Now that the audio is recorded, the next step is to clean up the quality of the audio. Even if your church has an amazing sound system, you will still get some noise in your recording. It usually appears as a hiss sound in the background. Also, you will need to remove some unwanted parts of the service.

To start, open up your sermon project into audacity. First you have to cut out some things at the start and end of the audio, so you only have the sermon.  You will need to highlight the beginning part of the sermon that you want to erase. You can press the play button to just play the part you selected to see that you highlighted the right part of the sermon. Press delete to get rid of that section of audio. Do the same with the end of the sermon.

Now the background noise needs to be removed. First you will need to highlight a small portion of your audio that just has noise.

Next select Effect->Noise Removal. Click the “Get Noise Profile” button. This will tell audacity what is the noise that needs to be eliminated from the sermon. Now press ctrl+a to highlight the entire audio project. Select Effect->Noise Removal, and click OK. This can take a while depending on how long your sermon is. While your entire audio project is highlighted, select Effect->Leveler. This will increase the volume, and make all the audio at a more level state. This is good if your pastor has a tendency to whisper some parts and scream other parts. The range of volume is good to keep peoples attention, but bad if a persons is listening from headphones.

To upload to the web, the file has to be compressed to MP3 format. The original sermon audio file is huge, and would take a long time for someone to download. Click File->Export, change the export type from WAV to MP3. Click Options, for Bit Rate Mode, select VBR. Change the quality to 7. This will give you good quality and small file size.

Click ok and save. A new screen will appear to input information about the audio file, this is the metadata for the file. Fill it out consistently with all your sermons, and make it as detailed as possible. This will make it easier for people with MP3 players.

The next section covers uploading the sermon to the web for free.