Awardee: Barry Lam
Semester of Award: Fall 2020
Materials Awarded: This grant allowed me to purchase 16 temporary student licenses of the Hindenburg audio editing software for two semesters of student use for AMST/MEDS 374, my intensive course in podcast production.
Project Description:
Each license allows students to use Hindenburg Journalist Pro for 6 months. Each student gets a software key, allowing them download the software on their laptops. They then used the software to produce a series of podcasting assignments in the intensive course. This particular software is very helpful because it allows them to use loudness monitoring, which is native to Journalist pro. Loudness monitoring is used in the final process of production to ensure that a project is audible.
This software, unlike the free software out there like Audacity, utilizes non-destructive editing, which is the industry standard for digital audio workstations. Non-destructive editing allows users to recover work from any edits, as editing never occurs on the audio file directly.
Hindenburg is also the most user-friendly of the digital audio workstations, being designed for audio journalism rather than music production. So students who are unfamiliar with digital audio editing can get started and familiarize themselves in less than a week.
I’d say that this grant has allowed students to engage in work much more quickly than other software, allows them to learn how the professionals do it, and has made the class affordable for all students, not just those who come from enough means to purchase a $200 piece of software.
Faculty looking for software purchases should learn than software companies are constantly changing their pricing structures and software names, and this happened right in the middle of my distribution of this software. My licenses were grandfathered in, but it is important to get agreements with software companies explicit beforehand.