JAN 2014 EDIT: These links will still work for some of you, but to resolve many of the issues people were having with downloading these, I have uploaded them to Google Drive. See the new links HERE.
Years ago I saw one of the BYU Rountable Discussions on the Book of Mormon while I was flipping through the channels and landed on BYUTV. It was actually quite interesting, so I went to the website to see what the program was all about. There was a series for every set of the standard works! It was like having a BYU religion class in your living room! Great! Except I didn’t have time to watch several hundred episodes right then.
I saw that they offered an audio download option for all of the episodes and I downloaded the MP3s in hopes of beginning to listen to them, but I never did. Then I forgot about them, then my hard drive crashed, and I figured I could just download them again sometime if I wanted to. Several years have passed, and now I’m living in Idaho with 45 minutes of commute each day and I’m looking for something to listen to as I go to work. I had already finished the Sped-Up Book of Mormon in a few months, and remembered these old MP3s! I went to the BYUTV site and could see the videos available for streaming, but couldn’t find the MP3s. I searched the web, but nothing. I searched torrents, no luck. They were gone.
So I hopelessly wrote to BYUTV and asked where I could find them. The response amazed me. A super nice shout out to Stephanie and Kaylee who sent me this email:
Dear Brad,
Thank you for your email. We are happy to hear that you have benefited from the Scripture Roundtable Discussions. As you correctly noted, these are no longer available in the audio format that you have been accessing. You’d be surprised to know that the cost to make these available was relatively high and since we didn’t have many users accessing the audio format, we decided to utilize our resources to support other services that are accessed by a wider audience.
However, if you would like to reply to this email with your address, we would be happy to send you the audio format of these discussions in the mail. If you have any other comments or questions, please feel free to contact us at 866-662-9888.
Have a great day!
Awesome! Not sure how hosting the MP3s was really that expensive, but the fact that they were going to send me a copy for free boggled my mind. I offered to pay, they refused. Go BYU! A few days later in the mail, I received a DVD with 137 HOURS of audio! Holy cow! I burned the Pearl of Great Price series and Doctrine and Covenants series to an MP3 CD and began listening the next morning.
After having listened to these for about a month now, back and forth, I have to say that they are really amazing. It has helped me to have more positive thoughts, understand the gospel better, understand church history better, and gain a greater testimony of the scriptures. These are seriously a really great thing if you’re needing something to listen to on a commute. So though you can write to BYUTV and have them mail you a copy of the program, I figured I’d upload it here. If you’d like to download the entire set, all 4.1GB of it, click on the link and then be prepared to wait quite a while for it to download. It’s in a .RAR format, so you’ll need something like WinZip, 7-Zip, or WinRAR to unpack it. But it’s worth it, I promise.
I will issue one caveat. In the Pearl of Great Price Discussions – which are great – Joseph Fielding McConkie drives me insane. By the end I was getting ready to pull my hair out every time he paused before the last word in a sentence. “Joseph Smith’s greatest revelation was obviously about the………………………Abrahamic Covenant.” Just a heads up. Enjoy.