Levelator

Of the 547 jack-of-all-trades talents that a voice actor must tackle these days, #5 (maybe 7…but no more than 10) is: mastering passable audio engineering skills.

Books written on the topic would fill an entire wing of Barnes & Noble, if they wanted to.
 
A recent article listed 25 free audio editing programs (see my blog on that)…each with its own peculiarities, although much is the same in many ways.

Even audio engineers at top studios struggle to maintain their skill level with all the new gee-gaws software updates, and upgrades.

Mostly, it seems, experience over time is the best teacher.  You learn the nuances of sound and how to best manipulate it when you do a lot of recording, editing, and mastering every day.

Nonetheless, the search never ends for the panacea that can make the most bumbling tech neophyte a seeming audio journeyman.

Submitted for your approval: LEVELATOR. 

I found Levelator on Jake Ludington's Media Lab site. 

He says Levelator: "examines a WAV or AIFF file, looks for volume inconsistencies and fixes
them. It's a bit geekier than that under the hood. The Levelator
handles both the gain optimization
on a file and RMS normalization to make sure the volume level is
consistent. The output is a new file, so you can always go back to the
original if you need to."

See?  I'm not even sure I fully understand that layman's explanation.  So maybe the best thing to do is just download and try this free program.  I have.  It installs in no time, and pretty much does everything it promises to do if you want to believe this admitted apprentice sound editor.

Top audio engineers might scoff at this sort of one-size-fits-all wizardry, but they're the same guys who would encourage a voice-actor to use Pro-Tools to record a simple E-learning narration.

BTW, I've added Jake Luddington's site to my BlogRoll….lots of good stuff to be had there.

CourVO