Suggestion

I don't know jack squat about programming, but for those that may ... I think a nice feature to add to the next Beta (if it is even possible) would be a memory feature that allows certain songs or types of songs to be linked to certain parametric equalizer settings automatically (like, say, if a song designated "Punk" came up, the RioCar would automatically designate one of the preset EQ settings). Just an idea ...

You mean have the ability to create EQ presets for any given Genre?

Customizable EQ's per song or per genre are on the wishlist but I believe it's been said they won't make the 2.0 release. Don't quote me on that...

I just want to add my support to this idea, though. EQ setting per song would be simply awsome. No othe rplayer on earth could even just imagine to be so rich in feature to equal that.

But really, EQ wasn't designed to do "post production" of your music. It's there to compensate for your listening environment's unique acoustic characteristics. If you don't like the way your music was mastered and EQ'ed, I guess EQ's per song is a good thing to have, but who wants to spend that much time EQing their entire collection? EQ is supposed to be a "set and forget" thing, and all of the crappy head units that offer "Jazz" "Classical" "Rock" EQ's are a solution looking for a problem, if you ask me.

But if enough people want it, hey, throw it in there... Just don't make me set an EQ for all my songs.

But really, EQ wasn't designed to do "post production" of your music. It's there to compensate for your listening environment's unique acoustic characteristics.

Yes, and we all live in a perfect world with flowers and little fluffy bunnies everywhere.

The truth is that there are some masterings that, when placed into a shuffle with other recordings, need to be EQ-corrected. They were simply botched in the mastering phase and sound awful without correction.

I guess EQ's per song is a good thing to have, but who wants to spend that much time EQing their entire collection?

We're not talking about EQ'ing one's entire collection. The "need correction" albums to which I'm referring are quite few in number. Out of my entire collection, I could probably count them on one hand.

An example is my remastered copy of The Fixx's "Shuttered Room". This is an album that I owned on cassette tape in the 80's and I just loved it. It was stolen (along with all my other cassette tapes) when my first stereo was ripped off a few years ago. I tried to order it on CD a while back and discovered that the original pressing was out of print. Amazon had a copy of the "remastered" pressing available. I noticed that one of the Amazon reviewers said that the remaster was over-brightened, which was why I wanted the original instead of the remaster. They were dead right, this remaster is downright strident compared to all of my other albums. They really butchered it in the remaster.

My dream is that I could group-select the songs from "Shuttered Room" in Emplode and say "Use EQ preset number 7 for these songs". For the other songs on the player, it would continue to use the current default EQ setting.

I could dial back the bass on Madonna's "Ray of Light" a little bit. Not much, just a tad. I could take some spoken-word recordings and adjust their EQ's more appropriately. Overall, I wouldn't correct very many tracks with it, but the few things I would correct would be awesome.

EQ is supposed to be a "set and forget" thing, and all of the crappy head units that offer "Jazz" "Classical" "Rock" EQ's are a solution looking for a problem, if you ask me.

I agree with that statement. Trying to apply EQ-by-genre is totally missing the point of EQ. I just retch every time I see one of the "Jazz, Classical, Rock" things on a car stereo. The person who invented that should be given a nice hard dope-slap.

The person who invented that should be given a nice hard dope-slap.

They were probably from Marketing anyway, so it would do no good, they wouldn't notice.

Convincing argument, Mr. Fabris.

I have to agree as well. One other thing that this would be nice for is to raise the volume of cd that are mastered at different volume levels from other cds..

One other thing that this would be nice for is to raise the volume of cd that are mastered at different volume levels from other cds..

You probably wouldn't want to do this with equalization. There are two volume normalization methods available, but neither is currently part of the "stock" Empeg software.

