The Technology of Music Production
Berklee · View on Coursera ↗
Taught by Loudon Stearns
Arts and Humanities
About the course
Learn about the music production process—including recording, editing, and mixing—and the tools available to you to create contemporary music on your computer. With the recent introduction of high-quality-low-cost software and hardware, the tools of music production are now available to the masses. Albums are made in bedrooms as well as studios. On the surface this is liberating. Anyone can make an album for the low cost of a couple pieces of gear and a software package. But, if you dig deeper,
The dissent
The most-upvoted critical review (32 votes, 2.0★).
“To begin, the recommended software options for screen movies and presentation are awful choices - not to mention "Prezi" is subscription service. I didn't use it. Try Open Office which has a "PowerPoint" type presentation software if you are looking to save costs. There's also an enormous technical problem with the screen movie makers suggested (at least with the PC versions). You cannot record from your microphone and capture internal sound card information (i.e. sounds produced by your DAW) simultaneously with any of the "suggested" programs I tried. The solution was a virtual sound card (I used Voice Meeter) where I could route the sounds accordingly so you could hear the sound produced by my DAW while I spoke. Considering this is a technology course, you would think this would be addressed. It is not.”
Coursera's 4.8 comes from 1,087 ratings. Of those, 1.3% are 1–2★.
Starisk reads the reviews learners voted most helpful, and weights each by the square root of its votes: a review with 80 upvotes counts about five times one with 2. Unvoted reviews are not skipped out of laziness — by this model they carry no evidence that other students endorsed them.
That measures what the most-endorsed reviews say, not “true quality.” The rating distribution above is the whole population, so you can see the sample next to it.
Reviews read on 23 Oct 2026.Read them on Coursera ↗