Hey guys, I made the switch to Linux about a week ago and have mo complaints so far. Except maybe this: I can’t seem to find a way in Linux to get proper loudness equalization like I got on windows.
My issue is that I have a bunch of media, especially shows and movies, that are suffering from way too loud gunshots, explosions, music and so forth and really quiet dialogue. I know this is because sound engineers make the audio fit for cinemas and not my living room, it is a problem nonetheless.
Under windows there is a simple toggle in even the most basic sound cards and settings called loudness equalization, that corrects those perceived differences quite effectively, which Linux is lacking. A bit of web search led me to the term ReplayGain, which seems to be the proper name for it, and I enabled it for my media from within the player apps. However it doesn’t really work like i am used to.
Sounds and language constantly change volume mid sentence, which is very irritating to me. ReplayGain also doesn’t really help avoiding those sudden bursts of loudness, I still blast awake my neighbors on accident when watching a move later at night.
Is there some way to get at that windows audio codec or whatever they use, that works so much better?
Thanks for reading
I haven’t used it, but it looks like there’s a program called pulseeffects that can do some real-time processing for PulseAudio, including that:
https://www.maketecheasier.com/improve-linux-pc-audio-with-pulseeffects/
EDIT: For more-generally applying effects, there’s also a Linux “audio effect plugin” standard called LADSPA, large library of those, and I know that I’ve seen ways to apply it to streams in realtime.
googles
https://askubuntu.com/questions/43950/how-can-i-apply-a-ladspa-plugin-to-a-pulseaudio-stream
If you wanted to do something like reverb or pitch-shift all the audio being played back, I expect that that’d let you do that.