Fixing unbalanced sound levels

By the Ourmedia staff

Many podcasts suffer from unbalanced audio — say, during an interview where one person sounds louder than the other. Podcast pioneer Doug Kaye of IT Conversations and The Conversations Network released a free program in late 2006 that solves some, though not all, of these shortcomings.

The Levelator is downloadable software that adjusts the audio levels within your podcast or other audio file for variations from one speaker to the next. It's not a compressor, normalizer or limiter, although it contains all three.

In the past, finicky sound editors would have to spend hours of painstaking work with expensive and complex tools like SoundTrack Pro, Audacity, Sound Forge or Audition to fix the sound levels. Now you just need to drag-and-drop any WAV or AIFF file onto The Levelator's application window, and a few moments later you'll find a new version that typically sounds better.

The software runs on the Windows and Mac platforms. The Levelator site at Gigavox Media contains more information about what the free application can and cannot do.

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