Download All Individual Conference Talks

Hi all,

I'm looking for a way to download all conference talks individually. It'd be great during my study to have a random conference talk I can play and study. I know I can download individual talks here (https://www.lds.org/general-conference/ ... s?lang=eng) after a bunch of clicking but it'd be great to batch download them.

Thanks in advance!

Chris

I have used a download manager that is a Firefox extension to download multiple video or audio files from a site. The one I have used is called "Down them All." It used to work on the LDSYouth music page, but at one point a web page change broke it and I have not tried since. I have not tried it with the general conference talks, but can do so this evening. If it works, I will re-post with the method.

If you look at previous conferences, for example the April 2017 conference, you will see a "Talks and Music" download link under each session. I'm guessing those links will be added sometime in the next few days for the October 2017 conference.

"Down Them All" works to some extent. The way the pages are set up, it will not see individual talks. It will automatically download all the full conference sessions all at one time (visible from the grey bars at the top of each session. It will also automatically download all the zip files of the individual talks if/when they are available (as sbradshaw mentioned above) since they are also directly linked from the page. They will have to be unzipped manually.

It is only slightly faster than downloading the zip files individually. I can send some screenshots if anyone is interested in trying it. There are some download managers available for Chrome that appear to work the same way but I have not used any of them.

The "Talks and Music" button was exactly what I was looking for, I just didn't see it on the most recent session. And I don't mind downloading the zip files individually. Thanks both!

Where can I find the “Talks and Music” part? All I see is a headphone icon on the top right under the general conference section in the app.

webbd12 wrote:Where can I find the “Talks and Music” part? All I see is a headphone icon on the top right under the general conference section in the app.

"Talks and Music" is on LDS.org, not in the Gospel Library app. Gospel Library doesn't have the music from the most recent General Conference as separate recordings – only the talks and the full sessions.

sbradshaw wrote:"Talks and Music" is on LDS.org, not in the Gospel Library app. Gospel Library doesn't have the music from the most recent General Conference as separate recordings – only the talks and the full sessions.

Perhaps on the LDS Media Library app?

Have you tried the LDS General Conference Downloader tool found here: https://github.com/simmeringratchet/LDS ... Downloader
Shameless plug - my son, a serving missionary, asked for a download of all conference talks, so I created this little tool to do it. I hope it's helpful to others.

simoncain wrote:Have you tried the LDS General Conference Downloader tool found here: https://github.com/simmeringratchet/LDS ... Downloader
Shameless plug - my son, a serving missionary, asked for a download of all conference talks, so I created this little tool to do it. I hope it's helpful to others.

Nice!

Hi Sam,
Thanks for the link and the program.
Although I don't code in Python, as a UNIX/Linux System Engineer I'm usually pretty self sufficient in getting stuff to run. However, this script is throwing about 9 or so errors. Python is installed, and I believe I have your code installed correctly as well.
My command line is this:
.\gen_conf_downloader.py -start 2017 -dest .\Conferences

I'm reluctant to post the entire error list here. Here is what I think is the first of the cascading errors.

File "C:\Users\larry\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\json\decoder.py", line 357, in raw_decode
raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

Thanks,
Larry Autry

That's interesting. Would you be kind enough to run it with the additional `-verbose` argument, and then post the output?

Here is the verbose output. The only additional output I noticed was the URL. Thanks for offering to review the output.

C:\Users\larry\GenConfDownloader>.\gen_conf_downloader.py -verbose -start 2017 -dest .\Conferences
https://www.lds.org/languages
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\larry\GenConfDownloader\gen_conf_downloader.py", line 395, in <module>
validate_args(cli_args)
File "C:\Users\larry\GenConfDownloader\gen_conf_downloader.py", line 343, in validate_args
langs_list = get_html_results(args, f'{LDS_ORG_URL}/languages', GET_LANGS_REGEX)
File "C:\Users\larry\GenConfDownloader\gen_conf_downloader.py", line 236, in get_html_results
return re.findall(regexpr, get(args, url), flags=flags)
File "C:\Users\larry\GenConfDownloader\gen_conf_downloader.py", line 244, in get
add_headers(req)
File "C:\Users\larry\GenConfDownloader\gen_conf_downloader.py", line 283, in add_headers
headers = json.load(f)
File "C:\Users\larry\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\json\__init__.py", line 299, in load
parse_constant=parse_constant, object_pairs_hook=object_pairs_hook, **kw)
File "C:\Users\larry\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\json\__init__.py", line 354, in loads
return _default_decoder.decode(s)
File "C:\Users\larry\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\json\decoder.py", line 339, in decode
obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
File "C:\Users\larry\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\json\decoder.py", line 357, in raw_decode
raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

Thanks,
Larry Autry

Did you clone the entire repo? It looks like the script is having trouble finding the conference_headers.json file (https://github.com/simmeringratchet/LDS ... aders.json) which should be sitting next to it. Perhaps you could check if it's there?

