While leveling the audio of podcasts, interviews and panel discussions is the core purpose of the free application, it can be used to level and normalize any kind of supported audio format. The supported audio formats are without doubt the greatest restriction or usability issue. Only wav audio and aiff audio formats are supported by the program.

Usage on the other hand could not be simpler. The Levelator comes without options or settings. All you need to do to level an audio file is to drag and drop it into the program interface.

The program displays a progress bar while doing its magic. The modified audio file is then in the end saved in the same directory as the original file.

The developers reveal a bit about the background process on the program website:

here are some hardware devices such as various AGC (automatic-gain control) components that can do moderate leveling, but since they have to operate in real time (i.e., without look-ahead), they can’t do much. And they aren’t cheap, let alone free. Even a skilled human can only react to changes unless s/he is lucky enough to be present during a recording session and can use visual cues to anticipate coming variations. Software can do better by performing multiple passes over the audio, generating a loudness map of where the volume changes. (It’s not actually that simple, but the metaphor is helpful.)

Bruce, with help from his son, Malcolm, had proven that he knew how to tackle these problems in ways that no one else anywhere in the audio/software industry has done to date. So we asked him, “Bruce, do you you think you can write a leveler that corrects for medium-term variations in loudness instead of the short-term and long-term variatons processed by compressor/limiters and normalizers, respectively?” Bruce and Malcolm took on the challenge, and eight months later we began testing The Levelator.

The big limitation of the program is the short list of supported audio formats. Many podcasts are not offered as wav files but mp3, which means that you will have to convert the mp3 files first to wav before you can use the program to level the audio. That may be fine if it is one or two audio files that you need to correct, but not so much if we are talking about dozens or even hundreds of files.

The Levelator is offered for Windows, OS X and Linux based operating systems. Interested users can download the free program from the project website.

Multiple file types is usually not a problem on the computer itself as software music players are capable of playing all of the popular music files. Problems usually arise when music needs to be transferred on media devices such as mp3 players.

Music converters are used to convert music from one format into a different format.

A first tech preview of the popular music converter LameXP 4.0 has been released a few days ago. LameXP is basically a frontend for the mp3 encoder Lame with support for additional decoders.

The tech preview has been released as a time limited demo which means that it will only work for 14 days. The developer plans to release a new version in that timeframe that users can update to.

Not all planned features are integrated in the tech preview as well. It is possible to load audio files into the interface with the built-in file browser or drag and drop. LameXP 4.0 supports a wide variety of file types from mp3 and wave over flac and ogg/vorbis to wma, mp4 and aac.

The endocder, quality settings, meta data and output directory are all defined in the program options. Supported are currently conversions to mp3, ogg vorbis, nero AAC (if installed), FLAC and Wave.

Meta Data can be added manually which will supersede meta data that is already existing in the files. A click on the Encode Now button starts the encoding. Encoded files are saved in the selected output directory. LameXP creates a playlist file automatically with an option to disable the creation in the meta data preferences.

Users who are interested in the tech preview of LameXP 4.0 find the official release thread at the Doom9 forum.

ID3 Kill is a free Windows software that can recursively scan through directories and perform file operations on audio files.

Usage is pretty straightforward. You point it at a directory and check a few boxes to configure the options. It is possible to include subdirectories in the scan. The main options are to remove ID3v1 and / or ID3v2 tags from all encountered audio files.

Other options include to clean m3u and pls playlists, to ignore file attributes or to display a message after the run is finished.

Update: ID3 Kill has been discontinued. You can download the last version if ID3Kill directly from our servers: ID3 Kill

MediaInfo scans a video or audio file and displays its technical and tag information. Information include general information like title, author and duration but also relevant information about the audio and video codec used to create the file. The freeware provides a link to a player who is playing that file and a link to the codec if you already have a favorite player.

The supported formats list is to large to be listed here at ghacks, take a look at the MediaInfo supported formats list for a complete listing. A similar tool is Gspot which offers basically the same functionality and is freeware as well.

Both tools offer in depth information about the analysed file which help if you encounter other problems, for example bitrate related problems.