If you work with digital audio recorded under less-than-studio-perfect engineering — especially spoken content — you are hereby requested and required to immediately download the new Levelator 2, free from the awesome nonprofit Conversations Network.

Public media’s good friend — nay, philanthropist innovator — Doug Kaye and his audio engineering wizards have offered up this tool for free to help all us poor schlubs make our audio sound better. It’s perfect for podcasting and especially well-suited to multi-person multi-microphone recording in which the various speakers are alternatively louder and softer than the next speaker.

I’ve been using The Levelator for years now and it almost always makes your audio sound much better, especially when you’re distributing the audio to online listeners or folks subscribing to your podcast.

Read more and download right away for Mac, Windows or Linux.