James Cridland: 0:12

Hello and welcome back to the Podnews Extra feed of the Podnews Weekly Review. I'm James Cridland and today very excited to be speaking to somebody who is currently sitting on the first floor in Knabrostræde in Copenhagen in Denmark. How is that, Nic?

Nick Dunkerley: 0:31

It was so good.

James Cridland: 0:37

Nick Dunkerley from Hindenburg Systems. Nick, what are you at Hindenburg? Are you a Joint Joint CEO, or how does that work?

Nick Dunkerley: 0:47

Yeah, we. It's a good one. Me and my partner, we now both call ourselves directors

James Cridland: 0:54

Director.

Nick Dunkerley: 0:55

because I don't really fancy. It's an old fashioned word. I like the word director. Something that you can imagine of a you know, we someone who builds trains or something needs to be building stuff. The whole CEO thing, I don't really take to that. But if you were to put that C title on this, I probably be the CEO.

James Cridland: 1:15

Well, there we are for a company called Hindenburg Systems, which, of course, produces Hindenburg Pro. Uh, by the way, I write when I'm flying somewhere and they ask me for my job title, then I don't write editor because that looks as if I'm a journalist and I write about things. So I just write Director as well. Director seems to work for everything so far as I'm concerned. Yeah.

Nick Dunkerley: 1:37

It's a lovely title.

James Cridland: 1:39

So let's start by asking you, Nick, what is Hindenburg pro?

Nick Dunkerley: 1:44

Well, basically Hindenburg Pro is another DAW digital audio workstation.

James Cridland: 1:49

What do you mean by DAW?

Nick Dunkerley: 1:51

I just said a digital audio workstation. So it's a it's a piece of software where you can edit your audio, you can record your voices, you can add your interviews, add music, ambience, and you can mix them all together and until you have a final piece. that's what it is in essence,

James Cridland: 2:13

So it's it's and I know that you hate this, but it's similar to something like ProTools or

Nick Dunkerley: 2:18

it.

James Cridland: 2:18

Audacity or Reaper or those sorts of tools. And we might we will come back to why you don't necessarily like that too much. But that's but that's the sort of thing Hindenburg Pro You make a piece of software for audio books as well. But Hindenburg pro came out with Hindenburg Pro 2, about a year ago now. So what's new about Hindenburg Pro, 2? If anybody doesn't know?

Nick Dunkerley: 2:46

Well, very briefly, we might say that Hindenburg one had been on the market for nearly 15 years and has been servicing radio journalists and podcasters all over the world. And we thought it was time to make an update. We hadn't made an update. Well, we had obviously made changes, but we hadn't charged for an upgrade in all those years. So that's one thing that's new for us. And the other thing was, well, if we're going to do that, we definitely want to put some new features in there that, say, users have been looking for. So we spent a huge amount of time redoing the whole UI, which is how it looks and feels. But also adding new features to it. So we have transcription in there. We've expanded the clipboard, which turned out to be a huge success, so we had to make an even better one. And we've also added other stuff like you can import video. Yeah, so it's, it's been interesting and a huge amount of work, but we're really proud of what we ended up with.

James Cridland: 3:53

And the transcript stuff you are doing, as some other companies are doing, editing by transcripts as well as you can highlight a paragraph or something, press the delete button and it goes away from the audio as well, right?

Nick Dunkerley: 4:06

Yes, it works that way. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that you do it not just in ours, just in general. A But that's just because I'm a radio person. I think

James Cridland: 4:18

Yes.

Nick Dunkerley: 4:18

having a script there is an amazing feature for for navigating your material, getting a better overview of your story for searching for keywords and for doing rough edits. It's amazing, really is it just speeds up your process. Which is what Hindenburg is all about at the end of the day, is you once week high end productions. But many of our users are professionals, so they are also at a tight deadline. So is finding that sweet balance between speed and quality. And the transcription really helps speed up things.

James Cridland: 4:58

Yeah, I mean, I use it to edit this very show every single week. And the Podnews Daily, of course, the Podnews weekly review. I literally I go through, I get it to produce a transcripts and then I go through and edit out everything that Sam says. That's basically my plan. Now I see some of these stories that didn't really work so well and try desperately to fit it into 90 minutes or so, and it is super useful just for that initial work. And then you go in and you edit it properly. like you, I'm an old fashioned radio person and I rather enjoy, you know, doing a proper job of the audio editing. But it's a great first start to go. Actually, I want this question and this answer up here rather than down there, and then I will go in and make sure that all of that works flawlessly. Now, how about Pro 2 has been going for, as I say, for a year as a user every day. I've seen some impressive changes in it. All of a sudden, in the middle of this year, it became far faster to use the transcription tool and various other things. What sort of it has it been? Basically making it as flawless as you possibly can over the last year, or have you added a bunch of new features that we've not actually spotted over the last year as well?

