Just getting started

Loving SermonSpeaker but having a few issues getting started. When I go the the series view I get "Sorry, unfortunately I didn't find any Sermons" even though I do. I suspect it might be because I use remote mp3 URLS. They work and play in other areas, but just a guess.  How do I debug this?

Also, I'm using the MediaElement.js player as I suspect its the best pick for non flash available, but the control buttons are not rendering, I just get the outline of square boxes?

Many thanks, I'll be picking brains for tips on customising templates soon, I'm a Joomla nube

Most likely, it is related to categories. SermonSpeaker uses the categories to filter sermons, speakers and series and it is also used to apply access control.
So make sure all your sermons, series and speakers have a valid public category assigned. And if you use a menuitem which filters by a category, best is to have all speakers, series and sermons in the same category as well (at least to rule out issues).

If your player is misbehaving, I'd first check the browser console for any errors. Chances are some JavaScript is faulty.

Thanks for the amazingly fast reply

It turned out I had to also include the speaker in the category also. This seems limiting, initially I was thinking of using Categories like Topics but this would rule this option out since one speaker could talk over many topics. I guess tags can be used that way instead.

No errors in the browser console just a warning "Invalid color value provided to Reftagger. Must be in hex format." I could try reducing the jquery version maybe.

Yes, the categories are a bit limiting the way they are currently. With SermonSpeaker 6 (for Joomla 4), there will be independant category trees for sermons, speakers and series. That will make things much more flexible.

As for the player: What kind of remote mp3 setup are you using? I'm asking because nowadays browsers restrict what ressources JavaScript can access from other domain. So this may be an issue. However I think you would see that in the console as well.
If you have an URL where I can have a look, that may help.

v6 sounds like that would be a positive step, I must admit it took me a long time to get my head around the existing user cases for categories also.

I link my mp3's from archive.org, here's an example, httn.net so far it works fine and I think if browsers get fussy I can add specific headers allowing resources from cited domains.

I want to get my head around Joomla templates as I would like to present the audio something along the lines of these guys I found, I think they present well oceandrivechurch.org I like the use of the filters, it works very well.  I've started reading www.sermonspeaker.net/documentation/layouting.html and will go on to the referenced magazine.joomla.org article too. Hopefully it shows me how to avoid loosing my customisations when updates are pushed.

If you use your own layouts, customisations will not be overwritten. That's the point of custom layouts
You could use the tiles layout as a starting point: www.sermonspeaker.net/tiles-layout.html
This one probably comes closest to what you want.