The Levelator 1.1.0

So what is The Levelator? Its software that runs on Windows or OS X (universal binary) that adjusts the audio levels within your podcast or other audio file for variations from one speaker to the next, for example.

Its not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three. Its much more than those tools, and its much simpler to use.

The UI is dirt-simple: Drag-and-drop any WAV or AIFF file onto The Levelers application window, and a few moments later youll find a new version which just sounds better.

Have you ever recorded an interview in which you and your guest ended up at different volumes? How about a panel discussion where some people were close to microphones and others were not?

These are the problems the post-production engineers of Team ITC solve every day, and it used to sometimes take them hours of painstaking work with expensive and complex tools like SoundTrack Pro, Audacity, Sound Forge or Audition to solve them. Now it takes mere seconds. Seriously. The Levelator is unlike any other audio tool youve ever seen, heard or used. Its magic. And its free.

When we developed the IT Conversations component-based show-assembly system (the first generation of GigaVox Audio Lite, see below), we realized all the components had to be of the same loudness or the results would sound awful. We limped along for many months using the RMS normalization functions in various applications, but the results werent satisfactory and it required tools and skillsets that some of our post-production audio engineers didnt have.

One of our best engineers, Bruce Sharpe, offered to write a standalone software RMS normalization utility, which weve been using as part of our production system GVUploader for nearly a year.

The GVUploaders normalizer acts similar to an intelligent RMS-based compressor/limiter combination, and it therefore affects primarily the short-term (transient) sounds and the long-term overall loudness of the file. It doesnt make the kind of adjustments that a skilled audio engineer can perform in software or at a mixing console, riding the levels up and down to compensate for medium-term variations.

There are some hardware devices such as various AGC (automatic-gain control) components that can do moderate leveling, but since they have to operate in real time (i.e., without look-ahead), they cant do much. And they arent cheap, let alone free.

Even a skilled human can only react to changes unless s/he is lucky enough to be present during a recording session and can use visual cues to anticipate coming variations. Software can do better by performing multiple passes over the audio, generating a loudness map of where the volume changes. (Its not actually that simple, but the metaphor can help.)