Nick Dunkerley: 6:22

No, I think absolutely. We try to tweak it. It's. A whole ethos when it comes to features is we don't just want to add features, just just to add features. We really spend a long time thinking about the ones that we put in there and how we put them in there. Because if we we've just added new features every time someone asks us for a feature, it would probably well be bloated for one thing. But also the features wouldn't necessarily make sense for most people. But make an example going back, you remember maybe the magic levels.

James Cridland: 6:59

Yeah.

Nick Dunkerley: 7:00

That came based on sound designers and sound engineers who are saying, well, we have problems with bleed and could you please adds side chained gate. Now, there's probably like 80% of all users have no idea what I just said. Any of it makes any sense whatsoever. So our approach is, well, we understand what the problem is, but this is not the solution. So then we try to find another way of approaching the same problem, then came up with magic levels, which basically just removes bleed. You just highlight everything pressure, magic levels and usually goes away and again, that we tweak that feature, you through time, but we don't change the feature, just add new ones. And it's the same thing that we do with other things. We keep just improving it because most of the time you don't new features, you just need what you have to be stable and work and work quickly.

James Cridland: 8:00

Yeah. And I think, you know, the history of Hindenburg is I mean, it used to be called Hindenburg journalist a while back. And it was really, you know, as I've been explaining it to people,

Nick Dunkerley: 8:12

Yeah.

James Cridland: 8:12

it's there as a tool for journalists to make great sounding audio reader really quickly so that they can get it onto the radio really, really fast. I don't know whether that's entirely, entirely the way that you would normally talk it out, but that certainly seems to me to be the real value of a tool like Hindenburg Pro in that it is very, very capable and also does its job very, very quickly as well.

Nick Dunkerley: 8:40

And that is exactly right. And that is actually the value. Because if, as you know yourself, if you're working towards a deadline and this is more than being able to meet your deadline is more valuable than anything else. So there might be tools out there that have more bells and whistles. And there definitely are. But again, for us, that's on purpose. the point isn't what you potentially can make if you all the time in the world. Our mission is how much can you make, how creative can you be within a very restricted time limit? And that is a completely different approach to a product.

James Cridland: 9:20

Yeah. And that's very different to something like ProTools, which is sitting there, you know, for you to make a make a pop album on that and you know, and it's very good at that. It's very good at giving you, you know, four weeks to make a 30 minute program. But in terms of the fast turnarounds that podcasting is there for, you know, arguably I would have thought ProTools and logic and those sorts of tools are probably rather more than you really need. Would that be fair?

Nick Dunkerley: 9:52

That's very fair. And they were never built for this kind of production. And if you ask them, they will probably agree. I, I would imagine they said, yeah, sure, you can use ProTools or a logic for, for radio production or podcast production. But at the same time, I'm pretty sure they would say, but it's not what it's built for. This is built for logic, for instance, for music production. No, ProTools is also obviously for music production, but even more for film production. And these are situations where you have, well, still a deadline, obviously, but maybe a deadline is in six months, which is a different situation than if you're a day to day radio journalist and your deadline is in 3 hours.

James Cridland: 10:34

Well, I mean, I notice on your website that you've got quite the the who's who of customers in here. You've got, uh, Deutsche Welle in here, who I believe we have to call D.W. these days, WNYC, but also Radio Romania. Um, NPR, Stanford University, the Sorbonne, all kinds of really large organizations using you and, you know, you. It's a very different, um, you know, it's a very different client list, I would expect, than, you know, many people who are using, you know, the scripts and the, and the podcasts of this world.

Nick Dunkerley: 11:17

Yes, it is. Hindenburg has always been designed for for people who don't have an engineering background. That means if you are just starting out in your audio storytelling career, you can start with the Hindenburg, if you like. you shouldn't be intimidated by the professionals using it. it's a fairly straightforward to jump into, but you might not necessarily understand all the benefits of it from the beginning, but later on you will.

