Next weekend's sessions of LDS General Conference will not only be broadcast to thousands of Mormons worldwide via satellite but to an additional audience of up to 100,000 via live audio on the World Wide Web.

Listeners will be able to plug into the Internet feed at www.generalconference.com to hear the four general sessions of the conference, scheduled Oct. 2-3 in the Tabernacle on Temple Square. Limited audio links have been provided during past conferences through Brigham Young University and KSL, and their popularity spurred officials at LDSWorld.com to make the service more widely available.

Paul Hansen, executive vice president of MStar.Net, which operates LDSWorld.com, said he's not sure how many people will actually take advantage of the service, but he believes once people know about it, the number of links being sought will grow — particularly since the proceedings are being provided in 12 languages other than English. Vietnamese, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Tongan, Samoan, Navajo, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese and German translations will be provided.

Though arrangements to provide the real audio links were only formalized about 10 days ago, Hansen isn't worried about getting the word out. LDSWorld.gems, a daily summary of news about the church found on the LDSWorld.com homepage, now reaches about 70,000 subscribers via e-mail in 82 nations worldwide.

An e-mail message informing those subscribers about the real audio service is scheduled to go out sometime before the week is out, said LDSWorld.com engineer Jim Baird.

Web site managers will be able monitor the number of people who log into the site or try to bring up and audio link. A formal survey will also be posted on the web site, seeking information about which sessions listeners tune in to, which language they prefer and where they live.

Baird said because the LDS Church provides live translation of each general conference session, that translation can be pulled directly off the satellite and coded into real audio stream.

Members anxious to try the new service can connect this weekend to hear the annual Relief Society meeting scheduled Saturday at 6 p.m. in the Tabernacle. That broadcast, in English only, will be used as a test to help work out any potential problems with the system, Hansen said.Those without access to a chapel with a satellite downlink have waited weeks or even months in the past to receive print or video versions of the conference.

Baird said BYU's NewsNet, newsnet.byu.edu, which provided a limited number of live audio streams during conference sessions, got positive feedback from Mormons in scores of remote locations.