What Auphonic does
Auphonic is a hosted audio post-production service with a broad feature set: adaptive leveling, noise and hum reduction, loudness normalization, multitrack processing, encoding to several formats, transcription, and publishing integrations, among others. You create an account, upload a file or tracks, and download the processed result. It offers free and paid plans.
Where Pod Level fits
Pod Level covers one part of that list: balancing the levels of speakers in a single mixed conversation recording, followed by loudness normalization and true-peak limiting. It is an alternative only for that narrower use case. It does not do the following, and is not trying to:
- Noise, hum, or reverb reduction.
- Multitrack input or per-speaker tracks.
- Transcripts, chapters, or metadata editing.
- Publishing, hosting, or integrations with other services.
- Batch processing or presets.
If your recording needs cleanup beyond leveling, or you want an end-to-end pipeline, a fuller service is the better fit.
What is true of Pod Level
The advantages below follow directly from how the tool is built rather than from a feature comparison:
- No signup and no upload. Processing runs in the browser. The page is configured so that it cannot send the audio, its filename, or measurements anywhere; nothing leaves your device.
- Free. There is no quota, plan, or account.
- Nothing to wait on. There is no upload or queue; the file is processed as fast as your device can, with progress and an estimate shown, and you can cancel at any time.
- The original is untouched. The source file is opened read-only and a new file is written.
- Transparent result. Input and output loudness, true peak, the gain range applied, and the number of turns adjusted are shown, with a before-and-after preview of a few handoffs.
How the leveling works
Pod Level detects speech turns, measures each turn’s loudness, and moves each turn toward the recording’s typical speech level by up to 12 dB. Short or uncertain turns follow the gain of nearby speech and gains ramp briefly at turn boundaries. Within a turn the gain is steady, so voices are not compressed. The result is normalized to −16 LUFS with true peaks limited to −1 dBTP.
Using it
Open Pod Level in current iPhone Safari, Chrome on iPhone, or desktop Chrome or Edge. Choose the file (WAV, MP3, M4A/AAC, OGG or Opus, WebM, or FLAC), review the proposed output format, pick a save location on desktop or start directly on iPhone, and wait for analysis and rendering. For the problems it is meant to solve, see balancing podcast speakers and fixing uneven podcast volume.