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The Levelator… Do you believe in magic? You will after using The Levelator to enhance your podcast. And you’ll be amazed that it’s free (for non-commercial use).

So what is The Levelator? It’s software that adjusts the audio levels within your podcast or other audio file for variations from one speaker to the next, for example. It’s not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three. It’s much more than those tools, and it’s much simpler to use. The UI is dirt-simple: Drag-and-drop any WAV or AIFF file onto The Leveler’s application window, and a fewmoments later you’ll find a new version which just sounds better.

Have you ever recorded an interview in which you and your guest ended up at different volumes? How about a panel discussion where some people were close to microphones and others were not? These are the problems the post-production engineers of Team ITC solve every day, and it used to sometimes take them hours of painstaking work with expensive and complex tools like SoundTrack Pro, Audacity, Sound Forge or Audition to solve them. Now it takes mere seconds. Seriously. The Levelator is unlike any other audio tool you’ve ever seen, heard or used. It’s magic. And it’s free.

When we developed the IT Conversations component-based show-assembly system (the first generation of GigaVox Audio Lite, see below), we realized all the components had to be of the same loudness or the results would sound awful. We limped along for many months using the RMS normalization functions in various applications, but the results weren’t satisfactory and it required tools and skillsets that some of our post-production audio engineers didn’t have. One of our best engineers, Bruce Sharpe, offered to write a standalone software RMS normalization utility, which we’ve been using as part of our production system GVUploader for nearly a year.

The GVUploader’s normalizer acts similar to an intelligent RMS-based compressor/limiter combination, and it therefore affects primarily the short-term (transient) sounds and the long-term overall loudness of the file. It doesn’t make the kind of adjustments that a skilled audio engineer can perform in software or at a mixing console, riding the levels up and down to compensate for medium-term variations.

There 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.

You’ll believe in magic.

What’s new:

Version 1.4.1:

• When the app is (re)installed, it clears its cache of the new “phone home” message.
• If you right-click on an audio file, Send to… allows you to start The Levelator. No longer does this leave an additional instance of the application running each time.
• The Levelator appears in the Windows task bar. (Windows only)
• The Levelator is included in the Alt-Tab display of running applications.
• Error messages no longer include cryptic characters such as “\n”.

Website
Download The Levelator

iPhoto Buddy is a small Universal Mac OS X application that allows you to use more than one photo Library with Apple’s iPhoto as well as with its companion programs, iMovie and iDVD. The advantages of splitting your One Huge Photo Library into multiple, smaller ones include improved iPhoto performance, increased flexibility in organizing your digital photo collection, and a consistency with most other Mac applications that allow their respective data to be store in as many files (documents) as you like.

iPhoto Buddy uses a simple, streamlined interface that was inspired by iPhoto itself. Anyone that has used iPhoto will immediately feel right at home using iPhoto Buddy. It truly is a companion application–a real buddy!

What’s new:

Version 1.3.1:

• Added support for iPhoto 8 (iLife ’09)
• Added icons in the Library List indicating which Library is currently registered with iPhoto and which is currently registered with other Applications
• Improved the Library verification process so that adding Libraries to the Library List is more reliable
• A warning message is displayed if the user attempts to add a Library that contains ampersand characters (&) in the path to the Library List
• Corrected an issue that prevented some Libraries from opening as expected from the Dock Menu
• Corrected an issue that prevented the Dock Menu from behaving correctly when iPhoto Buddy was not the front Application
• Performance and stability enhancements

Website
Download iPhoto Buddy

Chax is a collection of minor modifications and additions that make using Apple’s iChat more enjoyable. Some major features include:

• Unified contact list shows all contacts from all accounts in one window
• Growl notifications for new messages and users changing status
• Automatically resize the contact list to fit the number of visible users
• Built-in log viewer
• Activity log that displays your contacts’ status changes
• Auto-accept file transfers, AV chats, and screen sharing requests
• Toggle text status visibility of users
• Always on top option for contact list, message windows and AV chats
• Set font of names, status messages, and group separators
• Option to auto-accept text chats, skipping new message notification window
• Show status changes directly in the message window
• Additional unread message notifications in the dock
• Automatically go away when the screensaver activates
• Properly use ICQ accounts without sending text formatting in messages

What’s new:

• (New) Message history shows messages from the previous conversation in new chat windows
• (New) Send Camera Snapshot in the Buddies menu allows you to instantly send a picture from your camera as an inline image
• (New) Added option to confirm before ending AV chats
• (New) Added multitouch swipe gesture to switch tabs in message window
• (New) Hidden default SaveWindowFrames saves per-contact window positions
• (New) Hidden default ShowSenderAccount shows the active account in each conversation
• (Bug) Fixed parsing logs with some languages
• (Bug) New chat windows no longer steal focus when using auto-accept
• (Bug) Fixed unlocalized UI elements appearing in some languages

Website
Download Chax

Plex bridges the gap between your Mac and your home theater, doing so with a visually appealing user interface that provides instant access to your media. Plex can play a wide range of video, audio and photo formats as well as online streaming audio and video. The real power of Plex is found in its library features: Organize your media into versatile libraries, automatically retrieve metadata from the Internet, and display your libraries using one of the visually stunning skins.

