Including a system-wide pulseaudio equalizer

[Conn O'Griofa]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 7:21 AM, Daniel Chen <seven.steps at gmail.com> wrote:
> Two thoughts:
> This would entail switching to the master (or trunk) branch of
> upstream git, correct? Maverick currently tracks the stable-queue
> branch.

No, my equalizer is merely a "wrapper" script that takes advantage of
PulseAudio's module-ladspa-sink module (which has been included by
PulseAudio for quite some time, but only stable since the 0.9.19
series) with an EQ LADSPA plugin.

The script works by removing/(re)inserting the aforementioned module
with the equalization parameters on a running server via pacmd, and
optionally saving such configuration to the users's
~/.pulse/default.pa configuration file.

Although Chandru linked to the source, there are also packages
available (for Lucid and Karmic) if anybody is interested.

See here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1308838
Directly link to my PPA: https://launchpad.net/~psyke83/+archive/ppa

It was also included in Fedora 12's repository (though I am not the maintainer).

> Also, this should be packaged and submitted for inclusion into the
> Ubuntu repositories following procedure
> (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/NewPackages).

I replied directly to Chandru on this issue without awareness of this
thread, so let me now copy & paste to the list (and I'd be interested
to know if there's still any demand for the submission):

---
Hi,

Getting pulseaudio-equalizer included into Lucid would have been
ideal, but due to lack of time and problems with my development
machine, I didn't get to make the submission before the freeze
deadline.

Moving forward, I'm not so sure that the equalizer has a long future
in its current incarnation; the latest PulseAudio upstream code
(non-stable branch) includes a native equalizer [1] which offers
better quality than what can be provided through my equalizer (which
uses a LADSPA plugin).

So, for Lucid+1, perhaps there is potential to take the GUI part of my
pulseaudio-equalizer code and adapt it to be used by the native
PulseAudio equalizer. My GUI is GTK-based, whereas the native
equalizer only has a QT-based interface available (pqaeq). There's
nothing wrong with QT, but GTK-based applications would be preferred
for the regular Ubuntu (i.e., GNOME-based) desktop flavour. Let's wait
and see what happens.

Thanks,
Conn

[1] This branch may be obsolete now that the equalizer is included
upstream by default - I haven't followed developments recently. Here
it is: http://gitorious.org/pulseaudio-equalizer