Last spring, as I've become accustomed to do after each General Conference, I downloaded the talks from the April 2008 sessions. I downloaded the talks and have enjoyed them ever since then. I also remember feeling the Spirit very strongly during the hymns the choirs sang, and I was hoping that I'd be able to download the music as well as the spoken word.
There wasn't a way to download the music without downloading each session as one large .mp3 file. I didn't want to do that, but I did decide to make a comment at the feedback link of the church site, asking whether they might consider making the songs from General Conference available as they do the talks.
I did receive a response from someone at the church thanking me for my suggestion. I don't remember the exact words they said, it didn't promise anything but I do remember that whoever it was that had written to me did think my idea had merit.
Well, six months have passed and we have just had another wonderful conference. Again, the talks were inspiring and music superbly motivational, each being a testimony of the kingdom of God being on the earth.
As I went to download the talks this time, there was a little more to the content of the page than I was used to. There is now a podcast available that automatically updates each conference. This makes it so your mp3 player can be setup to download the talks for you without you having to remember to come back and download the sessions (as if I'd forget). Even better than that, it makes it so you don't have to individually click to download each talk as an mp3, saving them into the folder you setup for them. Rather, it is all taken care of... just set up your subscription to the podcast once. I use WinAmp (I even paid for a Pro version a couple of years ago), but iTunes and many other programs can also subscribe to podcasts.
Well, to my surprise, as I put the podcast into WinAmp, it downloaded the first thing in its list automatically, and it was a hymn! The opening music you hear as the announcer says: 'This is the 178th Semi-annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints'. (Oops, I hope that wasn't an unauthorized transcription- but I think Bonneville Communications might be fine with that much...) So, quickly I looked through the list of mp3 files available in the podcast and all the hymns were there!
I went back to the Church website to see if they might have retroactively made hymns available, or if I might have missed the podcast option before. It was there for April, but no music was available. And then I noticed that there is even a link for just the music starting with this fall's conference!
They took my comment to heart and made the music available! I don't dare think that I'm the only one who asked for it, but if it was my request that made it happen, that's pretty neat. I'm listening to the music right now. It is heavenly.
Here's the mp3 podcast link.
Here's an mp4 podcast link.
8 years ago
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