Equalizer in Ubuntu 18.04 [duplicate]

Question

Is there any build in Equalizer in Ubuntu 18.04 or a third party program that works with this version best?

Answer 1

PulseEffects application has a system-wide equalizer that you can control on a per-application basis. The application also provides various sound effects / enhancements, like limiter, compressor, reverberation, equalizer and auto volume effects.

A tweak is needed for PulseEffects to work correctly in Ubuntu, see here.

Oh, here's a screenshot:

Edit: to install PulseEffects follow the setup Flatpak and Flathub using this quick guide. Then visit the PulseEffects FlatHub page and click install. You can also search for PulseEffects in Ubuntu Software (after setting up Flatpak and Flathub like I mentioned).

Answer 2

This is a follow-up (and maybe a bit of a rant) for fans of PulseAudio-Equalizer (PAE) and PulseEffects (PE). As most users have found out by now with Ubuntu 18.04, PAE is no longer supported, having been available for years. For audio fans like myself, this was a very annoying setback as I found the use of PAE noticeably enhanced the sound in Ubuntu giving a really pleasant listening experience. But so far nobody seems to have come up with a workable means of installing PAE with 18.04. However thanks to the info from user Logix we now have PE, so the loss of PAE doesn't seem that important any longer.

PE has a lot more bells and whistles than PAE although I have little idea what most of them do. I have no instructions or manual that guide me or explain what the various applications within mean. Except we do have an equalizer, the main reason why I installed PE. And that one works in a very similar way to PAE, where you can set your own frequencies or presets and name-save them. I see you can even import them from a file of presets which I saved from PAE, but haven't tried this out yet.

As for downloading and installing PE, until recently this was a real PITA. There is Github, but as so often is the case with them, no instructions on how to install that I've come across. So unless you have a degree in Computer Science, good luck with that. There's also Flatpak, which is an alternative to Snap if no package is found in there nor the repositories. The trouble with Flatpak is that it's slow to start from a fresh boot

Then Eureka! Finally, I discovered there's a repository and the more conventional Debian method of installing packages and which nearly always works out of the box, so here are the commands for PE.

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

With the apt install command I've seen a suggestion to use these 2 commands together:

sudo apt install pulseeffects pulseaudio --install-recommends, but found the 2nd one unnecessary as 18.04 already comes packaged with PulseAudio.

By the way if anyone can tell me how to install PE from Github, just as a learning exercise I'd be curious to know.

Answer 3

Pulse effects didn't work in my case. And the new pulseaudio-equalizer (that is called qpaeq in 18.04) has a horrible latency. I spent weeks trying to find the solution, and it looks like there is another option to install pulseaudio-equalizer. Just download the version for 16.04 from here:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio-equalizer

Open "pulseaudio-equalizer/usr" folder inside the archive and extract the contents into /usr/. After that, you probably need to install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install swh-plugins ladspa-sdk python-gtk2 python-glade2 python-gobject python-gnome2

When everything is done, you can launch and use it with:

pulseaudio-equalizer-gtk