In the classic loudness war, music and radio producers have been trying to create their recordings as loud as possible and loudness normalization was introduced to stop that. Now one can see the start of a new loudness target war, where podcasters set their loudness targets higher and higher, mainly triggered by high target recommendations of platforms like Spotify or Amazon Alexa.
In this article, we will show how to resist the loudness target war and still be compliant with major platforms.

Resist the loudness target war! (Photo by Nayani Teixeira)

What's the problem?

“Two or three ...

At the Subscribe 9 Conference, we presented the first version of our new Audio Inspector:
The Auphonic Audio Inspector is shown on the status page of a finished production and displays details about what our algorithms are changing in audio files.

A screenshot of the Auphonic Audio Inspector on the status page of a finished Multitrack Production.
Please click on the screenshot to see it in full resolution!

It is possible to zoom and scroll within audio waveforms and the Audio Inspector might be used to manually check production result and input files.

In this blog post, we will ...

Today we released free updates for the Auphonic Leveler Batch Processor and the Auphonic Multitrack Processor with many algorithm improvements and bug fixes for Mac and Windows.

Changelog

• Linear Filtering Algorithms to avoid Asymmetric Waveforms:
  New zero-phase Adaptive Filtering Algorithms to avoid asymmetric waveforms.
  In asymmetric waveforms, the positive and negative amplitude values are disproportionate - please see Asymmetric Waveforms: Should You Be Concerned?.
  Asymmetrical waveforms are quite natural and not necessarily a problem. They are particularly common on recordings of speech, vocals and can be caused by low-end filtering. However, they limit the amount of gain that can ...

Another year is coming to an end: time for Krampus and Nikolaus to rewards the well-behaved ones with gifts – and to fix some remaining bugs from 2015 in our desktop apps :) !
Today we release version 1.7 of the Auphonic Leveler Batch Processor and version 1.3 of the Auphonic Multitrack Processor.

A typical Krampus in Austria, image by Johann Jaritz.

• Auphonic Leveler Download
• Auphonic Multitrack Download

Changelog

This release is mainly a bug fix release.
It fixes ...

We are happy to release version 1.6 of the Auphonic Leveler Batch Processor and version 1.2 of the Auphonic Multitrack Processor with new features and bug fixes for Mac and Windows (see Changelog below).

• Auphonic Leveler Download
• Auphonic Multitrack Download

Changelog

• Opus Encoder and Decoder:
  We included an opus encoder and decoder in all apps. Opus is particularly interesting for podcasts due to its suitability for both, music and speech, and its outstanding sound quality at also very low bitrates. For more see Opus, the revolutionary open ...

We just released version 1.4 of the Auphonic Leveler Batch Processor with many new features and fixes, including a new preset system, much faster processing (parallelization), algorithm improvements and more.

Screenshot of the Auphonic Leveler 1.4 with menu to load, save and delete a preset.

Updates in Version 1.4

The following new features were added:

• Parallelization of Individual Algorithms:
  Algorithms are now computed in parallel, also if you only process one single file.
  This brings a big speed improvement when processing only one long recording, like for example a long podcast.
• Presets:
  It is now possible to create, load ...

Today we released version 1.3 of the Auphonic Leveler Batch Processor with many bug fixes and some new features for Mac and Windows. Everyone is invited to download the latest binary!

New Features in 1.3

In addition to support for OS X Yosemite, we added some other new features:

• Auto Update Check:
  The Auphonic Leveler will inform you, if a new (free) update is available to download.
• Fade In / Out:
  Select the time for Fade Ins and Fade Outs in milliseconds at the beginning ...

Our Noise and Hum Reduction algorithms are now included in the Auphonic Leveler Batch Processor, version 1.2, on Windows and Mac. Note that this is a free update!

Auphonic Noise and Hum Reduction

The Auphonic Noise Reduction algorithms remove broadband background noise in audio files with slowly varying backgrounds.
First the audio file is segmented in regions with different background noise characteristics, then a noise print is extracted in each region and removed from the audio signal. A classifier decides if and how much noise reduction is necessary.
For more details and audio examples see Noise Reduction. ...

Finally we found some time to collect a few listening examples for our audio algorithms – thanks to all the people who provided audio files!
Everything is processed automatically and you can try Auphonic yourself with the unprocessed files and will get the same results.

The official Auphonic Audio Example page is here: Audio Examples.
We will extend this page with further examples, so let us know if you have some great ones!

Global Loudness Normalization

Our Global Loudness Normalization Algorithms calculate the loudness of your audio and ...