West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church Media

This tutorial is specific to West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church's podcast settings, but may be useful to others who are also using Drupal to manage their website's content. All the software used in this tutorial is freeware. The MP3 creation software (Audiograbber) is attached to this post for download, or it is available off of www.download.com as are several other options. Audiograbber was chosen for this site because of its ability to work on Win95-WinXP and the configuration options it allows, plus the author is very used to this program having used it since before became freeware.

The tutorial will be on a couple different pages so that parts that don't need to be done every time (i.e. this section) can more easily be skipped if someone needs a refresher or someone is stepping in to help out on a computer that already has Audiograbber installed. If that applies to you, please go to the next section instead.

First, you will need to install Audiograbber by downloading the agsetup.exe file attached to this page (scroll to the bottom). If you are inexperienced with installing software, save the file to a place that is easy for you to find (such as your desktop). Double-click on the agsetup.exe icon to install, and allow it to install to the default settings by clicking the "next" button until you get a "finish" button.

If the software doesn't load immediately, click your Start button, then Programs, then the Audiograbber folder, and finally click on the word "Audiograbber" and the program will load.

When the program first loads, it should look like this:

Click "OK" to make the Tip of the Day go away.

Next, click on Settings (from the Menu Bar) and then chose General Settings. The following screen will open:

The changes you need to make are:

1.) Select the Browse button near the upper right part of the window. Click on the white section starting "C:\" - delete what is already there and type "c:\podcasts" in the space instead, then click OK. It will ask if you want to create the directory, select OK.

2.) Select the "Advanced" checkbox in the Naming section and type in "wsuuc-%7-unedited" in the white space (this sets the filenames to be a standard format, %7 will be replaced with the date of the service so the files will sort chronologically).

Click "OK" when you've made those changes.

Next, select Settings again, then MP3 Settings. The following screen will open:




If you don't see LameEnc as an option, close Audiograbber, scroll to the bottom of this page and download the file "lame_enc.dll" directly into your c:\windows\system32 directory folder (c:\winnt\system32 if you're running Windows NT), then restart Audiograbber and continue with the settings below



The changes you will be making are:

1.) Select the radio button next to "MP3 via intermediate wav file. Delete the wav file"

2.) Under "Internal Encoder" make sure "LameEnc DLL..." is selected as it is in the screenshot above (usually it's the default)

3.) Make sure the "Constant Bit Rate" radio button is selected and move the slider over the numbers all the way to the left until it is over 32 (this creates a smaller file of lower audio quality but is fine for spoken word audio, if for any reason you later want to make MP3s of music you will want to go back in and change this setting to at least 128)

4.) Select the Mono and Low radio buttons in the next section (again, if you later want to make MP3s of music, you'll want to change this back to Joint Stereo and at least Normal)

When those changes are made, select "OK"

Next, select Settings one more time, then Normalize Settings. The following screen will open:

The only important part of this one (and the window may be smaller if the "Advanced" lower section isn't showing - not to worry) is to make sure the checkbox in the upper left next to Use Normalizing is checked.

When all this is done, on the main Audiograbber screen there should be checkmarks in the boxes next to Norm and MP3, and all is set for creating MP3s. If you don't have a service that needs to be turned into an MP3 right now, you can close Audiograbber by clicking the X at the upper right corner of the program screen. The configuration settings you've edited will be saved and ready for next time.

If you do have a service to work on, you are now ready to go on to the next step. This has been created as a separate page since, assuming the settings aren't changed to make music MP3s, none of these steps need to be repeated (unless you need to re-install or install the software on another computer).