How to Download Dale Ralph Davis Sermons and Convert them to MP3 on Linux

By David Legg, 2007/2008. Back to Main Menu


The on-line sermons of Dale Ralph Davis are strongly recommended for everyone to listen to. You can get them here (Woodland PCA) or here (Aisquith) However, non-Windows users will notice, that in the case of the Woodland PCA web site files, they are not in a very friendly, portable or usable format. Windows users may be able to play them using some versions of the Windows media player, but I wouldn't know about that :)

A neat trick is to download them, then convert them into, say, MP3 format. There are lots of other possibilities, of course, but MP3 format will allow you to listen to sermons in bed on your Palm, Nokia N810 (smug grin :), in your lounge on your DVD player, or in the bath on your iPod or MP3 player. I'm not young enuf to know about iPods either :)

Here are some instructions that work on Fedora Core 5 (FC5, FC6, FC7) and similar. Please email me if it works for you on other operating systems at dwlegg (at) gmail (dot) com, or to submit other instructions or suggestions. See the bottom of this page for a contribution from Tim Heaney.


Instructions:
1. Go to here and download the mplayer packages and install them. You can also use yum to install things from the livna site.


2. Go to here and download, then install, the BladeEnc program.


3. Use mplayer to convert your .wma file into a normal PCM audio file, i.e. like a CD track:

mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader "davis_sermon.wma"


4. Use BladeEnc to convert the resulting .wav file into MP3 format:


cat audiodump.wav | bladeenc -mono -br 64 STDIN "davis_sermon.64kHz.mp3"
rm audiodump.wav


Note that this last step converts a 50MB sermon into a 25MB sermon at quite a pleasant sampling rate, 64kHz, but in mono - thus saving lots of disk space or memory card space.


Some particularly well-worth downloading stuff:

1/7/2007 A.M.  Sermon - Isaiah 53:10-12, Hebrews 2:10
"Hallelujah! What a Servant!"
1/7/2007 P.M.  Sermon - 2 Samuel 6
"A Worshipper before God's Holiness or: Holy, Holy, Holy

See also the Bible study series on Genesis which starts July 2007.


Here's an example:

[daddy@arcturus SOUND]$ cat WMAMP3.sh # a little script to do the commands automatically :)
#!/bin/bash
# Convert .wma files in current directory into mp3s
#
mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader "$1.wma"
cat audiodump.wav | bladeenc -mono -br 64 STDIN "$1.64kHz.mp3"
rm audiodump.wav

[daddy@arcturus SOUND]$ ./WMAMP3.sh '6-17-2007 PM'
MPlayer SVN-r22817 rpm.livna.org (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+ (Family: 15, Model: 15, Stepping: 0)
CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled with runtime CPU detection.
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Playing 6-17-2007 PM.wma.
ASF file format detected.
Clip info:
 name: Track 1
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/9.07% (ratio: 16002->176400)
Selected audio codec: [ffwmav2] afm: ffmpeg (DivX audio v2 (FFmpeg))
==========================================================================
[AO PCM] File: audiodump.wav (WAVE)
PCM: Samplerate: 44100Hz Channels: Stereo Format s16le
[AO PCM] Info: Faster dumping is achieved with -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast
[AO PCM] Info: To write WAVE files use -ao pcm:waveheader (default).
AO: [pcm] 44100Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Video: no video
Starting playback...
A:3353.3 (55:53.3) of 3353.0 (55:53.0)  0.5%

Exiting... (End of file)

BladeEnc 0.94.2    (c) Tord Jansson            Homepage: http://bladeenc.mp3.no
===============================================================================
BladeEnc is free software, distributed under the Lesser General Public License.
See the file COPYING, BladeEnc's homepage or www.fsf.org for more details.

Files to encode: 1

Encoding:  Standard input stream
Input:     44.1 kHz, 16 bit, stereo.
Output:    64 kBit, mono.

Completed. Encoding time: 00:01:48 (31.04X)

All operations completed. Total encoding time: 00:01:48
[daddy@arcturus SOUND]$ ll
total 122048
-rw-rw-r-- 1 daddy daddy 26814590 Jul  7 19:58 6-17-2007 PM.64kHz.mp3
-rw-rw-r-- 1 daddy daddy 53944701 Jul  2 22:25 6-17-2007 PM.wma
-rwxr-xr-x 1 daddy daddy      221 Apr 21 20:04 WMAMP3.sh

Here is the kind contribution from Tim Heaney:

Hi I just stumpled upon

     https://davidlegg.org.uk/dale_ralph_davis_linux_howto.html

and I thought I'd add that LAME

  http://lame.sourceforge.net/

is another popular MP3 encoder. Before downloading and installing
BladeEnc, folks might want to check that they don't already have lame.
If so, to convert to 64k monophonic MP3, they could run:
lame -b 64 -m m audiodump.wav -o davis_sermon.64kHz.mp3
However, you don't really need to download the WMA to a file; mplayer
is happy to take a URL as input. For example, to download and convert
the latest sermon, I could run

mplayer -quiet -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao

pcm:waveheader http://www.woodlandpca.com/media/8-5-2007%20AM.wma

lame -b 64 -m m audiodump.wav -o 8-5-2007\ AM.mp3
You could, of course, do the same thing with bladeenc.

Tim

Back to Main Menu