How-to: Equalizer for Rhythmbox

[attilathepun]

This is more a tutorial than anything else, but I couldn't create a new thread in the how-to forum ... mods, please move if appropriate.
Anyway, adding an equalizer to Rhythmbox seems to be a common goal, as there are a number of feature requests and unresolved how-to's in various forums out there. It turns out that there is a plugin that is easy to install and works great -- but the only tutorial I can find is in Italian. Here's an English version.

You can add an equalizer to Rhythmbox quite easily by installing the rhythmbox-equalizer plugin. Download the tarball from http://www.deviantdark.altervista.or...ualizer.tar.gz and save it somewhere (your home folder is easiest).

First, we make sure that your user account has a Rhythmbox plugins folder. From the terminal, using your account credentials (i.e., not a root terminal), enter:

mkdir ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/

Now extract the tarball (all files extract to a ./equalizer directory):

tar -xzvf rhythmbox-equalizer.tar.gz

Finally, we copy the directory we just extracted to the plugins folder:

cp -R equalizer ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/

To use the plugin, load (or, if it's already running, exit and reload) Rhythmbox. Select "Plugins" from the Edit menu, and you should see an entry for "Equalizer". Enable it and hit the Configure button to set your equalizer.
Unfortunately there is currently no support for storing presets, but at least it's better than nothing.

To see the original post of this plugin, see deviantdark.
For information on how to pass all ALSA sound output through an equalizer, check out the tutorial someone else has posted here.

[AaronD12]

There are some issues with this EQ plugin:

1. It does not update "real time". You have to exit Rhythmbox and restart it to hear the difference.

2. It does not have a gain adjustment. Essentially to "boost" a particular frequency over 0db, you need to drop the rest of the bands to compensate or the sound will be grossly overdriven.

3. It has a bug (at least on my computer) that causes the channels to be merged and inverted. This means one channel (e.g., left) is inverted and both channels are merged together. This causes background audio to be very loud and lead vocals or instruments to be very quiet.

In short, don't bother.

-Aaron-