To Levelate or Not to Levelate…

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. .

before and after levelate

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.

August 29, 2007 | Filed Under podcasting technique 

Comments

Leave a Reply