I have been looking at this and all I see is a lot of personal opinions and very little fact. I have a technical background and have worked in acoustics.

Simply put, Equalisers were developed to make up for the imperfect acoustics of different environments. Your home lounge room is not the best acoustic environment to listen to music in but with the correct use of an equaliser it can be improved.

A common practice with equalisers is to use it as a bass boost device. This is a personal choice for people who want their music "more bassy". It was not the intended use of an equaliser but it is capable of doing this.

A bad recording will always be a bad recording. A bad amplifier and speakers will not be helped by an equaliser, as with a bad recording.

I think an equaliser is a "must have" in any type of software player of audio.

And as to Sandsmark remark, "(Me personally, I find equalizing in music players to be pretty useless, since the ears adjust while you listen to music...)", ears do not adjust at all - you are just less fussy as to what the sound is like which is your personal choice and there is nothing wrong with that. But please let others have the choice of deciding how they want there music to sound.

Finally I felt forced to comment on this topic as there was so much miss information. Sound quality is a very personal thing, just like the version of Linux you use, and you should have a right to choose how your music sounds.

I of course agree on the technical explanation, something I have said all the time.

What all of the whiners refuse to understand: we simply can't make an equalizer if the underlying sound architecture doesn't give us the means to do so. We are not the ones to address to for that task, go ask the Phonon and more especially the Xine people to provide the structure for it.

Let's just close this discussion, it's going in circles.

Pete wrote:And as to Sandsmark remark, "(Me personally, I find equalizing in music players to be pretty useless, since the ears adjust while you listen to music...)", ears do not adjust at all - you are just less fussy as to what the sound is like which is your personal choice and there is nothing wrong with that. But please let others have the choice of deciding how they want there music to sound.

While the discussions is really closed from an Amarok perspective, I hate to be wrong.

But AFAIK, isn't the fact that the “hairs” in the inner ear (which are responsible for picking up sound) able to lay themselves down when exposed to movement (aka. sound) over a prolonged period of time? So if you are exposed to certain frequencies for a prolonged amount of time, would not that lead to you being less sensitive to those frequencies? (I'm not talking permanently, I was told this was a temporary effect. The permanent effect, I was told, was when these hairs break, the "laying down" was a protection mechanism against this.)

Again, this might be wrong, but I was pretty sure this was how it really worked (and it fits with how I perceive reality to work ). If I was wrong, I learn something new today too. :-P

Mamarok wrote:What all of the whiners refuse to understand: we simply can't make an equalizer if the underlying sound architecture doesn't give us the means to do so. We are not the ones to address to for that task, go ask the Phonon and more especially the Xine people to provide the structure for it.

So you just admitted that the development of Amarok 2 was like bulldozing the sistine chapel and laying mudbrick foundations in place?

That's progress!

Edited by Mamarok: please learn to quote correctly

44Ronin wrote:

What all of the whiners refuse to understand: we simply can't make an equalizer if the underlying sound architecture doesn't give us the means to do so. We are not the ones to address to for that task, go ask the Phonon and more especially the Xine people to provide the structure for it.

So you just admitted that the development of Amarok 2 was like bulldozing the sistine chapel and laying mudbrick foundations in place?

That's progress!

Well, not really. If you have to compare it this way I'd more say;

Amarok 2 was like bulldozing the sistine chapel and then waiting for a proper foundation to be invented to rebuild it better then ever!

Anyway, Friday August 28 2009 aszymiec had committed initial equalizer support for Amarok to the main Amarok repository.

I guess that distro's that ship the latest Phonon SVN version (or perhaps it's in a final version somewhere now) will be fully capable of using an equalizer within Amarok as soon as 2.2 gets released.

44Ronin wrote:

What all of the whiners refuse to understand: we simply can't make an equalizer if the underlying sound architecture doesn't give us the means to do so. We are not the ones to address to for that task, go ask the Phonon and more especially the Xine people to provide the structure for it.

So you just admitted that the development of Amarok 2 was like bulldozing the sistine chapel and laying mudbrick foundations in place?

That's progress!

I did nothing of that sort. IMHO, Amarok 2 is already much better in many ways than 1.4.x ever was (talking about 2.2-git of course). Please be respectful for the huge amount of work that the developers have put in this player.

We never said it was feature par with 1.4.x in the 2.1 version, it is in 2.2 (besides some minor and obscure features only very little people ever use).

Also, you compare apples with oranges there, your comparison is not only flawed but simply wrong, you really seem not to have understood that Amarok 2 is a complete rewrite, comparing it to 1.4.x that was based on a totally different framework is simply nonsense.

Also, the "Sixtine Chapel" is still around, nothing prevents you to continue to use it and maybe even maintain it, as you seem to know so much more about development than our devs do?

sandsmark wrote:But AFAIK, isn't the fact that the “hairs” in the inner ear (which are responsible for picking up sound) able to lay themselves down when exposed to movement (aka. sound) over a prolonged period of time? So if you are exposed to certain frequencies for a prolonged amount of time, would not that lead to you being less sensitive to those frequencies? (I'm not talking permanently, I was told this was a temporary effect. The permanent effect, I was told, was when these hairs break, the "laying down" was a protection mechanism against this.)

You are able to get used to it, but would you say that you would not, over time, still notice the difference between turning up the bass all the way to turning the bass down all the way? Also, my headset has two subwoofers, so I can feel it, literally. If you touch the earphone it vibrates, which correlates directly to the amount of bass output, which can be controlled by an equalizer. So its not just the sound, but the "feel" also.

Also to Mamaraok, I never intended to imply that Amarok sucked or was inferior to other music programs simply because it lacked an equalizer. I'm actually quite impressed with it as a whole, but I was simply aggressively inquisitive about the philosophy of not having one, regardless of whether it was actually possible or not. ^^

Here it is:



Current amarok-git, works only with phonon-svn by now, which i dont have installed.

karoshi wrote:Here it is:
Current amarok-git, works only with phonon-svn by now, which i dont have installed.

`yaourt -S phonon-svn`
It depends on qt-nophonon, which yaourt should fetch and install manually.

(I packaged it to demo my gsoc work, but it should work just fine for this too.)

Mamarok wrote:Please be respectful for the huge amount of work that the developers have put in this player.

Respect is a two way street. Treating the concerns of user community as a non-issue just increases the chorus of voices who are against Amarok 2.

and with the "If you don't like it then develop it yourself" comment, I am through with trying to be a part of the Amarok community.

Mamarok wrote:you really seem not to have understood that Amarok 2 is a complete rewrite,

I think the Chapel comment implies that I do understand that it is a re-write, thus the bulldozing comment.

I think it is overwhelmingly obvious that the majority of Amarok 1.4.x users think that the soul of Amarok has been ripped out, thrown to the floor and stomped on by over-ambitious developers.

I am DONE.

Markey,

I am a son-of-a-music-teacher (and yes, that's as bad as it sounds). I grew up on Classical music (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, etc.), and especially orchestral music. Though your two points are valid, as far as they go, they don't go far enough. Good speakers and quality recordings are not enough. The "flat" output, without equalizer modification, distorts the best recordings, and the speakers do not correct for it. The equalizer is necessary to be able to balance the various frequency levels and ranges as a full orchestra would be in a "normal" hall. The "flat" output might be good enough for pop/rock music, but not for serious music.