James Cridland: 11:48

Yeah. And I think that that is actually exactly what I learned. So I was using audacity and fighting audacity every day. And Hindenburg was a real pain for about the first week. And after the first week it was, Oh, no, I understand this now I've got there. I mean, even everything from the wavefile looks to everything else. Nick, the reason why you're on is we got a boost the other week from Georg Dahm or George Dahm, as I may be incorrectly calling him. And anyway, he says, Could you get the Hindenburg guys onto the podcast? I've got one of them. It would be great to hear how things have been going since the switch to a subscription model. It says Here Now. Hindenburg Pro always had a subscription model, I think, as well as a buy out model. So you can buy the software if you like, or you can just essentially rent it every single month. That's not particularly new, is it?

Nick Dunkerley: 12:42

Well, to be honest, he's right. It is fairly new. We've had it for some years now, and before that it was only about you can just purchase it. It is it is a perpetual license, so to speak. But then we introduce subscription, but we still have both. You can choose. So we've just added the option. But because again, it'd a very niche products, it also has a fairly high price and and some people just found that price a bit too steep and were asking well could you do a subscription model instead. And so we did

James Cridland: 13:19

Yeah. and so essentially you can buy the software forever. And I think the only costs going on are the transcription, if you wish to use that, because that says, uh, a service that you buy in. But accepting that I think that is, that is the only,

Nick Dunkerley: 13:34

yes.

James Cridland: 13:35

the only cost of actually running the thing. Or you can use it as a subscription, you know, as you go, um, as you go through it. Georg also asks, How are you competing with all the transcript based editors out there? I mean, clearly, since Hindenburg's started there has been quite a growth in things like descriptors e.g. by headliner podcasts, all a bunch of these other tools. I think Adobe has just released one as well, which is supposed to be a really easy, simple, straightforward way of editing a podcast. Um, and do you, do you see yourselves as being in competition with those tools or where do you sort of fit?

Nick Dunkerley: 14:23

the way that we approach our products and how we think of our core audience. They are professional audio storytellers and the way that they use transcription. is for for searching and doing rough edits. So it's a slightly different approach to if you're using transcription and in the sense that if you've never tried to do audio before using transcription is the same as editing in the word documents. That's that's a very different approach to saying that having our approach is having transcription will just speed up your professional work on a day to day basis, So all in incomplete as well. Yes, but the crossover is not that deliberate from my point of view, with the crossover, when it comes to to the audience, we're not necessarily seeking the beginners. We would love to have them aboard. That's not the point. But that's not necessarily our target audience. It very much seems that when it comes to scripts in Adobe, their approach is we want to target very specifically the first time podcasters.

James Cridland: 15:37

Yeah. And I think from that point of view, you are you are very different aren't you. You are you are focusing. I mean, you know, people will get the most out of you if they are a serious podcaster, if they are producing audio in a serious way and probably producing a large volume of audio as well in comparison to some of these new, you know, if you're a brand new, um, a brand new person to podcasting, then, you know, I mean, frankly, you know, they may not be quite as much of a need for this sort of of, of a tool. One of the things that I like about Hindenburg is being able to hit that publish button and to publish in whatever weird and wonderful format I need into a particular place on my computer or a particular place on the cloud or even, you know, upload it up to post sponsor or whoever it might be. You know, that that is super, super useful.

Nick Dunkerley: 16:35

It's a very it's a very specific need, isn't it? You have to be at a certain point in your career to appreciate that.

James Cridland: 16:43

It is.

Nick Dunkerley: 16:45

So if a were to kind of think of it, I would say that yes, should start out within. But but it actually first really makes sense when you start producing, as you were saying regularly, when you've gotten to like your 20th episode and you start feeling the pain of doing a a weekly or monthly whatever podcast you're doing, and then it becomes a job. This is where you start finding all the small benefits and you say, Oh, okay, now I understand why the clipboard is there. Now I understand why the published tools. They now understand what the voice produce profile is there. But up until that point I can try to explain it to you until, you know, the cows come in. It's not going to make any sense if you haven't felt that pain yet.

James Cridland: 17:33

Yeah. No, indeed. Indeed. And it and it's probably also worth just mentioning, given that given that it turns out that you are that you're on a boat at the moment speaking to us, it's probably worthwhile mentioning the Hindenburg probe itself is a very small computer program. It doesn't take much to download, and everything that you do is offline. Even the transcription is offline, which is a

Nick Dunkerley: 17:58

Yes.

James Cridland: 17:58

super useful thing. I'll tell you for somebody that quite often has to edit podcasts and things on aeroplanes and everything elsewhere, the internet is awful or non-existent. So that's a useful thing to.

Nick Dunkerley: 18:11

It is not only useful, actually, is it? For us, it was crucial. Well, one thing is useful on the plane. I get that the mobility thing. And also if you're in the middle of a war zone or something is quite useful to be able to do that. But the most important thing was security. At the moment when we're uploading something for transcription, we don't really have any idea who's listening in on that audio.

