You Ask, I Answer: Best Audio Leveling Solution for Podcasting?

In today's episode, Mitch asks, with the return of the levelator, what is the best audio leveling solution for podcasting? Well, for those who are unfamiliar, the levelator is a piece of software that promises sort of one-click cleanup of audio to ready it for podcasting. Uh there are other solutions. Uh the levelator stopped working for a while because of various operating system uh updates and the fact that the uh software vendor uh basically has moved on to other things. But there are still folks who are committed to maintaining it and they do.

And so other tools like Authonic, for example, do similar tasks, but the levelator is free. Uh and obviously for those who own it, tools like Adobe Audition uh can bring a lot of extra polish, but not really the one-click solution. So what we wanted to look at today is how do these things sound. So let's go ahead and flip things over here, and we're gonna put these audio tracks in. Uh so let's start with this first uh here.

Let's go ahead and play this. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs. So that was this microphone as the first uh one. The VMOTA boom uh headset is the second one, the uh Apple AirPods Pro is the third one, and then just the onboard laptop sound. I wanted to do that because I wanted to have it uh four different types of audio sources to see how each one sounds.

Now, with the tool I'm using for video, Camtasia, uh, it does have a built-in leveler. So let's look at that one first. You can see there's already a bit of a difference. The these the spectrogram here is a little more dense, a little more colorful. Let's go ahead and listen to this.

This is Camtasia. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs. Okay. So that was Camtasia. Good, right?

Not great yet, um, but okay, not too bad. Let's now listen to uh Auphonic, which is one of the more popular tools out there. Hold on for a second here. There we go. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.

You can see in the spectrogram that the the colors there are brighter and more intense. If I click back to uh the original, you can see there's definitely a a big difference, right? There is a much bigger difference than you see with Camtasia, right? Auphonic uh brings a lot more vocal oomph, and it's at the right volume level uh for podcasts, which is a target loudness of minus 16 LUFS, which you can see down here in the corner. Now let's go ahead and look at the level later.

And here we go. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs. Again, very similar sound to Auphonic, right? Um it's there is a a a qualitative difference between uh this one here. You can see there's uh less of the purple fringing here uh in Auphonic.

Uh there's a bit more of that uh in what the Level Later pulled together. So the Auphonic seems to have a little bit better uh noise reduction. But when you look at the the sort of the colorful sections here, there the levelator is seems to be doing a better job of of enriching some of the tones. Now, which should you use? Well, if you can run the levelator on your machine, if you have a Mac and you've gotten it out of the App Store, and I believe it's still available for Windows, and you've got a single audio file that you're trying to work with, it's kind of hard to argue with this.

I mean, it's free. It's not as good at things like the the noise reduction uh as Aphonic, but it also is free, right? And it's still better than say Camtasia's built-in leveler, which is not great, uh, or and it's all of it is better than what you get when you just have the raw audio file by itself. So, conclusions. If you are if you've already bought Auphonic, keep using it, right?

If you fail, why wouldn't you keep using the thing that you paid for? Uh if you had have not bought it, look at the levelator. It again, it's free and it does a really good job. The other levelers and tools that are available, like if you wanted to do something in audition, you could. There's certainly ways to do all of what these tools do as a set of knee tricks if you want a very distinctive sound.

But honestly, for a lot of people, that's a heck of a lot of work and it adds a lot of production time, whereas dragging and dropping a file onto another app really definitely is the way to go. So, in conclusion, should you use one of these tools or others? It depends on what you've got and what you've already bought. I would say that in terms of what they output, all phonic and the level Later put out very close quality, and their quality is both better than not doing it all. So pick whichever one works for you and do that.

So uh good question, Mitch. Uh if you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

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