Recording General Conference

Can I record General Conference for my own personal use to view at a later date?

My wife tells me it is illegal to do so

What are the facts?

It's legal.

Please refer to the last question in A Conversation about Using Copyrighted Materials at Home and Church.

It's also announced either a the beginning or ending of each session.

The Church allows general conference to be recorded for personal use – from the General Handbook, 38.8.38: "members may record broadcasts of general conference on home equipment for personal, noncommercial use."

However, you also need to take into account the terms of service of the source you're using. For example, YouTube's terms of service are restrictive, and prevent downloading or recording streams for any reason (link). The Church website, on the other hand, allows downloading content for personal use (link). So, if you download or record general conference videos from the Church website, you shouldn't have any problems.

For general conference, the Church makes it easy to download video files from here:
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/gen ... e?lang=eng

Curious. I listed to some of the sessions of conference. They said:

This broadcast [is/has been] furnished as a public service by Bonneville Distribution. Any reproduction, recording, transcription, or other use of this program, without written consent, is prohibited.

I remember that last sentence as having "for commercial purpose" in it. But doing some spot checks, I can't find that version, even going back to April 2009.

Perhaps this is what OP's wife is talking about.

You have written consent in the General Handbook under the terms and limitations listed there.

We are trying to download mp3 from the church website, but failing. My husband thinks it is because it comes out as 27 MB instead of the small KB file it starts as. Does anyone have experience with this?

I should be more clear. we are able to download the mp3 just fine and it says it is 27 KB. But when we try to burn it onto a CD, then it says it is a thousand times bigger: 27 MB. We know a CD cannot hold more than 600 KB, so we think it will not go onto the CD because a CD will not hold that big of a file. But we also know the audio of conference is not that big. So do you know how we can find a way to burn it onto a CD?

suziwsmith wrote: Sat Sep 23, 2023 1:34 pm I should be more clear. we are able to download the mp3 just fine and it says it is 27 KB. But when we try to burn it onto a CD, then it says it is a thousand times bigger: 27 MB. We know a CD cannot hold more than 600 KB, so we think it will not go onto the CD because a CD will not hold that big of a file. But we also know the audio of conference is not that big. So do you know how we can find a way to burn it onto a CD?

My wife insists on audio CDs so she can listen from our home stereo system, so I know it can be done if you have the right tools. The first thing to consider is whether you're making an audio CD (aka CDDA) that can be played by a 1990s CD player with track selector buttons or a data CD that holds data files of arbitrary file types and data formats. The two CD types are very different. A data CD can hold ~750MB of data (about 3/4 of a GB). IIRC, an audio CD can hold 64-80 minutes of audio, with specific format requirements.

The files you download from the website are MP3 format, a lossy compressed format that is much more compact than the equivalent WAV format or what would be stored on an audio CD. If it's an audio CD you're trying to make, part of your software tool chain will have to expand the MP3 to the corresponding WAV-equivalent PCM bits.

Please clarify whether you're trying to make a CDDA-style audio CD or a data CD, and we can continue discussing how to get what you want done. My experience burning CDs is with Linux, so assuming you're using Windows, there may be others who can point you to tools that work better in that environment.

Edit: The two CD types are burned onto the _SAME_ type of physical media, but the layout of the bits is very different.

In addition to what rmrichesjr said, some audio CD players will play MP3s burned as a data disk. But that's not their native format.

Early CD players won't play MP3, but ones that came out when MP3 players were popular are more likely to.

Burning MP3 to a data disk is simple. Burning them as an audio CD usually takes special software.