There’s a very twisted irony in the fact that I don’t use the Levelator very often at all… but after I wrote the post early this morning about the Levelator, it would wind up being a key tool for me to use this day.  I had an interview scheduled in the early afternoon for an prototype of an internal podcast we’re working on.  Just minutes before I was to do the interview, I determined that something was wacky on my laptop and my normal route of using a softphone on the laptop with a mix-minus from my condenser mic was not going to work.   Not having the time to diagnose the problem and not wanting to lose the interview window, I went to Plan B (well, it should be Plan Z, as in “just don’t do it”, but it was B) and grabbed my JK Audio QuickTap from the closet, inserted it inline between the handset and one of my teleworker phones, and ran a cable over to an input on my mixer. As I did this, I was dearly hoping the Levelator could help out… or I was going to be re-recording another day.

You see, the problem with the QuickTap is this – you get both sides of the conversation on a single track, and I’m right there talking into the handset microphone, and the other person is on the other end of a phone connection.  The result is almost always: I’m loud and the other person is soft.  Maybe others have different results, but that’s almost always how it is for me.

However, the Levelator did save the day.  Dumped the recording to a WAV file, dropped it on the Levelator and opened up the levelated file.  Ta da… the levels were at least much nearer to each other.  Not the quality that I’d get out of my regular audio rig (because of the handset microphones and QuickTap), but certainly acceptable and a decent way to recover.

Just very ironic given my post this morning…

Nice to see The Levelator getting coverage in the Make magazine website.  Knowing of my interest in podcasting audio quality, a Blue Box listener sent me the note about this posting in Make, which was great to see.  I’ve actually been a huge fan of the The Levelator ever since Doug Kaye, Michael Geoghegan and Paul Figgiani released it through their Gigavox company.  It’s done wonders with some interviews I have recorded. 

If you aren’t aware of it, the Levelator is basically a tool to do most all of the audio post-production you need to do on a podcast or other audio file.  The Gigavox team wrote it for their own usage so that they could level out the different audio levels in podcasts they were producing.  They were then kind enough to release it to the broader community – and we have all benefited from that.

For me, where the tool is most useful is with field-recorded interviews or podcasts that are recorded via a conference call.  When I’m doing my own podcasts, my audio setup is such that I can control the audio levels of myself and a partner.  But field interviews often have varying levels of audio, sometimes purely by mic placement.  And conference calls?  Either on a traditional audio bridge or by using a tool like Skype?  Audio levels can be way off between the speakers.  And from a production point-of-view on my end, all of those people are one track coming into my recording rig (with my microphone being the other).  So, yes, I could do all the audio post-production to make it sound great…. or I could simply export it to a WAV file, drag and drop it on the Levelator window… and listen to the generally outstanding result.

If you are doing podcasts, or any other kind of audio production, the Levelator is definitely worth checking out.