Speaker 1: In today's video we're taking a look at a podcast editing tool called Hindenburg and before you get alarmed, I'm calling it a podcast editing tool I know that it does a lot more and serves a broader audience as you can tell it's aptly or there are two most popular Versions are called journalist and journalist Pro. I'm gonna break down some of the pros and cons of using this tool today I've used it to create a mini-series. I used just the trial, but I do plan on purchasing the pro version And I wanted to give my feedback. I know that, you know, one of the major questions when anyone's starting their podcast is what are they using for tools? If you've been following this channel for a while or following me personally, you know that I love using Descript. Never thought I would go back to wanting to use a waveform editing tool or multi-track waveform editing tool like this one after leaving Audacity and Audition many, many months ago, Audacity years ago, Audition months and months ago. But man, I kind of like it. I kind of like it. I really like what Hindenburg has done with Journalist Pro specifically, or at least what you can do is you can try it for 30 days to see if you like it. But simple, powerful UI, very easy to work and manipulate waveform tracks where I find and that audacity on addition were a little bit more difficult or clunky or just overwhelming. And it makes your tracks sound really good without having to be an audio engineer. I know, I know, it's like blasphemy to say those types of things, but I'm not an audio engineer. I want tools that are gonna, like I understand what compression and equalizing is and noise reduction obviously, and I just want tools that's gonna make that process easier for me where I still have control to adjust it, whereas I feel like Descript just has like a blanket statement and it just yeah, here's how it's going to sound. Take it or leave it sounds good, but take it or leave it. You're not going to adjust too much, whereas this one you're going to have a little bit more power around that. So let's dive in. Ninety five dollars for the journalist version, I think serves most people really well. I know with Audacity, it's free. GarageBand is free. There's been some controversy, air quotes, around Audacity recently because of the data privacy and the end user agreement, sort of sharing those crash reports and the data from a company that now owns it. If you're looking for an alternative to Audacity or GarageBand, $95 I think is a fair trade to have a simple, powerful tool that makes your audio sound really good. And then $3.75 for some key features if you want some more of the luxurious side, noise reduction, sound profiling, things like that. We'll talk about that in a moment. $3.75 sounds like a lot at first, but when you look at something like, I was paying $30 a month to Creative Cloud indefinitely, so $3.75 is a one-time payment and you're done. Whereas you're paying $30 a month to Adobe to get the suite of tools, you're going to outpace that. They also have a rent, if you click on rent, I like the word rent, you can get it for 12 months for $120, so you can get for three years, you can sort of extend that payment of the, instead of the 375. So, really interesting pricing model here. I think it's pretty affordable and pretty straightforward, especially if you're taking podcasting fairly seriously. So, simple and powerful, that's the first pro of using Hindenburg. I think it's simple and powerful. Right out of the gate, you're looking at this and as long as this is not your first time looking at an audio editing tool, you're looking at it going, okay, I understand what's happening here. I got multiple tracks. There's my waveform in the middle. I can zoom in and zoom out. I can make my edits here. This all makes a lot of sense. Cut, copy, paste, clear, insert, split. These are very fairly basic things that we can all understand. And on the left-hand side, we can see that whenever I wanna select my microphone, I can do that. If I wanna arm to record, I can do that. I can see the levels bouncing up and down there. This is all very familiar territory. You don't feel lost. Like you might with Audition, with all the tools they have, Apple's Logic, even GarageBand to a degree. I feel sometimes, I'm like, what is all of this stuff? It's because it's made primarily for musicians with all kinds of options for instruments and everything that happens in that department, whereas this is like, hey, we're just recording and editing audio here. This is just for podcast, radio content, journalists, again, since the name, news content, et cetera. Okay, simple, powerful, I really like it. Controls and user interface. Like I said at the top of the video, I didn't think I'd ever wanna go back to editing with Waveform. I don't think I want to go back to editing in Waveform for every audio project that I'm working on, but certainly for something that I'm spending a lot of time doing, detailed edits, sound engineering, sound effects and music beds and all that stuff, I think that I really like this. Let me show you some examples. When I'm working with a track, you can see that it has these little icons that are in the middle, the upper corners and bottom corners of each little clip that I'm working on. And when I'm highlighting and working on one, it's got this gold color and blue when it's not selected. So very clear, very, you know, visible. What I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna mute this track. I've already armed this track