With Hindenburg editing a podcast doesn’t take an age and you will feel like a broadcasting pro

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is Jim James talking to you from the UK, and I'm actually trialing a new software today called Hindenburg. And I'm trialing this for podcasting because I've been looking at the ways that we can make audio for podcasting that is simple to do, because one of the challenges for content creation these days is the complexity of the technology. I've been using GarageBand for 225 episodes, and it's great, but it's really made for music making, and I'm not really doing that. So there's lots of functionality, and frankly, some of the keys and so on are really not what I need. So I've been on the hunt. I've tried Audacity, and today I'm trying Hindenburg. So let's share with you some initial impressions and why this could well be A great platform for you if you're looking for a dedicated tool for making audio. Now, as you know, I'm working on the Speak PR Masterclass, and in that we talk about storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and to know. So I'm always interested in the backstory of a company, and it turns out that Hindenburg was born in 2008 in Lusaka. In Zambia, and there were 2 friends together on a porch in the garden, and one of them, Nick, turned to the other one and said that he was working on a community radio. And, uh, he said that the problem was that he couldn't find an audio editor that suited the, the project. It needs to be nice and simple, reliable, and affordable, he said to his friend Preben. And it turns out, of course, that this was a conversation that was starting a business because Preben actually had experience as an engineer, a software engineer. And having myself grown up in Africa, in Nigeria, at the age of 8, I really resonated with that idea of an African sunset, but also about how we need some intermediate and dedicated technology Especially in some applications like audio where the engineering side has sort of almost taken over. And for those of us that just want to do one thing well, the technology has become kind of a barrier and not a tool anymore. And so the two of them, Nick and Preben, decided on create a new business and they called it Hindenburg because in 1937, the Chicago reporter Herbert Morrison witnessed the Hindenburg disaster where the German passenger airship caught firing crashed. And the interesting part about that from broadcast perspective is it was the first time there was ever a real live broadcast. And so it got the chaps to thinking about this being a tool for journalism, really. They were solving the problem for intermediate technology for people dedicated to one task, which was radio editing. Now, in my earlier life, I worked at a company called AMS-Neve that pioneered the Audiophile, the first product, uh, in the mid-'80s that was digitizing audio, and then you could make edits on a nonlinear disc. Seems like a long time ago now, but we used to digitize the tape and then edit it and then put it back onto tape at the end. Things have moved along a long way since then, but the point was that there was a dedicated device for editing. And Hindenburg looks to be an amazing, amazingly simple and yet intuitive piece of software that so far, having played with it for a day now, I'm really enjoying. So it's got a few features that I can share with you because for many of us that are looking at creating content The content creation is the barrier from a technology point of view, and it shouldn't be. Now, the Hindenburg user interface is very clean, and it enables you to, you know, choose the different tracks. One of the features that's very nice is it has a clipboard where you can actually create clips and bits of audio and cut and paste them into little areas on the right-hand side of your dashboard. Now I'm already liking that feature because sometimes there can be a phrase or a sentence that you want to keep for later, uh, and in GarageBand I had to create a new track to kind of file all of the little clips that I wanted and then to drag and drop them back again. So this idea that you could have different elements is really nice. Now, some of those elements you might have created inside Hindenburg itself, where you can record directly as I'm doing now using my Rode NT-USB mic. But also you can drag and drop the audio that you've got on your desktop. So I've taken the theme music for this, uh, podcast actually just from my Finder and just dragged and dropped it And that's really nice as well. Another feature that Hindenburg has is an auto-level feature. Now for me, I have to say that I've used GarageBand and spent much too much time trying to sort out the different levels, to the extent that now I know I'm guilty of it, but I'm sometimes sending out content where I know the levels are slightly uneven, but it's taken me so long to get them all arranged. I'm using the Budcast, uh, Buzzsprout Magic Mastering, uh, where they're supposed to auto-level these, but even then now I, I listen and it still isn't quite right. So the Hindenburg has an auto-leveling feature which I'm looking forward to seeing at play. Another aspect that I'm really liking about Hindenburg is the control of the, of the audio as I see it going across the screen. One of the problems with the GarageBand was the sort of scrolling back and forwards, and most importantly, the scrubbing of audio. Now, scrubbing means that you can play the audio back at different speeds so you can find where the, where the voice stops and where, if you want to change, um, for example, a sentence or remove an um or ah. And on the GarageBand, that's not possible, in fact, to, to play back at different speeds because it's made for music, and I guess that's not really an issue, but it is a dedicated voice issue— the ability to scrub back and forwards, as it's called, and to hear where the words start and stop and to be able to remove those ones you don't want. The, the cutting and the pasting on the Hindenburg looks really very simple, and it really resembles a word