Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

Produce a couple of podcasts that involve more than one speaker (or, worse yet, speakers Skyped in for a VoIP conference call), and you’ll learn something about the tender art of balancing track volumes. He’s loud, she’s quiet, the other guy is sometimes loud and sometimes quiet. Rather than spending your day endlessly adjusting volume curves, download The Conversations Network’s Levelator.

This free tool, optimized for speech, makes a noble effort to correct uneven volume levels. And it couldn't be easier to use-just drop AIFF or WAV files on the application, and it does the job.