Podcasters, if you do a show and particularly if you do interviews or multi-person, multi-mike shows, you need the Levelator. I’m running all my interviews through it nowadays and it makes a world of difference. When two people are not at the same level, this evens them back out and makes it all good. It’s free, so take it and use it. There’s just no real reason to have that 12 dB difference in levels between people in a show anymore. It just means you aren’t even trying.
Via Gigavox big wheel Michael Geoghegan comes a link to their own interview with Bruce Sharpe, the guy who built the Levelator. For those of you into the inner workings of RMS normalization, this is your thing!
I’ll give it a try again. The Beta wasn’t dealing well with the background noise on the recordings I tried. It worked fine on my “studio” recordings, but they generally aren’t the ones that need help. The release notes say they tested with every “problem” file folks sent in, so it should kick major ass.
“For those of you into the inner workings of RMS normalization, this is your thing!”
Wow, that’s even more geeky than I care to geek out on! LOL
I will give Levelator, and the interview, a try, though.
Hugh-By all means give it a second try. Gigavox has released version 1.1.0 with a new interface (or perhaps AN interface, the previous version was a raw Java machine skin).
I used version 1 (beta) and found it did not handle noise floors well and introduced artifacts, so I went back to my old routine of using Adobe Audition’s (excellent)normalization/hard limiting routines.
I ran the new Levelator on a Skype interview I did over the weekend for a radio production—split channel with my voice on mike and the other person through WAVE IN via mixer–and it totally killed!No artifacts, perfect normalization to -3dB
It is also faster than version 1 and has drag and drop to the desktop icon. I’m no “newbie” to audio production, butI have to say this is one of those little “miracle” apps no serious audio producer should overlook.
RandyM
http://www.surfingthechaos.com