Organize all of your media, from local drives, network shares, optical media and the Internet, in one easy touse application. Plex supports a wide range of video, audio and image formats without having to install any additional third party plug-ins or programs. Plex will make the days of trying to find the right plug-in to work with the right application a thing of the past.

What’s new:

Version 0.7.6:

• FIX: Ryan coaxed DTSWAV files into playing. It turns out to be impossible to play 44.1KHz DTS files on OS X, as it assumes encoded audio is 48KHz. For now, we’re mixing down the files, and shortly we’ll move to transcoding them to 48KHz AC3 files. Not optimal, but better than nothing given the limitations of the platform. (I’m looking forward to this personally, because I want to have the first 1080p Wizard of Oz + 5.1 Dark Side of the Moon party.)
• FIX: The highly annoying bug which caused TV shows to lose audio randomly with TV theme music enabled.
• FIX: Certain dialogs in the update code didn’t support UTF8 strings (James).
• FIX: There is now an option you can disable to prevent Plex linking the system audio output device with the device selected in Plex (System > Audio > Link System Output).
• FIX: The audio device settings didn’t appear to be remembered in the settings (they actually were saved, just not displayed correctly).
• FIX: We’ve disallowed deleting files from inside Plex by default. Much safer! This is a change to the settings, so you’d need to delete your guisettings.xml file to get the new value.
• FIX: We fixed a bug that prevented actions from being sent to Plex via event clients (used by Remote buddy).
• FIX: Ryan fixed a crash when attempting to transcode a corrupt DTS stream into AC3.
• FIX: Background music tracks are now played completely randomly.
• FIX: Isaac fixed some issues in the harmony and keyboard maps, and also added Hold Up/Hold Down to control volume in Full Screen Video and Visusalization for Mira users (and likely Sofa Control users as well). He also went through and “humanized” some of the error messages that Plex spits out to be more intelligible.
• FIX: Tweaked permissions on a MediaStream file.
• FIX: Mikey gave us some fixes to French strings (thanks!)
• FIX: Stillness sent some fixes for the KinoPoisk scraper (thanks!)
• FIX: A crash in Weather for some regions.
• FIX: Maddox suggested some excellent changes in the scraper defaults which result in better movie covers by default.

We have also updated the Plex Media Server (included with Plex) with the following changes:

• NEW: James added support for nested iTunes playlist folders and iPhoto folders (a much requested feature).
• NEW: Audiobook support.

• FIX: More tweaks for “album artist” tag.
• FIX: iPhoto sorting of events and albums was broken.

We’ve also pulled the usual bunch of fixes from XBMC, including updated scrapers, updated UPnP code, and some fixes.

Website
Download Plex

TimeMachineEditor… Change the one-hour interval of Time Machine backups. You can change the interval or decide to make daily, weekly and monthly backups.

TimeMachineEditor installs nothing in your system, it merely tells the system when Time Machine should be called.

What’s new:

Raw Photo Processor (RPP) is a RAW converter, supporting almost all available digital RAW formats. Think of it as of a development machine in terms of film photography – first you have to develop your roll right, then do whatever you want with it. So this is NOT a full featured photo processing package, you will need Photoshop or some other tool to apply sharpness, cropping and so on, but you may use RPP for some very carefully picked amount of operations.

The main idea behind this application is to do quality conversion without blocking shadows, clipping highlights, spoiling colors and returning that natural film-like look to your pictures.

What’s new:

Version 3.8.6:

• Added dot-noise remover for hot pixels and similar kinds of noise. See “Remove dot-noise option” chapter in the manual.
• Added white balance presets for Nikon D3X, D3, D700, D2X, D2Xs, D300, D90; Fujifilm S5 Pro; Panasonic L1, LX1, LX2, LX3, FZ8, FZ18, FZ30, FZ50.
• Improved batch mode:
  – Support for directories scanning at full depth.
  – Quit/Crash protection, i.e. if RPP quit or crashed it can be restarted from last position.
  – Batch cancel button.
  See “Batch Processing mode” in the manual for more details.
• Added option to File menu to prevent overwriting of existing files. Instead RPP will try to automatically add sequential unique numeric suffix to the file name in range from 001 to 999.
• Initial support for Hasselblad V96C FFF files.
• Bugfixes.

Website
Download Raw Photo Processor

What’s new:

• Optionally, Plain Clip can remove trailing whitespace and strip certain control characters, such as non-breaking spaces.
• When invoked from a hotkey applications, can send an emulated Cmd-V (Paste) keystroke (see Readme for more details).

Website
Download Plain Clip

What’s new:

Version 2.2 / 2.2.1:

• Fixed problems that can not download video file.(v2.2.1).
• Added “HD Video Search” function.
• Added “displaying order” of playlist videos.
• Fixed problems and added other functions.

Website
Download MacTubes