James Cridland: 18:39

Hmm.

Nick Dunkerley: 18:39

And there has already been cases where, you know, and that was a very unfortunate case where it was journalists was, was, was doing an interview with a minority group in China and suddenly was had to knock on the door from the Chinese government. And so when it comes to, again, the professionals, I had a longer chat with an editor from The New York Times about this and said they would never lie, can never use online transcription tools when it comes to sensitive material,

James Cridland: 19:14

Mm hmm. Because you never know who's going to hear that and who's going

Nick Dunkerley: 19:17

you

James Cridland: 19:17

to

Nick Dunkerley: 19:17

know.

James Cridland: 19:18

use that as a, I, you know, training and all of that kind of stuff. Keeping something

Nick Dunkerley: 19:26

Yeah.

James Cridland: 19:26

on

Nick Dunkerley: 19:26

There's.

James Cridland: 19:26

your own.

Nick Dunkerley: 19:26

There's that on top of

James Cridland: 19:27

Massively

Nick Dunkerley: 19:27

it.

James Cridland: 19:27

important.

Nick Dunkerley: 19:27

Yes.

James Cridland: 19:28

Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Dunkerley: 19:29

So. So if you do have sensitive material and again, this might not make sense if you're making a comedy podcast, you know, why would it? But for for some people and again, we do realize some of the things that we have in there that we find important for a very niche audience, but someone has to serve that audience. And to be honest, we love what we do. So, you know, if no one else is going to go for it, we will.

James Cridland: 19:57

No, indeed, indeed. And worth while also mentioning that it supports things like, you know, transcripts in a sort of format. So it works fine with podcasting 2.0 and all of that and does a and does a fine job, you know, in terms of all that stuff and will even sort out your LUFS levels as well. More details on that on the Podnews website. So what's coming up for Hindenburg? You've had a change at the top recently. What

Nick Dunkerley: 20:26

Yeah.

James Cridland: 20:27

sort of are there any changes to the way that the company will work in the future and any new products that your currently working on?

Nick Dunkerley: 20:38

Yes.

James Cridland: 20:41

Good. Well,

Nick Dunkerley: 20:44

This wraps up this.

James Cridland: 20:46

any clues as to what might be.

Nick Dunkerley: 20:49

I just have to be careful what I say. But. But yes, as you might be able to hear from what we've already talked about and our direction now is very much on the professional market. And and

James Cridland: 21:05

Yeah.

Nick Dunkerley: 21:06

again, we're not trying to alienate anyone. We're not going to make it so that you can't use it is just we want to be able to expand it. Okay. Let me put it in the broad sense. If you are working professionally with with storytelling. And that could be as a podcaster, but that might also be you have to do some side work as a voiceover artist. You might be narrating audiobooks, that kind of thing, where we're going looking into the future and if somewhat shorter term is that we want to be able to have more tools in there so that you as a professional can do all your your different products in one tool. I hope that makes sense.

James Cridland: 21:57

Yeah. No, that does that does make a bit of sense. That's that's relatively cryptic, but that does make.

Nick Dunkerley: 22:05

Well. I can't say too much about the specific features, but is is just to say that they it's difficult enough as it is

James Cridland: 22:13

Yeah.

Nick Dunkerley: 22:14

and to to try to you know, get food on the table as a voiceover artist or a podcaster. So we're just thinking, okay, what can we do again to make your work as seamless and as fun, to be honest as possible, but at the same time, make sure that you're so effective that you can actually earn money. Because many of the things that we do, we do spend so much money. If I come with an example, I know we're not necessarily talking about audiobooks here, but when it comes to people who narrating audiobooks and they can spend a lot of time just on the reading of the book, but then they take can take a large percentage of their income and give that to an audio editor for them to then go in and set levels. And make sure that all the the noise levels are set correctly and save money and not get a lot of money in the first place. And to just to do their day to day work. So some of the things we already have that in that way to make that easier, but we're going to be migrating some of those ideas back to in by pro. So you as a professional again can just have one tool that you can use for most of your jobs

James Cridland: 23:28

And everybody is putting into their tools my email. Software updated today with Apple intelligence in it. What's your stance on AI? How will you be using A.I. as you move forward?