over here to record, I'm gonna put the cursor over here and I'm gonna hit record. Hey, this is the intro to our podcast. I'm just doing this as a test for the YouTube channel. It's just an intro. So I'm gonna use that as my intro. First and foremost, you can see that the audio track automatically went down. It automatically normalized itself to the loudness of the other track. And that's one of the amazing things that this program does is auto-leveling. It auto-levels the audio as you bring it into your project. And I know that sounds, well we can just auto-level it ourselves, yeah but when you're working on a long-form audio project or you're doing a lot of edits, a lot of sound effects, a lot of music beds, man it's just time-consuming to sit and auto-level everything. It does it for you on the fly and I think that is a killer feature and one that saves people more time than they think. Okay, so that was another pro, that was my next pro, but auto-leveling, fantastic. And you're going to see it happen again when I bring in this music track. So I'm going to go to the clipboard and I'm going to bring in this music track. And now again, watch the auto-leveling at play, get some jazz music here. If you're an audience podcast listener, it's a very familiar track. So I can just quickly bring this track down and let's just say this is going to be my intro. I can select this part of this waveform down here, and say this is my audio intro. I can just grab the top of this after selecting it and duck that track so that when it plays... That's muted. It's so easy, and I know it's such a silly feature, but when you're doing that across a whole project, it just saves so much time, and you can get really detailed with that. I can make my life a little bit easier and adjust it if I want, and then I can select the section there, and then just do this infinite fade for the rest of the track, and then do Do this, and bring that out, so as the rest of the track played, it would just sort of fade out, and again, controlling these waveforms, working with the waveforms, very easy and very intuitive. The one hiccup that I had in the beginning, but then made all the sense in the world as I learned how to do it, is if I click on this little clip right here, you can see up here I've got the mouse, I can grab it and I can bring it down. If you go three quarters of the way down, that's where you get the selector tool so that you can select parts of the track and you can set the in and the out of your selection to do whatever you want, to do the ducking and to do the fading or editing and stuff like that. And at first, I was like, what is going on? I was working on a second track down here, I'm like, let me just grab this clip. I'm like, why can't I just grab this clip? And then I could, then it made sense to me. I know there were no words right there, but then it made sense to me once I realized, Oh, there's like this three-quarter ways thing and then it made all the sense in the world so intuitive waveform Working with waveform is very easy That ducking and fading very easy another pro that I think is is really great the plugins When you click on or the effects the effects and the plugins I guess all wrapped up into one when I click on this section right here. I can bring those effects in and I can turn on the compressor for a track, and it's very easy to understand. Now, there's like a million and one compressors in Adobe Audition. Audacity has some, but they're like plugins, you gotta install them, little bit of clunkiness involved there. This one's very straightforward. Almost like GarageBand, but even GarageBand's a little bit more technical. You just grab it, dial it in, listen to it, listen to how it's being compressed. Very easy, very straightforward. I really like the way that plugins are used here, especially the default ones that come with Hindenburg Pro. There's also a auto equalizer, so you can equalize very easily, low, mid, and highs, and they have this really powerful profiling tool. So you can profile your own voice. If you dial it in and equalize it, you can profile your own voice, learn it, and then use that profile across all of the projects that you work on. So if you equalize your voice, it sounds great. You wanna have that in every single project. You learn your profile and you drop your profile in. You just want a generic one where Hindenburg will just drop it in for you. It sort of uses it as like this generic vocal booster to a degree and just makes your voice sound more broadcast quality. It does a really fantastic job and I think But that's worth the money in some cases, right? Just all of the money that you've paid for it is worth it just for that profiler. Noise reduction, same thing. You can dial in the noise reduction. That's only gonna come in the pro version, the noise reduction. Okay, last sort of pro here, as I used the tool and really started to understand it, is the clipboard section. So the clipboard section, as you saw, I was able to bring in, I can just bring in this music track. But I can load this all up and label them however I want, and it's just an organizational tool for me to just take the important clips that I'm gonna reuse a lot on a project, bring them in, and repurpose them throughout the project. The favorites that you see here on the right hand side is for any project that you open up in Hindenburg, it's going to pull in those favorites. So the clipboard is just for the immediate project that you're working on, and the favorites is for whenever you open