After recording the recent episode of the swim podcast, where I was a guest host, I went back to my audio and tried to clean it up. There were two things with the audio that needed to be cleaned up and I was without an audio engineer to do it for me. So, I turned to the lay mans quick and dirty tool the levelator.
The levelator is designed to adjust the levels in your podcast audio. It can adjust for multiple speakers. It uses compressors, normalizers, and gates. Sure, it's not as good as what a sound engineer can do. But, if you are a lay person who doesn't have the skills to engineer the sound this is better than nothing.
The two problems I ran into were the sound on my mic (a cheap headset mic) and the signal came in too hot (I talked louder than was sound checked at). After dumping it through the levelator it didn't sound perfect but it cleaned up the audio much better than I could have done on my own.
I use this all the time.
I use this for every posting of our Churches sermons. Its simple. Just drag the audio into the window and wait. Works good for me.
I'm Spolied
I have to admit, I'm a little spoiled. Most of the time I have a sound engineer (Rob Feature). When I don't have him I tend to use the levelator.
ditto
I do the same for our Pastor's sermons. It really helps even out the loud and soft parts. I'm also not an audio person so it's a gem for me.
We record on an inexpensive personal digital recorder, the pastor starts and stops it himself. Sometimes when he has left the recorder on, the levelator even increases the volume so we can hear people in the congregation when the pastor takes prayer requests.
matt, what's the software
matt,
what's the software you use to actually record the podcast? and is your source file an AIF? I'm wondering if levelator requires a higher-level recording like stereo 64k for better downsampling.
Audacity
When I have to record something I typically turn to Audacity. It gets the job done well. I've used Garageband before but I find, for what I do, Audacity to be quicker to get the job done.
Levelator requires a wav or aiff file to do it's thing. I usually just export a wav out of Audacity and run it through levelator.
Realize, this is the quick and dirty approach and that this isn't the setup we use for Geeks and God or the Super Average Podcast. For those we are using high end mics running into a sound board connected up to Pro Tools.
Matt, thanks for the
Matt, thanks for the recommendation. I've been using Audacity for processing my church's sermon podcast but it's kind of a pain to adjust the volume for different speakers or if the sound guy decides he's going to adjust the levels during the message. I've also had several recordings where the level was too high and it distorted the signal. It'd be great if this can help clean that up.
Only So Much Help
The levelator can only give so much help. If the original signal came in too hot to handle there will still be issues. Solving the issue of the recording being too hot when it is recorded will make a big difference.
If this works out well I'd love to hear what problems it helped you solve.