Hindenburg makes editing your Life Story simple so you can concentrate on the Story

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I know the feeling of getting bogged down on the details of Creating a Life Story. There are so many things that can take you attention away from what a project is all about… The Story.

One of the things that people get far too hung up about is, editing the raw audio. Nick Dunkerley of Hindenburg Systems gives us a bit of the background philosophy on Hindenburg and why it’s perfect audio editing software for our Life Story projects. Go and get your free 30 day trial version of Hindenburg to see what it’s all about.

Why edit?

We all know that the most important thing is to get the conversations of your Life Story recorded, but then what!

Yes, it’s paramount to record but ultimately, it’s about having the stories heard by others. What’s the use of the whole recording exercise, if afterwards they aren’t listened to?

You should at least consider editing the audio to remove the unwanted interruptions to make it an enjoyable listening experience for others.

Within every conversation there will be distractions that are unnecessary for the listener to hear and spending some time to remove these will improve the listenability significantly. Then if you want, you can go as deep down the rabbit hole as you like, all the way to a full radio documentary if you choose.

Which editing software to choose.

There are many audio editing programmes available, from the expensive high end professional programmes to free systems possibly already on your computer. All have there place to suit specific applications but until now there hasn’t been a programme that is all about getting the job done for editing voice, for use in telling the story. This is exactly what we’re about with our Life Story.

Most other programmes are designed to be all things, to all people and are bloated with too many bells & whistles, making them a challenge to find the few functions that we need to edit the voice, tweak the quality a little and add additional audio (music & effects), making it a listening pleasure.

I’ve mentioned Hindenburg in the past, as my preferred audio editing programme but it’s worth having an understanding of the philosophy that has gone into it’s design and how well that’s in sync with our task of creating audio biographies, using all the skills of storytelling, while still having all the technology necessary to get the job done ,while not getting in the way.

What I love about Hindenburg

Originally I used Garageband but found, as it’s designed for music production, to be more complicated than I needed. Hindenburg is designed for what we do, without the fat that is unnecessary.

* Fast editing – Removing stammers & pauses is a breeze.

* One click voice profiler – Makes you sound good without having to be an engineer.

* One knob compression – More or less compression is so simple it’s obvious when it’s right.

* Easy to view timeline to see exactly what’s going on.