This posting is to simply document the settings used for the sermon audio.  This may be handy for other tech heads or sound technicians that are tasked with creating sermon audio podcasts for their church.  The church sermon is generally recorded with the iKey recording device directly to a flash memory device in a full quality .wav format.  We then process it with the Audacity program to remove background noise.  At that time we encode that .wav file as an .mp3 file.  We use the LAME mp3 encoder.  The conversion is done with a command line:

Frequently the --alt-preset 24 is pushed down to 20 or 16 to attempt to keep the filesize down below 5Megs.  Even a target bitrate of 12 is possible, but is very thin and doesn't sound very nice.  Special occasions and events will frequently be encoded at a significantly higher bitrate of 128 or 192, and that version is stored only on the church server for  internal use.  If you require a higher quality recording such as this, see the office to get it on a flash drive or CD.

Blessings to you all, and please share these sermons with folks that can't make it to church or need to hear the Word of God faithfully preached.