The Levelator is an interesting beta program

I have to stress that point. This program is in beta, so do not count on stability to be one hundred percent. If you are an audio nut, then you’ll want to consider adding Levelator to you audio editing tools.

Do you believe in magic? You will after using The Levelator to enhance your podcast. And you’ll be amazed that it’s free (for non-commercial use).

So what is The Levelator? It’s 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. It’s not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three. It’s much more than those tools, and it’s much simpler to use. The UI is dirt-simple: Drag-and-drop any WAV or AIFF file onto The Leveler’s application window, and a few moments later you’ll 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 you’ve ever seen, heard or used. It’s magic. And it’s free. [gigavox]

I was half inclined to use this on the podcast that I released today, but time was a bit more of a factor. However, I did a slight trial run this afternoon and met some not so good results. I’m not saying this is a horrible program, but maybe you shouldn’t do what I did.

When it installs, try going with the defaults. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I didn’t want desktop shortcuts and all that junk. When it installed, I have no idea where it went, but some careful searching found it. On top of that, when I dragged the AIFF of the episode of RadioZoom I released today[rz#114] into the program, it hung. I tried to cancel it and quit out, but no going. That’s when it beach-balled and showed progress like it was doing something.

When I force quit out, and you can start to see the stupid things starting to happen, the program went away. Something somewhere was still doing something because my hard drive space was being eaten away. I even quit down to where no other programs were running and relaunched the Finder. Eventually, whatever it was, stopped and all my eaten space came back.

So, I stress that this is a beta version of the program, but a great concept for a utility. I haven’t had the opportunity to really see if it works, but I thought I’d pass on the word about this.