TheLevelator
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Friday Favorite: The Levelator, friend to podcasters everywhere
We've mentioned it before (via Laurie and Scott's posts back in ought-six) but it's worth a Friday Favorite: if you're looking for a free, cross-platform tool that does one thing to audio and does it very very well, you need to download The Levelator today.The Levelator is offered by The Conversations Network as a single-purpose tool: it takes uncompressed audio (WAV or AIFF files) and performs a small miracle. The file is leveled to a uniform loudness level, even if varying parts are recorded with different microphones, audio settings, or even in diverse corners of the world (if you've ever tried to record a podcast over Skype, you know what I'm talking about). While many audio apps have normalization or 'leveling' functions, in my admittedly amateur audio experience I haven't heard anything like The Levelator; those with more savvy in this area tell me that the output is akin to what you would get with a human engineer 'riding the meters' to adjust the sound dynamically as it varies.The really nice thing about The Levelator -- and this is an odd thing to say about a Mac application -- is that it has, for all practical purposes, no controls. Drop a file on it, wait an appropriate amount of time and watch the blinking lights, then take your output file and continue on your merry way; the final file will simply sound way better than the original did. It's made my life much easier in editing the TUAW Talkcast, and if you have any hand in producing spoken-word audio it might do the same for you.The Levelator is a free 48 MB Universal Binary download, and will work on either 10.4 or 10.5, as well as Windows and Linux. Enjoy!
The Levelator 1.1.0
We first wrote about The Levelator when it was just a wee app in beta, but now it is all grown up and has hit version 1.1.0. The Levelator, as you might recall, can take an audio file and automagically adjusts the levels so everything has the same base level (though some things are louder than others, as it should be).New in 1.1.0 is an entirely new (and very un-Mac like) user interface, as well as a new license that permits free use of The Levelator for commercial projects (the previous license only permitted free personal use).The Levelator is Univeral, requires OS X 10.3 or later, and is free.
Beta Beat: Enhance your podcast audio with The Levelator
The Levelator, from GigaVox Media does one thing, does it well and has no bells and whistles to confuse you. In fact, it has no real settings at all. It takes your audio file (WAV and AIFF files at the moment) and normalizes the volume giving you a much more polished and consistent sounding podcast. It basically saves you what can often be hours of manual adjustments.Levelator requires Java 1.5 so it needs at least Mac OS X 10.4, but it's Universal Binary and free for personal non-commercial use. Runs on Windows too, if you care. It's in very early beta (Version 0.1b). The download page says "...the download and install mechanism is a little sloppy. We'll be making this much nicer over the days and weeks to come, but we didn't want to hold back The Levelator, the core functionality of which is far more solid." In my limited testing this evening it seems to get the job done. I used a 20-second clip of a voicemail message that has 2 of us speaking (one of us actually yelling from across the room) and the original levels are horrible, as you might imagine. A split second after I dropped it onto The Levelator it was done and the difference in the playback audio was impressive. I also found a pointer to How-To use The Levelator with GarageBand's compressed files - which I think I'll be sending to our resident Podcast producer (I'm talking to you, Chartier) here at TUAW HQ.If you dabble in podcasts yourself, download this puppy and take it for a spin. You might like it![via Steve Rubel's del.icio.us links]
