If you are a podcaster, or in some small way produce sound for someone else to hear, you need The Levelator. Unlike conventional compressors or limiters The Levelator is a smart level equaliser for any sound file. The cool part is that it works on both Mac and PC platforms as it is written in Java. It’s not actually a compressor, limiter or normaliser but it performs the fuctions of all three and in a really neat easy to use, automatic package.

It’s particularly good at things like interviews where you have a number of different voices on different microphones who may be closer or further away from the mic as they speak. The Levelator sorts out the different levels, working on both the transients (short term) and overall (long term) loudness of the whole file, and presents you with a cleaned up and perfectly balanced version. It can’t replace a skilled audio engineer, but it can do things that much more expensive audio clean up can do at no cost.

The software installs from the web directly onto your computer and give you and icon to run it on the desktop, then you drop a sound file onto the program window and it processes the file. The resulting file is processed in multiple passes to intelligently adjust the levels of different passages, so louder bits become lower and softer bits become more present. It’s a wonderful tool and totally free. It works with WAV and AIFF files, two industry standard sound file formats, but not unfortunately MP3. If you are releasing your audio in MP3 format you will have to use some other kind of sound file converter to arrive at that format.

For more details about The Levelator go to www.gigavox.com for your free download.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 8th, 2006 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.