There is a certain financial podcast I listen to with very poor production values. Some parts are too loud, some too soft. It's difficult to listen to in a relatively quiet office environment using speakers. I pointed them to Levelator, a free level fixer, but so far, they obviously are not using it. Then it dawned on me that I could probably find a media player that had a built-in real-time compression (aka normalizing, leveling, etc.) feature that would soften loud parts and make soft parts louder. I found a decent enough plug-in for Winamp called RockStead that works with the ancient version (2.81) that I still use. There are others, but this seems to work fine.