I have no idea what the title of this post means. It's just that "The Levelator" brings so much Terminator goodness (or badness, I guess) to mind that I can't help myself.
I have to admit that I don't understand the point behind this tool, but podcasters way smarter than me have developed it and told me that it's needed so it must be.
The GigaVox team developed The Levelator in house to combat the problem of unlike volume levels in podcasts. We've all seen and lived through telephone interviews and conference calls where some people are much louder than others. If you use a recording solution where every participant ends up on their own audio track then normalizing all of them is trivial. I think the Levelator is aimed more at the situation where you have big audio differences on the same track.
To date, the normalize filter in Audacity has worked fine for me, but since the Levelator is free I'll be trying it out. Oh wait, no I won' t because there's only a Windows and OS X version. Maybe some other time, then.
The Levelator is supposed to be available from GigaVox as of yesterday, but I don't see it there yet. Maybe check back tomorrow.
Hi Jon. I just did a guest spot on TWIT here at the Podcast Expo where Doug Kaye from Gigavox was also on the show talking about this. He said it's more advanced than the Normalize filter because it doesn't just work like a basic limiter/expander. It does true peak RMS normalization with a look ahead feature that allows the software to normalize entire ranges of a show rather than a few seconds at a time. This is very similar to the Intelligent Maximize function in Ozone iZotope 3.
Hi, Jon. If not Windows or OS X, what operating system do you need? Thanks.
Posted by: Doug Kaye | September 29, 2006 8:39 PM | Permalink to Comment