Room eq under Ubuntu?

[ChuckT]

Hi, I am totally new to room EQ and Linux, so I hope this will not be too much for me to chew on. I plan to run Ubuntu as my next music server (currently using Popcorn hour C200) with media store in hard disk. I hope to learn to use some form of room EQ to fix my far from ideal room acoustic problem. Hardware wise I have eye on the Asrock Q2900 itx which is fanless.

Is Ubuntu good choice? And what is a good Room EQ to go with that?

I know I have a lot to learn.

TIA.

[dallasjustice]

I think Brute FIR could be a good solution as a convolver. I know nothing about linux and I haven't used this Convolver. All you need is a convolution engine and Brute FIR is the only linux one I know of.

[ChuckT]

I finally got HQplayer which can use a filter file generated by Room EQ wizard.

I also got an Intel NUC as I need a more power processor.

[Henk Poley]

I've made a little write-up how to do room correction over all your programs, within PulseAudio: MythTV & Ziggo (Multikabel gebied): Room Correction using drc-fir, ladspa_dsp & PulseAudio

[iago]

Is Ubuntu good choice? And what is a good Room EQ to go with that?

I know I have a lot to learn.

 

If you combine learning about room correction with learning how to use Linux, you have a steep slope ahead, indeed :-)

 

Apart from that, Ubuntu is a well supported distribution with a lot of followers and support, definitely a good starting point for an initial system. Personally I prefer Lubuntu and Xubuntu, because they are slimmer and do not use the aubergine-coloured Unity user interface.

 

As dallasjustice noted, BruteFIR is one of the few solutions available on Linux for convolution. You should know a little bit about Linux, and especially the use of configuration files, to use it. It's major drawback is that it uses a fixed sample rate (or needs to be restarted every time you play something). If you have source material with varying sample rates, you probably have to think about re-sampling on-the-fly.

 

I have stumbled upon another solution recently, it's called folve. folve implements a user space file system (FUSE), which allows you to just mount a directory containing music somewhere on your file system. Everything you play from this location will be convoluted according to the rules you supplied in a filter set. folve is not included in the Ubuntu packages, you have to compile it yourself. Here is a recipe how to achieve this (Volumio is Debian based like Ubuntu, so the differences should not be great).

 

folve seems to work quite well and is much easier to use than BruteFIR, but currently I cannot make any comments about sound quality yet - more testing necessary.