Console music player with equalizer

orangecakez · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 116

What is a good console music player that has an equalizer? I like moc but it doesn't have an equalizer.

Wormo · Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2007 11:14 pm Post subject:

That's a hard one... there seem to be hardly any players with equalizer built in.

Know of 2 graphical ones: amarok and bmpx. Well, also there is MoreAmp but it's not in portage.

For console, there is 'mpg123 -R' that allows you to type equalizer commands,
but mpg123 is hardly a general purpose player given that it only plays mp3s...

orangecakez · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 116

I use Audacious and it's pretty great but for my other boxes without X I'm looking for something. I have music files like .mp3, .flac, etc. too so I need support for most of those. Something like moc with an equalizer would be cool. Or if there's just a global equalizer for my entire system instead of just on the media player, that would be okay too.

Wormo · Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 12:40 am Post subject:

Hey, how about mplayer? It supports lots of audio formats, and I just found out it has a 10-band equalizer.
You have to supply it on command line when you play a file, don't think you can tweak it interactively from the console -- is that good enough?

orangecakez · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 116

It's good enough if I can load a .m3u playlist and can set the equalizer settings before I start my music. Do you know what the command to load a .m3u playlist and set the equalizer is?

Wormo · Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 1:23 am Post subject:

Not tested (I don't have mplayer installed on this system yet):

orangecakez · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 116

Okay, I got the equalizer working, but the frequency ranges are too sporadic/low range so I can't set it correctly as opposed to, for example, the Audacious equalizer. Is there any other alternative for an equalizer? That's just my main concern. Otherwise as long as it can play a .m3u playlist else it doesn't matter except I need a decent equalizer...if there's a console equalizer that globally edits all the sounds playing from the same machine, that's okay too.

Wormo · Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 7:20 am Post subject:

pulseaudio sound server will probably add equalizer support one of these days http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/174, but it doesn't exist yet.

If you're expecting something as fancy as the 31-band audacious equalizer plugin but with a console interface, you'll need to go with something capable of high-end linux audio processing and just use it to play files. I doubt there will be playlist support, so you'll have to do some scripting to interpret your playlist. ecasound with one of the LADSPA equalizer plugins should do the trick.

orangecakez · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 116

Well it doesn't really have to be fancy...I tried tweaking the equalizer in gmplayer (with the GUI) so it was easier, but the frequencies are just terrible, like I said, as opposed to such as the ones in Audacious which is also 10-band, but the frequencies are much different. (60, 170, 310, 600, 1k, 3k, 6k, 12k, 14k, and 16k instead of mplayer's crappy 31.25, 62.50, 125, 250, 500, 1k, 2k, 4k, 8k, and 16k.) I was fine with using mplayer until I found out how bad the frequencies were.

Thanks for the suggestions so far and I'll try your latest one and report back.

On a side note...I have never used anything like ecasound or LADSPA before...and I might need some help with that

I don't really mind if it can't load a playlist anymore but as long as it can play songs randomly from a directory continuously, that's fine too, as long as it has that capability.

So I've narrowed it down to only two requests...that it can play songs from a directory (where there's also directories within directories) at random on a loop (it can repeat duplicate songs, as long as it's always random) and a decent equalizer.

Wormo · Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 9:06 pm Post subject:

Hey here's another idea --
since you don't like the frequency bands mplayer uses, how about modifying them?

It looks pretty simple

In mplayer/libaf/af_equalizer.c there is a line

orangecakez · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 116

Wow, do you think that will really work?! I'm going to try now!

Errr...I can't find mplayer/libaf/af_equalizer.c :oops:

slocate can't find it either (just did updatedb now)

Wormo · Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 10:10 pm Post subject:

Oops, I meant that you need to compile a custom version, not that you can tweak files in an already installed mplayer.

Here's more details since my last post was too brief.

unpack the mplayer source code from the tarball (should still be in /usr/portage/distfiles, unless you've recently cleared out your downloads)
go to libaf subdirectory inside the unpacked mplayer-<version> source code directory
modify the file af_equalizer.c as suggested
go back to top dir of mplayer source and run './configure ; make'
test the mplayer binary you just built to see if you like it './mplayer -af equalizer blah blah '

After this test, decide whether you want to make a custom version of the ebuild to make a proper gentoo package out of it and install it on your systems. I can give directions on that if you are interested but have never done a private overlay before.

orangecakez · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 116

Eh...it still sounds horrible...I even tried changing the #define G_MAX to +20 and the min to -20 (because that's the maxes for Audacious) and ./configure and make it, but that still doesn't work (after changing the #define CF as well). I think it might have something to do with the software filters or something (the rest of those random settings and numbers in the af_equalizer.c file below the settings I just edited)

Wormo · Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2007 7:23 pm Post subject:

Rats. Back to going with the heavy hitters like ecasound...

Malvineous · Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2007 11:36 pm Post subject:

I've been using LADSPA plugins to do system-wide equalising for years now, they work really well. You just set up another ALSA device as an equaliser, then point your default device to that and all ALSA programs then become equalised (except 32-bit Flash running under 64-bit Firefox, as per my recent post in this forum.)

Unfortunately dmix needs to be connected to a hardware card, so you can't dmix all your streams together and then equalise them once, you need to equalise each stream and then mix them all together, but that should only result in a relatively minor performance hit.

I was thinking about documenting the process for this on the Gentoo Wiki, but I wasn't sure if anyone would find it useful - perhaps I will now.

orangecakez · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 116

Malvineous · Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2007 1:53 am Post subject:

Well it's not overly complicated and I'm in a documentative mood, so see how you go with this:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Set_up_a_system-wide_equaliser_with_ALSA_and_LADSPA

Let me know how it works out - I've always found ALSA to be one big headache (they seem to enjoy making error messages as cryptic as possible, and the more crashes the better) so I hope it works for you!

orangecakez · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 116

Wow, thanks!

But how come it doesn't work with v1.3.2? Why only 1.4?
The latest version in Portage is 1.3.2 I think

Kenji Miyamoto · Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2007 2:10 am Post subject:

Try unmasking the ~ARCH version of Audacious:

Malvineous · Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2007 2:16 am Post subject:

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

Oooh, another opportunity to plug Project OCP :mrgreen:

http://stian.lunafish.org/ocp/

If the port ever gets completed it will be the best console player as it was for DOS, but it still has a ways to go...
I'm not sure if he's ported the equalizer code over yet 'tho... but if he has, that'd be the easiest way I know of.

Alas it's just one guy at the moment, and the DOS code was pretty messy. I don't think any of the original sceners (Pascal, kb etc.) are involved, so it could be a while

Malvineous · Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2007 2:42 am Post subject:

Oh wow that's nice...ah, nostalgia :-)

orangecakez · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 116

Okay, I've gotten Audacious 1.4.4, and I am adjusting the LADSPA.
But I don't have a /etc/asound.conf or ~/.asoundrc. What should I do?

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Set_up_a_system-wide_equaliser_with_ALSA_and_LADSPA

Kenji Miyamoto · Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2007 2:53 am Post subject:

That command was only to show the versions of it.

If you're using Portage on x86:

orangecakez · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 116