As a charity, we depend on donations to keep our service free.
Please consider taking out a regular donation — or donating whenever you download a talk. We will appreciate whatever you can give!
We offer our talks in three different formats. We’ve tried our best to ensure that you’ll be able to access at least two of them relatively quickly, regardless of the speed of your internet connection. Here’s how it works:
1. To listen to a track or talk before downloading, just click the play button beside it. The file should play in almost all web browsers, on almost any computer. If it doesn’t on yours, please contact us and we’ll try to help. We’ve compressed these mp3 preview versions a lot so folk with dial-up connections can use them too – but the quality is fine and should be clearly audible.
2. To download an individual track from any talk, simply right-click the play button and choose 'save linked file as'. On a Mac, option-click the play button to start the download. This will be in the same compressed mp3 format as the previews.
3. At the bottom of each talk page, you’ll see three links. One allows broadband users to download a high quality mp3 version of each talk (around 21 MB for an hour’s talk). The other is for dial-up modem users and is much smaller (around 7-8 MB for an hour’s talk – about 40 minutes to download on a normal 56k modem). Please note that these small files (.m4a) are a little punkier than the others, due to the level of compression involved. But they should also be perfectly audible! You'll need to have software installed that can play these versions of our talks. iTunes and Quicktime (version 6.4 or later) will play them and is available for free. They’ll also play in Real Audio Player, or Winamp, both of which are also available for free.
It’s also possible to listen to a whole talk online using the third link. This connects you to an mp3 stream, which will play through your default mp3 software (usually iTunes or Windows Media Player).
When the download is completed, you’ll have an audio file on your computer, or (in the case of indexed talks that we’ve split into separate tracks) a .zip file containing the tracks (like a zipped up folder!). Your computer will probably just unzip the .zip file for you when you double-click it. If not, and you are using a Windows PC, look here for help. There are several free programs available for unzipping. If you need more help, try here.
