Uploading talks
1. Log in to the administration pages
Start by going to https://dharmaseed.org/admin, where you will see the following page. Log in with the username and password you were given.
2. Indicate that you wish to add a talk
Once you are logged in you will see a screen like this. Start by clicking on Talks - Add (in red, below):
3. Fill out the Add Talk form
After you click 'Add', you will see a page like this. It's important that when you fill in the fields Date, Teacher, Venue and Retreat that you do so in that order. This form is 'active' in the sense that some pulldown menus are adjusted during input so that the Venues and Retreats appropriate to a particular Date and Teacher are moved to the top of the list and made easy to find.
We'll go through the fields one by one:
(The fields in Bold Text are required and must be filled in before saving the talk.)
Save: Click this when all your data has been added to the form (the Save button also appears at the very bottom of the page).
Date Recorded: These two fields should be filled in with the date and local time-of-day (to the best of your knowledge) when the recording was made. There are two small buttons 'Today' and 'Now' that will fill in the date with today's date and the time with the current wall clock time -- these are intended as shortcuts, but you needn't use them.
Teacher: The teacher is selected from a pulldown list of all the teachers currently in the system. The monastics are listed first, followed by the lay teachers. If you don't see your teacher there you may add a teacher by clicking on the green + sign. After the teacher is selected, you may notice that the Venue and Retreat are also automatically set. We'll cover this in a moment.
Title: This field holds the title for the talk. The title should contain only the talk's real title -- please omit information such as the venue and date, that will be recorded separately.
Venue: This is the center under whose auspices the recording was made. The system finds the venues where the teacher has previously given talks and shows them first in the list. Even though the system may initially fill the field for you, please double check that it is correct. If your center holds sittings and talks in various locations, please use the name of your center here. If your center is not in the system, you may add it by clicking on the green + sign. If you don't know where the talk was recorded, you may select 'Unknown'
Retreat: This field is used both for talks given at multi-day retreats as well as for talks that are given regularly each week, e.g. Spirit Rock Monday and Wednesday Talks. The form allows you to select from those retreats in the system that correspond to the previously entered recording date and venue. If you do not see the retreat you are looking for, one may be added by clicking on the green + sign -- but before doing so, please make sure that the recording date and venue are correct.
Publishability: This is initially set to Publicly Available, but if the teacher has requested that it be made available only to retreatants, change the selection accordingly.
Description: This field holds a teacher-given description of the talk. It is not intended for notes or commentary by participants. If you have no description or anticipate providing one later, simply leave it blank.
Recording Type: This is initially set to Dharma Talk but may be changed to indicate these other recording types: Guided meditation, Chanting, Jataka Tale, or Other.
Language: Here the talk's language can be indicated. Current possibilities include Spanish and Thai w/English translation. Please contact Dharmaseed if you would like a new language to be added to the list.
Audio file to upload: This field is used to select the MP3 or MP4 (e.g. with a filename extension of .m4a) file containing the recording. You do this by clicking on the Browse button and then using the navigation window that appears to locate the recording on your computer. Regarding the recording parameters, we prefer monaural (not stereo) recordings made at 44.1khz with 16bit samples and then encoded into monaural MP3 files compressed to 64kbps or 96kbps (kilo-bits per second). Certain equipment may not be capable of this (e.g. some portable MP3 recorders only record in stereo), and so we accept other formats as well. Please contact Dharmaseed if you have an unusual recording format to upload. Note that we only accept MP3 and MP4 files -- WMA, WAV, FLAC, etc. can not be handled currently.
4. Click Save to begin uploading
Save: Click the Save button when you have completed the form. The talk will be uploaded in about ten minutes, depending upon your Internet connection speed. If you are using the Internet Explorer or Firefox web browser, you will see an upload progress bar like this indicating how long the upload will take to complete.
