Audio Equalizer Software in Ubuntu 16.04

sound pulseaudio alsa jack equalizer

26,928

Solution 1

This list is roughly sorted from simple to professional and of course far from being complete.

Alsaequal

Alsaequal is an equalizer plugin for the (usually preinstalled) command-line audio mixer alsamixer as well as amixer.

Installation

sudo apt install libasound2-plugin-equal

Start

alsamixer -D equal
amixer -D equal

To change to the equalizer in the running program, press F6, choose enter device name... and enter “equal”.

Configuration

You can find configuration tipps on wiki.archlinux.org, e. g. how to save and load custom presets.

PulseAudio Equalizer

Installation

Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty and 16.04 Xenial

Follow these instructions on webupd8.org.

Ubuntu 18.04 and later

sudo apt install pulseaudio-equalizer

Start

qpaeq

If you encounter an error and are told to make sure you have the pulseaudio dbus module loaded follow the instructions in this answer.

JackEQ

Installation

sudo apt install jackeq

Requirements

JackEQ needs a configured and running JACK Audio Connection Kit, a howto is provided by this article on libremusicproduction.com.

JAMin

JAMin is the JACK Audio Connection Kit (JACK) Audio Mastering interface (…) designed to perform professional audio mastering of stereo input streams. ^source

Installation

sudo apt install jamin

Requirements

JAMin needs a configured and running JACK, a howto is provided by this article on libremusicproduction.com.

JACK Rack with LADSPA effects

JACK Rack is a sound studio rack where you can store and combine LADSPA effect plugins. A collection of plugins is contained in the ubuntustudio-audio-plugins package. More on ladspa.org.

Installation

sudo apt install jack-rack

Requirements

JACK Rack needs a configured and running JACK, a howto is provided by this article on libremusicproduction.com.

Advanced audio software – normally using the JACK Audio Connection Kit – of course also comes with equalizing features. As I feel like this goes beyond the scope of this question, here's just a short list with links.

Kwave: sudo apt install kwave
MusE: sudo apt install muse
Audacity: sudo apt install audacity
LMMS: sudo apt install lmms
Rosegarden: sudo apt install rosegarden
Ardour: sudo apt install ardour, needs plugins for equalizing features
Qtractor: sudo apt install qtractor
Renoise
ocenaudio

Further information about audio software can be found on the German Ubuntu wiki wiki.ubuntuusers.de.

Solution 2

PulseEffects provides a "limiter, compressor, reverberation, equalizer and auto volume effects for Pulseaudio applications":

According to the installation instructions, to install on Ubuntu >= 18.04:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mikhailnov/pulseeffects -y
sudo apt update
sudo apt install pulseeffects pulseaudio --install-recommends

An older version which should install on Ubuntu 16.04 is available in this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~yunnxx/+archive/ubuntu/gnome3/

26,928

Noah Palau

By Day: I am a student in Highschool. I will be heading to Penn State this fall. By Night: Studying, or fixing someone's device on the weekends For Fun: I am a regular Linux user. I have various computers I work on, trying out different operating systems for fun. Also, I dabble in film photography, and I travel once a year to somewhere very nice. My prized possession is the 1969 Akai X-150D reel-to-reel tape player my grandfather gave me a few years ago, ask me about it sometime.

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Noah Palau over 1 year

I want to install an audio equalizer in Lubuntu 16.04 LTS. Is there one I can use? I was going to install pulseaudio-equalizer but it does not work. Is there any way to install pulseaudio systemwide?