I have to say I agree with Jon Udell here - the audio editing piece of podcasting is time consuming, and trying to get a decently normalized sound is hard:

Here's the deal, from my perspective as an audio newbie now plunged into the deep end. As my podcasting method has evolved, I've settled into two modes of editing. In one mode, I refine the content of the recording. That involves fine-grained internal editing -- trimming out excessive ums, uhs, and pauses -- as well as coarse-grained edits that remove less interesting passages in order to focus on the most essential parts of the conversation. Applying both methods typically reduces the final product to somewhere between 70% and 90% of the original length and, in my opinion, sharpens the result in a way that's well worth the investment of time. I've always enjoyed this kind of editing in the textual realm, and it turns out that I enjoy it in the audio realm as well.

The other mode involves the purely technical work of taming sometimes-noisy phone lines and evening out audio levels. As I've become more sensitive to audio quality, I've found myself spending more and more time on the leveling process. It's not only needed to balance the caller and the callee. There can be a ton of loudness variation just within the caller's track. When you start fiddling with that, you're on a slippery slope that leads straight into a pit of drudgery.

Like Jon, I stumbled across the Levelator (in my case, it was by listening to TWiT). It's a primitive looking tool, but it does the job - you put in audio that's all over the map, and you end up with something that's nicely normalized. There are artifacts - the tool sometimes picks up ambient noise and levels that, but I can see that in Audacity easily enough and chop it out. It's a very nice tool for this task.

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