type of service in any one week, to use the whole date would be a waste of space, so we simply number the weeks through the year.

05 - the last pair of digits is simply the year (in non-millennium-compliant form!) Our example recording was made in 2005.