Show HN: Parametric Equalizer for PulseAudio

https://github.com/keur/prettyeq

by keurrr • 6 years ago

119 50 6 years ago

github.com

person_of_color• 6 years ago

Does this use vector extensions where available?

mcint• 6 years ago

gcc -O3 vectorizes. https://github.com/keur/prettyeq/blob/master/build_tests.sh

jcelerier• 6 years ago

you likely want -O3 -march=native if building for your own machine, this way you get more than the SSE2 baseline if available

keurrr14• 6 years ago

Not by hand, but the FFT I wrote for the spectral analyzer is compiled with -ffast-math and gcc vectorizes it (verified with objdump). Same thing with the functions that change the filter parameters.

danaos• 6 years ago

fftw3 is extremely fast and vectorized well. Why write your own FFT implementation?

Did you test against pulseeffects cpu usage?

Const-me2• 6 years ago

is compiled with -ffast-math and gcc vectorizes it

Automatic vectorization is extremely limited, in all compilers.

Check this out, feel free to merge if it works in reality not just in the test: https://github.com/Const-me/prettyeq/tree/master

PaulDavisThe1st• 6 years ago

note that from our recent experience adding AVX to Ardour's existing SSE hand-written vector code, gcc is now able to generate SIMD code that essentially matches the performance of the hand-written versions.

randkyp2• 6 years ago

Any way to set pre-amp to avoid clipping or is there built-in headroom / automatic gain adjust so that that is taken care of by default?

keurrr14• 6 years ago

So my background is I did music production in high school. I actually based the design for PrettyEQ off of the Logic Pro X equalizer and Fruity Parametric EQ 2, and those will happily let you clip. So I like the idea of leaving that to the user's discretion (move the filters slowly, especially in the lows and highs, and know your speakers well). These days, especially in EDM / Hip Hop, slight clipping in bass in somewhat stylistic. So I don't know. Maybe could be an option in the GUI that could be switched on? Would need to think about it more.

randkyp2• 6 years ago

If the equalization is done near the end of the audio output chain (ex: music player, defaults at 100% volume -> user sets master audio output volume to 50% -> EQ is applied) then a pre-amp is not strictly necessary if the EQ can take advantage of the extra headroom in the output channel. Otherwise, an adjustable pre-amp / gain setting would be nice, preferable with the option for it to automatically set itself to reduce by the maximum gain the EQ is applying to avoid clipping. But yeah, it should be optional; if the user wants stuff to clip, let it clip.

ldarby3• 6 years ago

These days, especially in EDM / Hip Hop, slight clipping in bass in somewhat stylistic.

No it's not, it's just widespread incompetence and has ruined lots of music I would have liked. Having better software tools that alert when clipping is happening would be a good thing (i.e. it needs to alert when crossing over from 0dB to a distorted wave form, not just hitting 0dB without distorting, which is fine).

Hydraulix9892• 6 years ago

Any CLI planned?

vladvasiliu• 6 years ago

I'd like to know the same thing. I'm currently using PulseEffects [0] for my parametric eq needs, but as I use a dedicated PC to play music, it's a bit of a pain to have to connect via vnc to control it.

[0] https://github.com/wwmm/pulseeffects

keurrr14• 6 years ago

Hah, pulseeffects was why I wrote this project. It has tons of latency, very sluggish UI, not nice to use.

keurrr14• 6 years ago

I'm not personally into cli stuff, but most of the code in the equalizer/ directory could be used without much change. If anyone started that project and needed assistance I would for sure help out.

Hydraulix9892• 6 years ago

I have an HTPC hooked up to my speakers in my living room that I often SSH into in order to play music while I work, hence the need for a CLI EQ.

leetrout2• 6 years ago

I was just looking for a replacement for the app I used on Mac: Boom.

