Get the new, cleaned-up MP3 file of our 'Springtime for Apple' podcast

Get it here.

The first version, which I uploaded Sunday, had bad volume problems. I sounded all right, as did guest Michael T. Rose of The Unofficial Apple Weblog. But Gina Trapani, of Smarterware and Lifehacker, sounded a bit distant. And Second Life's ArminasX Saiman, of the shop Electric Pixels and the blog Second Effects, sounded like he had a bad case of the mumbles.

I did the best I could to clean it up, which wasn't enough. After uploading the MP3 to this blog, I mentioned the problem to Mike, and he recommended The Levelator, a free, cross-platform tool for solving exactly the problem I faced: Equalizing volume levels between multiple speakers on a podcast.

As Mike describes Levelator on TUAW: "The really nice thing about The Levelator ... is that it has, for all practical purposes, no controls. Drop a file on it, wait an appropriate amount of time and watch the blinking lights, then take your output file and continue on your merry way; the final file will simply sound way better than the original did."

It's cross-platform, running on Windows, OS X and Linux, and it's a miracle-worker. I spent a couple of hours banging on the original recording, trying to fix it manually — Levelator did a much better job in seconds.

If you avoided listening to the original MP3 because of the audio problems, re-download it and give it another try. If you listened to it all the way through, and strained your ears, I'm sorry, I can't help you, except to offer you soothing ear ointment.

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