The Levelator: A Must For Podcasters

As an amateur audio engineer and a podcast producer, I deal with everything from GarageBand to SoundTrack Pro to Adobe Audition in a single day. In a world of Swiss Army knife pro apps like these, it’s always nice to see those little tools that do a terrific job at one aspect of production. The Levelator from GigaVox Media fits this bill exactly.

Just as a quick background, GigaVox Media was founded by Doug Kaye of IT Conversations. Kaye is one of the first real podcasters, and in the past several years he’s produced thousands and thousands of hours of audio interviews with tech luminaries. In short, Kaye and the guys at GigaVox know a thing or two about how stuff should sound. If you know anything about editing audio, you know that the editing can in many cases take three or four times longer than the recording itself, and that’s on a good day. Kaye soon realized that all in all, the editing of these interviews went rougly the same, so he helped develop The Levelator to automate the process of level adjusting, sound compression, limiting, and other factors.

It would be a great disservice to say that The Levelator is just a sound compression tool. Using a bit of arcane “black magic,” The Levelator doesn’t do a typical compression job, it uses both very short-term and very long-term look-ahead to generate an overall loudness profile of the audio and then adjusts levels of many individual slices of the file with multiple passes. If you’re feeling left in the dust with all of this audio talk, don’t worry - The Levelator is extremely easy to use. Just drop an uncompressed WAV or AIFF onto it, and it will churn away, getting your levels just right. If you do any audio interviewing at all, The Levelator will, appropriately to its namesake, adjust all the levels to get them matched and sounding top-notch.

The Levelator, for all its greatness, is absolutely free! Download version 1.1.0 here.