I will give this a try tomorrow!

unicornporn• 6 years ago

Yes please, that buggy piece of...

leetrout2• 6 years ago

It’s turned in to nagware.

grawprog• 6 years ago

Is the Jack aware at all? This is a pretty nice looking eq and more eq plugins are always a handy tool to have. Needing to use the pulseaudio bridge for an eq makes it difficult to use in production setup with a chain of Jack input/outputs though.

rembicilious• 6 years ago

Being Jack aware would be a bonus but there are already a multitude of Jack aware EQ plugins. The feature-set of this prettyeq plugin seems aimed specifically at system-wide audio, in other words to adjust the audio on your system to match your daily use preferences, rather than production work. I might never use this sort of EQ (high-pass, lo-pass, 5 peaks) for production work. Maybe for tweaking a final mix... pulseaudio is definitely in need of some nicely integrated audio filters. Jack has many to choose from, but more are always welcome.

Edit: I am not an audio pro and if this EQ is in fact aimed at production, I would love to learn more about its use cases

keurrr14• 6 years ago

This is pretty accurate. I wrote it to tweak songs to my speakers when I'm streaming music. I wanted something very fast, no configuration, pleasant graphics.

While probably not suited for production work, the design is based off of existing production tools that I am very familiar with (Channel EQ from Logic Pro X, Parametric Eq 2 from FL Studio).

qmmmur2• 6 years ago

If I need to do any kind of DSP i'd much rather insert a VST plugin into the chain using Carla or similar. Way more generic and less tied to Pulse that way and usually superior in engineering.

DyslexicAtheist2• 6 years ago

how do I build this? (there doesn't seem to be a Makefile)?

very promising. have been looking for a pulseeffects replacement for some time.

wiml• 6 years ago

QMake, probably (it's a Qt program and there's a `.pro` file in the root)

DyslexicAtheist2• 6 years ago

a thanks, silly me. I wondered what that was.

jmiskovic2• 6 years ago

Looks and works great - it's simple to use and very intuitive. Very useful for badly recorded lectures, to filter out the crowd.

I hope you can add a bit of polish to integrate better into OS. On XFCE the program has a nice-looking icon showing in Notification Area (system tray), but in Window Buttons (taskbar) it has a generic icon. It cannot be minimized or hidden, it can only be closed.

jmiskovic2• 6 years ago

After using it some more, I have to say tweaking the spectrum while the music is playing is fun! Far better experience than dozen sliders found in graphic equilizers.

keurrr14• 6 years ago

That makes me so happy to hear! Since this thread is getting less active, feel free to email me at kevin@segfault.fun if you need anything else.

bilekas• 6 years ago

Love this, great job, will join to contribute.. Would be very interested in getting >2.0 channel support. Great job again

keurrr14• 6 years ago

Cool, yeah. Would love if you contributed that. So off the top of my head we would want to get all output sinks and display them in the GUI and, when the user switches, detect the number of channels they support and live configure to that. We would need to update the null sink, sample_spec struct, and latency. This would live in equalizer/pretty.c so that's a good place to poke around.

Email me at kevin@segfault.fun if you have any questions. The pulseaudio C API can be a bit... opaque :)

Retr0spectrum• 6 years ago

This is a neat project, but I'm still using PulseEffects, which appears to be more fully featured: https://github.com/wwmm/pulseeffects

anotheryou• 6 years ago

oh, global compressor. Sounds god sent for badly mixed movies.

linuxSL2• 6 years ago

How does one use this?

keurrr14• 6 years ago

In the project directory run:

mkdir ./make ./build

cd ./make

qmake CONFIG+=release ..

make -j<cthread_count>

mv ./prettyeq ../build

linuxSL2• 6 years ago

Thanks!

First try I got: equalizer/equalizer.pro:10: Parse Error ('pretty.h')

Then I removed the extra pretty.h line and got: ../../gui/prettyshim.h:4:10: fatal error: QObject: No such file or directory #include <QObject>

which is beyond my time to dig right now :/

mxmilkb• 6 years ago

Best PA EQ so far! Added to https://wiki.thingsandstuff.org/Audio#Processing

Show HN: Parametric Equalizer for PulseAudio

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