I Love Levelator

If you are a podcaster, click as fast as you can over to download Levelator, a free piece of software that helps tremendously with podcast production.

Levelator reads in an audio file and adjusts it to have a consistent volume throughout the entire recording. If one speaker was recorded louder than another or if inconsistencies exist in speakers, Levelator does it's best to round these out without distorting the audio.

Working in audio editting software can be very deceptive! What might sound good in your headphones during editing might not be what gets outputted when you render your audio file. During the rendering/bounce process, the software finds the loudest point in the entire show (which could easily be a moment of laughter or a door slam) and sets that to the peak volume. Everything else is scaled quieter relative to this maximum loudness point. This happens on rendering, so you might not be aware of it listening back to the source files.

I can't remember when I discovered it, but you could probably pinpoint the exact date by listening to the back catalog of Data Skeptic. Early on, the levels of different voices on the show were not always consistent. Similarily, the music was sometimes not mixed ideally. Although I know a fair amount about audio production and how to fix it, some shortcuts were necessary for getting the show out on time as a part-time hobby.

You'll find my podcasts are almost always well leveled these days. Granted, Levelator is not magic. It cannot fix recordings that are garbage to begin with. It doesn't remove background noise or do any sort of space modeling to reduce unpleasant components of the recording. However, if you manage to record a half way decent audio track, Levelator really can upgrade your sound.

A word of warning - it can distort music. For this reason, I edit my episodes without my intro/outro/transition music. I run the editted voices through Levelator, and then I go back in to a new project where I combine the level-ated talk with my intro and outro.

Yes, it would be better if this were a plugin built into my editting software. But it's well worth the extra step to make my episodes sound polished and professional.