The Volume Adjust kernel does dynamic compression so that quiet periods in songs (or quiet songs) will be normalized somewhat. It's not truly boosting the entire song, rather, it's figuring out where the volume should be so that the output signal's volume remains somewhat constant. A kernel with volume adjustment enabled is available bundled with the Hijack kernel at http://empeg-hijack.sourceforge.net/

In a future release, (possibly 2.0 final?) the Empeg guys say they will have track-by-track normalization so that when a track is played once, its peak level will be determined, and if that peak level isn't at a certain threshhold, a volume adjustment level will be stored for that track. This would be more towards what you're talking about, raising the volume of entire tracks or albums that are mastered too softly (mostly older CD's.) It kinda sorta made it into 2.0b3 but it was causing problems.

Tony Fabris will probably be along shortly to tell you that both these methods are mentioned in the FAQ.

I have to agree as well. One other thing that this would be nice for is to raise the volume of cd that are mastered at different volume levels from other cds.

Before I realized that all my albums were already normalized, I thought the same thing. But the truth (as was pointed out to me at the time) is that the EQ is the wrong tool for this job. Take a gander at the FAQ section on this subject.

After reading that section of the FAQ I feel a bit more educated.. I guess I skipped past it when I read through them all..

I believe you're forgetting something. Not only there are several mp3s that ARE bad equalized and not normalized to have same "volume" as the others you have, but also you may wanto to alter the way an mp3 sounds for personal reasons that are totally independent from "quality" of reproduction.
As to the first aspect, consider that, may one consider that right or wrong, many, including me, have MP3s without having the original recording, and that is essentially because as others pointed out it is not always easy to find original of old and rare songs, or simply because a friend gave it to you and you never bothered to buy the cd. Also, sometimes old original were badly recorded and you many need adjustements that are not needed on most of the other mp3s you may have.
As to the second, consider that you may want to listen to audio books, or othrer source, that, for one reason or another, may require, or just make you appreciate, some sort of adjustment. Not to mention that you may want to alter the way an mp3 sounds for "creative" or "personal" reasons (once I used my empeg as a source for "special effect" while playing an RPG with friends, just to create a nice atmosphere. In that case, I would have even liked some effect such as evironmental dsp.) As you can see, this has nothing to do with the intent of reproducing music at high quality strandards (at which regard you are totally right), but with simply the personal listening freedom and wide range of usage of each single user. Thinking of an EQ or an evironmental DSP only in terms of reproduction quality is quite restrictive, IMNSHO, and obviously with such an incredible tool as the empeg one is naturally driven to think of all the possible applications.

Finally, having per-song eq settings does not mean you have to personalize ALL your mp3s. You would use that just for those you think need that.

In reply to:

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In a future release, (possibly 2.0 final?) the Empeg guys say they will have track-by-track normalization so that when a track is played once, its peak level will be determined, and if that peak level isn't at a certain threshhold, a volume adjustment level will be stored for that track.

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I hope this will be optional on a per track or per album basis. I say this because if you've got an album where the tracks run into eachother, like say a live album and one track has a lower peak than the next or previous track, then you're going to get a sudden change in volume between tracks because of the different multipliers applied to each of the two tracks.

Yeah yeah yeah... All good reasons for it. I wasn't saying it's worthless, I was saying that I personally would like to see the Empeg guys work on other stuff because I wouldn't use the per-song EQ's much, if at all.

Selfish? Sure. But then agian, we're talking about a wish list item in the Programming forum so who cares? :0

I agree and hope there would be some way to enforce this. Maybe an Emplode checkbox for a given playlist to be normalized as a group instead of individually.

Since you only need to do this on a few albums, wouldn't it make sense to rip those tracks to WAV instead of mp3, perform some modifications on the WAV in your favorite audio editor, save the modified WAV and then convert that into mp3s? I'm not saying per-song EQ is a horrible idea, but this is something that you could do now.

You're right, I could re-EQ the original WAV files before encoding them. That is true.

However, I would not get the benefit of listening to them "live" on my car stereo as I make the edits to the EQ. I could only listen to them through my cheap PC sound card, using headphones that have a totally different response curve than my car speakers.

In the case of the Fixx album, it still might be enough to correct the harshness, though.