Do you know that feeling when you’ve been doing something the hard way, repetitively by hand, a million times? For those of you who’ve wasted countless hours manually trying to balance the levels in your recordings, GigaVox created ‘Levelator’. But here’s a thing: search anyway you like in Google for software to automatically balance the levels in your soundfiles. You won’t come up with Levelator. There’s a bit of feedback for GigaVox.
At first go, Levelator balanced levels subtly and without hysterics. But it doesn’t last. As soon as Levelator hits a file with a period of extreme quiet (a distant audience question, for example, or a dramatic half-whisper) it loses its head and forces the whisper up to the dragged-down level of the loudest sound in the recording. The result is a series of noise-gates that give the entire game away and sounds awful. .
The bottom line is that for a spoken word recording with a relatively narrow range of volume, Levelator is excellent – so good it’s invisible. But if there’s so much as one half-whisper, it falls to bits and you’re forced to either abandon the whole attempt, or start cutting the recording into sections in order to deliberately NOT levelate the quiet bits.
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