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   How to Revive The Levelator in El Capitan

   Adam C. Engst

   Many people who record podcasts use a free tool called The Levelator to
   ensure that audio files use a consistent loudness, something that can
   be tricky to achieve otherwise with multiple people in the same
   podcast, or even between podcast episodes. Because of this capability,
   The Levelator is part of our process for recording TidBITS articles for
   those who would rather listen than read (see '[1]PodBOT Improves
   TidBITS Audio,' 7 May 2012). Unfortunately, The Levelator is no longer
   being maintained by its developers, and worse, it displays an error
   when used in the golden master version of OS X 10.11 El Capitan. That
   in turn confuses PodBOT, throwing a serious wrench into our audio
   automation.

   [2][tn_Levelator-error.jpg]

   We had thought The Levelator was just dead, and were trying to figure
   out how we'd maintain a Mac running 10.10 Yosemite to facilitate
   processing our audio, when I stumbled across [3]a comment in a Mac
   Forums discussion that pointed to the solution. So if you want to use
   The Levelator in El Capitan, follow these steps:
    1. Control-click on the Levelator icon in the Applications folder, and
       choose Show Package Contents.
    2. Within the Levelator package, open the Contents folder, then
       Resources, and finally osx. You should see a file called
       libsndfile.1.dylib. If a full path would be helpful, it's
       Contents/Resources/osx/libsndfile.1.dylib.
       [4][tn_libsndfile.1.dylib.jpg]
    3. Open a new Finder window, choose Go > Go to Folder (Cmd-Shift-G),
       type /usr/local into the dialog that appears, and press Return. The
       window should display the contents of that otherwise hidden folder,
       and it's entirely likely there won't be anything there.
    4. If there is a lib folder inside /usr/local, open it. Otherwise,
       choose File > New Folder (Cmd-Shift-N) to make a new folder, and
       name it lib exactly. You'll need to enter an administrator password
       to create a folder there.
    5. Press the Option key, and drag libsndfile.1.dylib from the first
       Finder window into the second Finder window, which should be
       showing the path /usr/local/lib, to make a copy. Again, enter an
       administrator password when prompted.
    6. Restart your Mac.

   That's it ' once your Mac comes back up, you should be able to continue
   using The Levelator as before.

References

   1. http://tidbits.com/article/12953
   2. http://tidbits.com/resources/2015-09/Levelator-error.png
   3. http://www.mac-forums.com/music-audio-and-podcasting/328029-levelator-replacement.html
   4. http://tidbits.com/resources/2015-09/libsndfile.1.dylib.png

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