Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

I've uploaded the unofficial system-wide PulseAudio equalizer to main WebUpd8 PPA for Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr. 

Update: the equalizer was updated to support Ubuntu 16.10. The PPA now supports Ubuntu 16.10, 16.04, 15.10, 15.04, 14.04 and 12.04, as well as Linux Mint 18 and 17.

The package update comes with a fix for a crash that occurred when no presets were found. The issue that caused audio to be muted as soon as PulseAudio Equalizer was enabled, disabled, or adjusted, was also fixed.


PulseAudio Equalizer provides a 15 band equalizer interface for the LADSPA sound processing functionality of PulseAudio. It supports enabling or disabling equalized audio on-the-fly, comes with some built-in presets (based on VLC's built-in equalizer), supports saving your own custom presets for later use, can be used for the current session only or permanently, etc.

To enable the system-wide equalizer for the current session, check the "EQ Enabled" box and click "Apply Settings". If you enable "Keep Settings", PulseAudio remains permanently equalized (and therefore, you won't need to run the PulseAudio Equalizer interface each time you login).


Note: in the beginning of the article I said "unofficial" because PulseAudio has a built-in equalizer for some time however, it's not as easy to setup and use as this one. For more information, see: Install Pulseaudio With Built-In System-Wide Equalizer In Ubuntu.


Install the system-wide PulseAudio equalizer in Ubuntu or Linux Mint


To install the (unofficial) system-wide PulseAudio equalizer in Ubuntu, use the commands below:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio-equalizer

Tip from WebUpd8 reader MikeEx: if you get stuttering audio while using this equalizer, edit /etc/pulse/default.pa as root with a text editor - I'll use Gedit below:
gksu gedit /etc/pulse/default.pa
And add "tsched=0" (without the quotes) to the "load-module module-udev-detect" and "load-module module-detect" lines - this is how it should look:
### Automatically load driver modules depending on the hardware available
.ifexists module-udev-detect.so
load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0
.else
### Use the static hardware detection module (for systems that lack udev/hal support)
load-module module-detect tsched=0
.endif

Please note that PulseAudio Equalizer is no longer maintained so if you find a bug or if it doesn't work for you and the fix isn't trivial, there's nothing I can do. Update: for a modern, maintained PulseAudio equalizer you can try PulseEffects - read about it here.