The Legend of Levelator
A hobbyist podcaster’s best friend.
I started podcasting in 2005 (before they were even called “podcasts”). Back then, radio equipment was expensive. Like, prohibitively expensive. But I was 17, and getting into radio as a real career wasn’t an option. So I made do with what I had: $15 omnidirectional Radio Shack (RIP) microphones and a couple of daisy-chained 4-channel mixers that made us sound… fine.
In 2008, at the height of the first podcasting boom, a nonprofit in California called The Conversations Network released an app for Windows and Mac that took a .wav or .aiff file and “levelized” it. It pushed all the audio to a max of -1dB, somehow keeping the loud parts loud and the quiet parts quiet, all relative to the conversation. It was like having an expert audio engineer working behind the scenes, after the fact. It turned your poorly mixed, or not-mixed-at-all, show into something actually listenable.
Sadly, in 2012, The Conversations Network shut down, and support for Levelator kind of vanished too. When macOS El Capitan came out in 2015, the app broke completely. But the original dev team came back and fixed it. Superheroes, honestly. Then Catalina dropped just a year later and broke it again. One final time, they updated it, but this time they put it on the App Store. And now it’s gone. For good, I guess?
Luckily, Levelator has been part of my workflow since the beginning. Even though I’ve upgraded my audio chain and production studio to be state-of-the-art, I still run the WAV file through Levelator before every release. Call it superstition, but I love it.
So, since I keep a working copy of Levelator in my private files as part of my production stack, I figured I’d release it here for you to download if you need it. Enjoy. And pray it keeps working forever.