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 hope you'll find our site easy and enjoyable to use. If you are experiencing problems, please read the information below, which should help with most of the issues that can arise. If things still aren't working, feel free to contact us and we'll do our best to assist you.
To listen to a track or talk before downloading, just click the red play button beside it. The mp3 file should play in almost all web browsers, on almost any computer. If it doesn’t on yours, get in touch and we’ll try to help. We’ve compressed these preview versions a lot so people with dial-up connections can use them too – but the quality is fine and should be clearly audible.
To download an individual track from any talk, simply right-click the play button and choose 'save linked file as'. On an Apple computer, option-click the play button to start the download. This will be in the same compressed mp3 format as the previews.
At the bottom of each talk page, you’ll also see various download links:
The first allows broadband users to download a high quality mp3 version of each talk (around 21 MB for an hour’s talk).
The second 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).
These smallest 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 them: iTunes and Quicktime (version 6.4 or later) will work, and are available for free. You can also use Real Audio Player, or Winamp, both of which are also available for free.
You can listen to a whole talk online using the third link at the bottom of each talk page. 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 more likely a .zip file containing the tracks in 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.
The recordings in our catalogue were either digitally recorded (after the mid 1990s) or digitally re-mastered from the original source-tapes. Please be aware, however, that all of our talks were given publicly or to an invited audience, and that none of the recordings were made in a professional studio. As a result, the quality of the original recording is not perfect and, in some cases, quite poor (often with very low volume levels), particularly on older lectures. We have tried to indicate where specific instances of poor quality were encountered and can be heard on the files concerned. And we’ve turned up the volume where possible! All of the talks should now be clearly audible, and we have tried to preserve as much of the ambience of the original occasion as possible.
These talks are made available under the Creative Commons license. The talks are yours to keep for free — and we're very happy for you to share them with your friends too, online or otherwise. We do ask, however, that anyone wishing to re-distribute any incomplete part of any of our files (including samples, via another web site, by disc or by any other means) contact us first to discuss this. Under no circumstances can any charge be made for the further distribution of these files. The copyright of the recordings remains with Dharmachakra ℗ 2000-2008.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Please note that all of the views expressed in these talks are necessarily provisional! They are also not necessarily those of anyone connected with, or employed by, freebuddhistaudio.com...