processor, in fact. So you've got cut, copy, paste, insert, clear, split, and in and out. So you can choose where you're going to do those edits. So the functionality is looking really good for actually making edits, and I can have multi-tracks. So I can have different interviewees or different pieces of music or audio on different tracks, and there's a very nice and very simple to use crossfade feature. And I have to say that I have found that quite difficult in GarageBand because you have to keep hitting the, the little sort of loudness bar and making little dots and then doing what they call automation. And frankly, it's pretty fiddly, and I think it's what's given me a bad shoulder. So this has got a quite nice grab at the top, uh, of the track, or the bottom of the track and just slide it back and forwards, actually in the way that iMovie does with its audio in and out on the, on the tracks, but GarageBand doesn't. So the ability to fade in and out between different speakers is something that's really useful, especially as I do a lot of one-man shows, but actually I also like to do the, uh, 2-person interviews. So the blending in and out between speakers will help the, the podcast not sound quite so awkward at times. So then the next part will be the display. One of the things I'm liking about Hindenburg is that I can see my audio monitor on my— on the channel itself, but also on the bottom of my screen. And what I'm also getting is the the clock. Now with the GarageBand, it showed me beats and time, and it had a metronome and, and other sort of things on the display that were really irrelevant, but I, I couldn't remove. So this slightly more utilitarian interface on Hindenburg I'm finding quite relaxing, to be honest. And I'm liking the fact that I can see that my voice level is getting between -15 to -12 dB, which is just about right. I'm not getting up to the -9 into the red or the, or the -6, and I can see my time counter slipping away nicely. And in front of me, I can see the waveform actually on the file, and it's letting me know that I'm recording at a consistent, at a consistent volume. And there's another feature that I really must mention, which is that when you're editing audio in GarageBand, if you edit and delete a section, the section to the right does not automatically shift to the left, which means that I personally spent hours just dragging audio files and audio segments, uh, across to join up. It's a labor-intensive and thankless job. I did find a shortcut Uh, there's a macro, but you have to actually put that in yourself. It's not an automatic. So in the Hindenburg, I think it shows that they really understand the user workflow, because with Hindenburg, if you put an in and an out and you delete a section of audio, all the audio tracks and clips to the right of that will move automatically. And that is going to save me a lot of time. Now I've got some work to do myself on editing this, but one of the things I'm then going to be doing is publishing it. And this is where I think it's going to really be coming into its own as a dedicated podcast, uh, or broadcast app. In GarageBand, I have to export it as a file, um, as an MP3 file, and then I upload it. For the Hindenburg, I've got a publish macro within the program, and I can choose then to publish to an MP3 podcast, an enhanced podcast. I can do a file upload. I can save it to my computer. I can do SoundCloud, Libsyn, Blubrry, Buzzsprout, Podbean. Spreaker, podcast.co, and iono.fm. In other words, I can actually syndicate the content directly from my device to this number of podcast players. Doesn't have Apple in there, for example, uh, doesn't have the Google Podcasts. So I'm still going to need to send it to my Buzzsprout, which does syndicate it to there. But certainly there are a couple in there that I'm not using at all. For example, like PRX and podcast.co. So my initial view of this Hindenburg is looking really positive. Now, what is it going to cost me to buy this program? Obviously, if I use the, the plain GarageBand, I get it for free on my computer. If I use the journalist version of Hindenburg with a multitrack editor, the automated levels, the clipboards, and the publish, and a number of other features, going to cost me £78, which is including tax. If I want the Journalist Pro, which is still multitrack recording as well as editing, noise reduction and noise profiler, and 10 times publishing and a few other features, it's going to cost me £299. So Again, that's not cheap, but it's going to be saving me a lot of work and it's going to be a real workhorse. So the opportunities here for, yes, paying a little bit of money, but if you're going to be creating content frequently as a way of monetizing your podcast and of making something that you can be proud of and using daily, then it's going to be a tool I should think the ROI on that over a— even just over a year is going to be really, really worthwhile. So if you're looking at creating content for audio, having the right tools is going to make life a lot more fun, believe me. And if you don't have the right tools, it becomes quite tiring. GarageBand is great, it's free, but it really is dedicated to making music. Audacity is dedicated to making audio. It's free. For me, just some of the features and the interface make it quite distracting. Hindenburg Creates offers an alternative— paid, yes, but if you're serious about creating content, then it may well be worth the investment. And for the people who sat on that patio in Lusaka in 2008. They deserve, of course, the credit for what they've made, which is really a functional, utilitarian, but extremely professional piece of audio equipment. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. You've been listening to me on the new Hindenburg software that I'm trialing. And in the meantime, until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, that if you're going to be making anything in content, treat yourself to the best tools you can afford because it really does make all the difference, not just to you but also to your audience.