Levelator Oddness

I needed to redownload the Levelator to stay current, and I noticed something odd. In the download statistics, it says that the OS X version was downloaded 3186 time and the Windows version 66 times. First, can the numbers really be that low? They must have been reset at some point. Second, is the OS X version really being downloaded at a 50 to 1 ratio against Windows?

I’m not sure of the cause of this discrepancy if it is real. OS X users care more about the quality of their audio and want it leveled better? Windows users don’t podcast as much as Mac users? I’ll avoid overinterpreting this data unless and until I know it is real but it struck me as very unusual indeed.

Levelate Me

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!