Q: What do all these Dhamma Talks have in common? What distinguishes this collection from all the other Dhamma Talks on the Internet?

A: They are all given by monastics from Theravada Buddhism in the Thai forest tradition, usually tracing their lineage back through Ajahn Chah. There are some chants in English or Pali from this tradition, but the vast majority of the collection is spoken word on the Dhamma. Almost all of the Dhamma Talks are in English.

Q: How many Dhamma Talks do you host? How many Gigabytes is that? How long in duration is that?

A: 3082 Dhamma Talks. Over 36 GB. Over 77 days, played continually. This might be the biggest collection of Dhamma Talks on the entire Internet. We have attempted to make available all the Dhamma Talks we have received in the mail over the years from the other monasteries we are affiliated with.

Q: How can I search through all your Dhamma Talks?

A: We keep a "master list" which lists the filename of every talk in every collection. We call this list the "Birken's Theravada Buddhist Dhamma Talk Master List." (Note: This is a single web page that you can search through by pressing "Ctrl+F" to open your web browser's "Find" tool. Using the "Find" tool, you can search for occurrences of any topic, keyword, or monastic's name.

Once you have some Dhamma Talks downloaded and opened in a huge "playlist" in an MP3 "jukebox" program (like Foobar2000, or iTunes), you will be able to search through your playlist very quickly and effectively. Thanks to all the ID3 tags being properly set inside all the MP3 files, your searches will find results based on "Artist" (ie. the monastic's name), "Title," "Album," "Date," etc. This is where the "searchability" gets far more advanced.

Q: Some of your Dhamma Talks are also available at other websites. Why do you post them again?

A: For the following two reasons:

1. The licensing the Dhamma Talks are released under allows this (non-commercial redistribution). The Dhamma Talks are usually specifically released under a "Creative Commons" license, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/, or one allowing free-of-charge, non-commercial re-distribution. Remember, monastics have renounced money, and have nothing to gain by enforcing Copyright laws. They don't need to protect any profits from the sale of their "work". Note: the Dhamma Talks from "Dhamma Threads" have an interesting licensing restriction: they are not to be distributed on the Internet without express permission from them. We at Birken Forest Monastery have obtained this permission from Dhamma Threads. If you wish to redistribute these Dhamma Talks in the internet yourself, you would need to ask their permission as well.

2. You may get faster downloading speed by downloading from one of our mirrors. Some other sites have slow download speeds because they are so popular. We provide an alternative location to get these talks to help "level out" this load.

Q: Anyone can re-post files they have downloaded from the Internet. Do you "add value" to these files somehow? Why would I not "go to the source" of these talks?

A: We have invested considerable effort in "polishing up" the Dhamma Talks we have received from other monastics and monasteries:

• We've fixed the ID3 tags to properly display "Artist" (ie. the monastic speaking), "Title" and "Album". ID3 tags allow "search-ability" to your collection of Dhamma Talks. This is valuable for those listening to many talks in a huge playlist, and want to be able to quickly search through the playlist for a given monastic's name or topic. Without the ID3 tags filled in properly, such searching is far more complicated or impossible. ID3 tags are also a must when you listen to Dhamma Taks on your portable MP3 player (such as an iPod). Most portable MP3 players will only let you only browse through your collection based on the ID3 tags (that is to say, by Artist, by Album, by Title, by Genre, etc), not by filename!

• Most Dhamma Talks now also have a small picture of the monastic (in the ID3 tags)! This makes it a little more personal. Some MP3 players that have a small, color screen, and will display the picture as the Dhamma Talk plays.

• We've "normalized" the volume level of each Dhamma talk, meaning they all have the same average volume. Again, this is nice to have when you are playing many Dhamma Talks from many different collections in a huge "playlist", and don't want to be adjusting your volume from talk to talk.

• We've deleted about 100 mp3's that had really bad audio quality.
• We've cleaned up the filenames so that they are "web-safe." That means the filenames don't contain any nasty punctuation like spaces, brackets, apostrophes, etc. That nice punctuation has been preserved in the ID3 tags where it belongs (and only belongs).

Q: On your download pages, there is a choice in mirror. What is a "mirror"?

A: We have all our Dhamma Talks copied on multiple web servers. Each of these web servers is called a "mirror" because it has the same collection of Dhamma Talks that the other servers have. They are said to be "mirror images" of each other. By people choosing different mirrors, it roughly distributes the load between the servers.

Q: What is the advantage to having different "mirrors"?

A: The more mirrors there are, the faster everyone's downloads will be, as each mirror has its own separate capacity for bandwidth. If your downloads from one mirror are painfully slow, choose a different mirror instead, and see if the speed is considerably faster from that mirror. Some of the Dhamma Talks are dozens of MB in size, so download speed matters!

Q: Which "mirror" should I choose when I download?

A: Pick any mirror that gives you a reasonable download speed.

Q: What is an md5sum good for? Why do you include them?

A: They help you verify that a download was successful. For more information, please read this explanation of md5sums.

Q: Your Dhamma Talks are organized into "Collections." Why is that? Why not just have one huge folder containing all of them, that I could search through?

A: Each collection name (like "Sona 01") corresponds to a physical CD full of Dhamma Talks we have at our monastery. Retaining this method of organization makes our huge collection of Dhamma Talks manageable for us. It also makes it easy for you to know which collections you do and don't have. For example, if you have already downloaded "Sona 01" through "Sona 18," it will be obvious to you which collection you still need to download when "Sona 19" gets posted to all the mirrors in the summer of 2007. Newer collections have sequentially higher numbers.

Q: I have a very slow Internet connection. It's taking me forever to download the Dhamma Talks. What can I do?

A: You can visit our monastery in person. We have a computer called the "Dhammatron" available for the use of all our guests. It has a CD/DVD burner, along with blank CDs/DVDs. You could make yourself a copy of the whole collection if you were to stay for at least a few days. This would effectively give you far faster bandwidth than the Internet probably ever will. Do not underestimate the power of a sneakernet!

Q: What software do you recommend for playing the Dhamma Talks once I have them downloaded?

A: Foobar2000. Despite its silly name, it's free, safe, straightforward to download and install, and has no advertisements or DRM technology. Foobar2000 is for Windows only.

Q: Some of your Dhamma Talks are redundant. I see the same talk in two different collections.

A: You're right, there are a very few redundancies - perhaps a dozen Dhamma Talks among several thousand. These have been left intentionally, as they would make certain compilations awkwardly incomplete if removed from either collection they appear in. We have kept an eye on redundancies and eliminated the bulk of them from our collections.

Q: Some of your collections seem to be completely missing. For example, you have "Sona 12" and "Sona 14", but no "Sona 13." What happened to "Sona 13"?

A: These "missing" collections turned out to be completely redundant of other collections, and were removed.

Q: Can I become one of your mirrors? I want to share in the enormous merit of spreading the Dhamma also!

A: If you have your own web server (or web hosting from an ISP) with high bandwidth, and want to become one of our mirrors, email the webmaster and we'll add your mirror to our list. If you are a home user with "high-speed Internet", you unfortunately would not qualify, because although your download speeds might be quite fast, your upload speeds will very likely be poor (so people downloading from you will get very, very slow downloads). That is to say, your home Internet connection would be more fittingly called "high-speed download Internet," as it's only fast in one direction: downloading. In this case, you might want to contact your ISP and ask that they allow faster uploads in their Internet service packages for home users.

Q: Who can I contact about questions or suggestions?

A: webmaster@birken.ca