up Hindenburg, it's always going to be there. So if you're always producing the same podcast with Hindenburg and you have the same intro, outro tracks, advertisement tracks, et cetera, you can save those to your favorites and just pull them into your project. Makes life really easy, right? And that's one of my other big favorites of using this piece of software. Okay, now let's talk about some of the cons of this program. Uh, aside from price, I know a lot of people are looking for a free tool, but I'll put price aside for a moment. One of the things, the only thing that really gets me about the price is that normalization is only in the pro version as far as I understand it. I read the website, I read the pricing page. Normalizing a track should be pretty par for the course for a lot of audio editing tools. And that's when you go to export, I can select on MP3s, go to options, and then change that loudness across the whole project to the standard minus 16 LUFs or LUFs and the way that I'm reading this and the way that I'm understanding it is that it is only in the pro version this feature that's a little I feel like that should just be in the standard version that's really the the crux of it there I feel like that should be in the standard version pretty standard stuff but apparently only in the pro version let me know if if you know any differently. One of the things about this tool is that I feel like it's even more powerful and maybe even a better experience if you're good with the keyboard. So there's a lot of programs out there. You gotta be really good at keyboard. You can save a lot of time. I know like editing videos, Adobe Premiere. I use now DaVinci Resolve. If you're really good with keyboard commands, you're gonna save a bunch of time. I'm still not that person, I still click on everything. I feel like this program, you'd be even better with some of the features around it. And almost to a degree, it's like you have to be at least hitting the escape key all the time to like clear this stuff when you're selecting and moving things around. If I was like cutting something out like that, well, that was a bad example because it just kind of disappeared. But if I wanted to clear it, this track down here, like this is still all selected. You know, things like that you're always having to hit escape to move some of this stuff around, which is not a big deal, but I still feel like it's made for people who want to master a keyboard to be a little bit better. One really cool feature is like if you hit the P key, oh, you're not gonna hear that because it's muted. So if you just hit P, it'll rewind three seconds back from where the selector was. So it's a great way to just like keep playing the clip over and over again to just hear your edit and stuff like that so you don't have to click around on the timeline. That's pretty cool. But I still feel like it's made for people who are going to master the keyboard. One other big con that I saw was no multi-project access. So I can't have multiple projects open up at the same time. When you have Hindenburg open, you can only have one project open up at a time. So I can't copy and paste things from one project to another. That's a little, that was a little bit tricky when I was working on that long form piece. It was five or six mini episodes. I wanted to copy and paste different effects and different outros to it. I couldn't do that. You can always use the global favorites as a workaround, but sometimes you're doing something on the fly and you're like, oh, I want to bring that over to another project. You can't do that. So that's a pretty major con, I think, if you're, especially if you're used to audition, You could, I used to like run, create a template and just paste it in and do multiple projects that way. That was really easy to do that with Audition. You can't do that here. Another con, well, you're back to editing in waveforms. If you are somebody like me who has sort of fell in love with Descript and just the ease of use of editing projects with text and having that transcript, you're back to editing in in waveforms, which makes things a little bit more difficult if you wanna remove the filler words, if you've gotten used to that, if you've gotten used to just reading and pulling out big chunks of audio just by looking at words, this is obviously the opposite direction. It's the old way of doing it. It's waveforms, you're editing that way, and you just have to get accustomed to it. More so me, I have to get accustomed to working with waveforms again. And again, like I said, at the end of the day, could be pricey for some. You might be looking for a free alternative, but I think for $95, this is a fantastic tool that can really up the audio quality of your podcast. If not, make you a little bit more, give you some more creativity. You can think about editing, you can actually enjoy editing. Like I enjoyed editing that mini-series much more than I have ever done, and I did it quicker than I have ever done with Audition. And I was using that tool for many years. And people would say, well, if many years you should have mastered it. Yeah, I know. But every time I logged into Audition, something changed. There was an update. I lost a panel. My workspace changed. It would drive me crazy. This seems rock solid, very simple to use, and very powerful. Check it out. Let me know if you have any comments. Leave them in the comments below. Thumbs up if you like the video. Subscribe to the channel if you want more. See you in the next video.