Nick Dunkerley: 23:45

Ah, it's a good one. To be honest, we've been using a lie before anyone even had an idea what I was. Because in a sense, I is just taking someone else's knowledge, being knowledge and applying it to as a tool to what you want to do. So you could argue that a voice profile, for instance, that's a lie, but it's just based on a very narrow group of people, which was us at the office, so to speak. But the the ideas around a machine learning, we're going to be using them also. Looking forward, we're going to be making more voice restoration tools. I know we've promised voice restoration tools for a long time, but it turned out to be slightly more tricky than we had hoped. But we are getting there and so we definitely will be using it for that.

James Cridland: 24:38

Yeah. Interesting. And you. You. When we met in, uh, Denmark a few weeks or so ago, you were. You dangled the phrase proof of work at me, but you never quite explained what it meant.

Nick Dunkerley: 24:54

No, the thing about proof of work is it is basically just an idea that I had because I was been on a panel. I was on a panel for a an American organization for journalists. And

James Cridland: 25:10

Yeah.

Nick Dunkerley: 25:12

the questions that we get all the time is and this is also on this panel, what about A.I.? What kind of tools will be there to make my life easier? And this is a reoccurring theme. How can I make my life easier? And I kind of had to go the other way and say, we have to be careful with this because and if we just keep going down this path, we might so might end up making ourselves redundant. If if what you're doing right now is mediocre. Because to be honest, anyone who's using A.I. tools for their end products. They will be able to produce the quality of product that they can produce. And anyone who's professional will know that it's it's okay, but it's not a professional product. It's a mediocre product. And the issue with that is if that is kind of the standard we're setting, that would also mean that why would we need you? And this is what I was saying to a bunch of journalists, Why would we need you if we can replace you with a in the first place? So the whole point is that A.I. is great as a tool, but you have to make sure that you know what you're doing. You need to be good enough at your job to be able to filter out. Is this good? Is this usable? So there is that issue when it comes to AIG. We can't just lay back and depend on it to solve our problems. If we don't have the skill sets to actually understand what quality is. Then we have a problem. And then there's another problem going back to the proof of work, which is authenticity. Which also is a theme at the moments. How do you know that something is actually not just being produced by some bots? And we've all heard the examples out there at the moments for, for instance, Google Notes. It's quite amazing what it can do. And obviously that's just going to be better looking forward.

James Cridland: 27:21

Yeah.

Nick Dunkerley: 27:22

So when it comes to how do we prove that there's actually a person to person communication going on like the one we have at the moment and, and I think at least that we can steal ideas from the blockchain. And one of them is a proof of work, which is basically the way that Bitcoin works. And proof of work is, in a sense, a way of peacocking, if that makes sense. The peacock has a huge tail. It doesn't have to have a huge tail does make any sense. The only thing that makes it slightly more vulnerable to being killed. But the reason it has it is to prove that it can survive. And it's a bit the same thing when it comes to proof of work, when it comes to the blockchain. Blockchain uses a huge amount of energy just to prove

James Cridland: 28:15

Yeah.

Nick Dunkerley: 28:15

a is actually solving what would be an unnecessarily complicated arithmetic. But the point of it isn't to solve the arithmetic. The point is to use that amount of energy. That's the whole point of it. Because if you're using that amounts of energy, then someone else has to put the same amounts of energy into it to try to copy it. And it doesn't make any sense because you're using, you know, way too many resources on it. So it doesn't make any sense to try to copy it. And it's kind of what I was trying to convey here when it comes to our jobs. If we want to stand out as being our jobs is something special, something unique and something that the the end user can hear that there's a person they're trying to communicate something of value. We need to apply more effort. We need to go the other way. We can't just say that I do the job for us. We need to apply what we're really good at and then use A.I. as tools to help us down that road.

James Cridland: 29:24

Yeah, that's very, very well. Well said thing. And I know that Sam keeps on talking about assisted intelligence rather than artificial intelligence.

Nick Dunkerley: 29:34

He's a clever man.

James Cridland: 29:35

He is a clever man. Don't go telling him that face to face.

Nick Dunkerley: 29:38

No. God, no.

James Cridland: 29:39

Now, that would be a bad plan. It's been a great pleasure having a chat with you, Nick. This isn't a painful thing, but I would point out hindenburg. com/podnews. You can actually go there and get a three month trial and a 30% money off on your first year of Hindenburg Pro. I only mention this because Hindenburg very kindly give me a year free use of your tool. And so, therefore, you know, I think that would be a good plan. But do go and have a play with it. It is most definitely the tool for the serious podcaster that just wants to spend less time mixing and more time being more creative. That would be a good plan. Hindenburg dot com Like the disaster slash pod news. Nick, it's been a great pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.

Nick Dunkerley: 30:29

It has been. James, I thank you very much.