The Levelator - 2.0.6

I am an audio professional. I record and edit a 30 minutes spoken program that goes to air weekly on the Public Broadcasting Association via satellite to approximately 26 stations nationally, so quality and consistency in a technologic sense is just as important as the content. I use a range of great (and expensive) pro apps, such as Peak Pro and Soundsoap Pro.

As the majority of the people i interview are over 60 years of age, the levels of the recored voices can be quite extreme within any given interview due to the frailty of those approaching their 80's and 90's. I have been able to level these extreme level variances with Peak Pro (Version 6), but it is time consuming.

Then I came across Levelator. I didn't have any great expectations, but I ran three programs with varying level issues through. It was as simple as drag and drop onto the app icon. It took only 3 - 4 minutes to run a thirty minute interview and in what is a great little feature, it leaves the original untouched (a great safety feature) and produces a copy that has had the highs and lows of the recorded levels balanced out, and balanced out well. Having only tried it with 3 interviews, there may be issues that i have not uncovered, but up until now I am very impressed. Be it by design or just by luck, it has levelled the overall volume to -1Db, and while my transmission requirements are -3Db, its just a simple matter changing the overall gain through peak by 1 Db and then running the normaliser function at -3Db.

And, its free. I have a number of shareware apps that i have been happy to pay the developer a small fee to enable continued development and wouldn't hesitate making such a payment for this little beauty.

Well done!

Levelator doesn't just even out the quirks and cadences of voice - I'm a performance poet - it enrichens the sound itself somehow. What goes in to the Levelator box is a recording and what comes out is magic. I'm glad to see a new version. This is a fantastic tool for recording. Thanks!

Really nice piece of software, good looking and easy to use...but isn't possible to use it also on mp3, a lot of file are in this format and converting them over and over would be a problem.

This is one of those great utilities that does only one thing and does it exceedingly well. It takes your audio with varying levels and evens it out. This is particularly great for dialogue from multiple sources, which is rarely recorded perfectly.

The only thing that would make this better is an audio unit plugin version, so I could run it directly from within any of my audio editing applications.

based on some fairly basic tests. would be very useful for podcasts (its primary purpose, i think), or any audio production where there are different audio sources being combined, or multiple participants with different volume levels.