This is the first time I've downloaded this type of repo from github. The method I was using introduced an extra line ending character to the raw file. This morning I noticed the Zip file method (sorry). I replaced the entire repo and got a different error. This one looks like it may be more easily resolvable..
C:\Users\larry\GenConfDownloader>.\gen_conf_downloader.py -verbose -start 2017 -dest .\Conferences
https://www.lds.org/languages
Problem with http request (https://www.lds.org/languages: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\uea09' in position 17389: character maps to <undefined>The given language (eng) is not available. Please choose one of the following:

Thanks,
Larry Autry

simoncain wrote:Have you tried the LDS General Conference Downloader tool found here: https://github.com/simmeringratchet/LDS ... Downloader
Shameless plug - my son, a serving missionary, asked for a download of all conference talks, so I created this little tool to do it. I hope it's helpful to others.

Hi. I tried your tool but it gave me a syntax error as follows:

File "gen_conf_downloader.py", line 36
ALL_CONFERENCES_URL = f'{LDS_ORG_URL}/general-conference/conferences'
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax


I do not know if you'll happen to check this reply, but if you do, will you check how I can fix this error?
Thank you.

Same here.

Unfortunately, I know nothing about Python, so I've no idea what to try.

It looks like the author has not updated the tool to point to the current church web site for conference talks - it points to the old "lds.org" site.

The syntax error problem was an old version of Python (3.4).

Running the script through https://pythonbuddy.com/ pointed me in the right direction. "Format strings are only supported in Python 3.6 and greater (, line 36)"

Also, Ryan Lindeman responded to a post I made on GitHub with several suggestions.

Now I'm getting: "Problem with http request (https://www.lds.org/languages: HTTP Error 403: ForbiddenThe given language (eng) is not available. Please choose one of the following:"

So that's some progress. The error doesn't change if/which language I specify (other than the language referenced).

Altering lds.org to churchofjesuschrist.org in the script makes no difference. lds.org appears to still be valid, even if it redirects to churchofjesuschrist.org

Ryan Lindeman's fixed version is here:

https://github.com/GatorQue/LDSGeneralC ... th-numbers

We were having trouble downloading using some of the premade scripts. So we made a new one. It has some bugs here and there but, it is easy to modify and supports many languages. Here is the git repo: https://github.com/peytonbair/GeneralCo ... Downloader

Enjoy the talks and hope this helps!

I have also managed a similar project for the last few years. Mine has a simple executable and GUI interface to make it easy to download MP3 files for each talk in multiple languages and years. It creates MP3 playlist files you can use.
The project and latest release can be found here:
https://github.com/GatorQue/LDSGeneralC ... tag/202105

Thank you, thank you! They should make this available on the General Conference website.

I used this convenient .exe that was provided in another thread: https://github.com/GatorQue/LDSGeneralC ... tag/202105

This should make it much easier. Even easier than it used to be from the Church website before that was made unusable.

Thank you all for your work.

Now we're well into 2022. I'm tried the exe, but it doesn't seem to work anymore. Would love to download all conference talks individually, including the music. This sounds like a great option to do it, but it doesn't seem to work in 2022.

I use an app called “Conference Radio”. It is amazing. You can set it to pull from all of the talks on Gospel Library. You can pick year ranges, etc. I’ve listened to well over 1000 different talks at random. It’s really neat when a specific theme starts to take form.

That app is all well and good, but it just duplicates what is available in the Church Library app. At the moment there seems to be no working option to bulk download mp3 files of the individual talks per session or conference. (Thank you to all that produced previous python scripts to make this workable in the past.)

This is quite frustrating. Why not really try and make the word of God freely and easily available for everyone? (Not just hyper connected Europe and the U.S.) There are more countries in the world, many of which do not have internet to every location. Why as an organization do we consistently presume or act as if they don't need access to the word of God?