High Quality Downloads for general conference

If memory serves, we used to be able to download high quality MP3's of talks and music from general conference via the old LDS.org website (this may have preceded the gospel library app). However, now it seems that the bit rate for general conference talks is only about 56 kbps (I just downloaded a sample talk from the most recent conference and checked its' properties in Apple Music).

To my ears, this is not a high enough quality. The "s" sounds are very sibilant, etc. I really wish they offered CD quality MP3 downloads from either the website or within the gospel library app, and have requested that feature through the gospel library app help function.

Just my two cents.

As far as I know, there's only one bitrate for the current General Conference MP3s. Currently, both the talks and the sessions seem to be 32k. It sounds pretty good for only being 32k, though (but yes, I'm sure it would sound better if it were 192k or something; I don't notice too much difference going higher than 192k, personally).

So, it looks like your primary option if you want higher quality audio is to download the MP4 videos. It looks like the 720p videos have 135kbps aac audio. I imagine the higher quality ones would be higher (but they take a long time to download).

You can play video files as if they were audio files on the command-line version of mpv, if you disable the video: i.e. `mpv --no-video my_video.mp4`

If you don't actually want to download the videos, you can stream them with mpv (as opposed to having to download the whole thing to start).

Here's a playlist of the highest quality videos for April 2024 (1080p): To stream them with mpv, you would do this from the command-line (after extracting the zip file and installing mpv):

mpv --no-video video_sessions.m3u

Alternatively, instead of the file name, you could enter the URL for the specific session (the URLs are in the file).

If your Internet isn't fast enough, it might be choppy, though, since they are huge files to stream. So, you might want to download them overnight (and possibly then some) or something and play them on your computer instead. You can download them all in one go with `wget -i video_sessions.m3u`, if you use wget.

And, of course, you can watch the actual videos, too, which are excellent quality.