EasyEffects
Version: 6.0.3 Web: https://github. com/wwmm/easyeffects
In LXF228 we reviewed PulseEffects, a powerful standalone audio equaliser for any Linux system that ran Pulseaudio. As time passed by we felt like it was necessary to revisit this outstanding software due to recent changes in the Linux audio subsystem. As you may know, Pulseaudio is already getting to the state of being legacy software, while the new Pipewire sound server is going to supersede it.
Pipewire is another intermediate layer between your media applications and the hardware, yet it is less bloated, less buggy (hopefully), and promises to better handle audio sessions for the sake of more efficient management. Also, Pipewire was designed with a powerful security model that makes interacting with audio and video devices from containerised applications easy, with supporting Flatpak applications being the primary goal. As such, the PulseEffects project was renamed to EasyEffects to reflect that its no longer a Pulseaudio-related thing.
We tested EasyEffects using the latest code, which required us to set up some bleeding-edge versions of Gtkmm and GTK 4 dependencies taken from GNOME’s GitLab servers. The application itself is an evolutionary improvement over the older PulseEffects, and it works and plays like a charm.
The whole idea behind a system-wide media stream control centre is that it puts you in control over everything that is played on your Linux system.
EasyEffects replaces both Pulseaudio plug-ins and
Gstreamer filters and provides the single point for altering audio properties. The application has a solid number of filters including equaliser, convolver, gain control, limiter, noise reduction and much more.
Control input and output levels, fine-tune harmonics, change stereo scene – these are only a few of the possible usage scenarios for EasyEffects. It feels like a very pro-level tool, which will be landing in mainstream Linux distros pretty soon.