[pulseaudio-discuss] Call for testing the equalizer

[Jason Newton]

The equalizer is now fairly stable for usage, issues not withstanding
though. I'd like to ask anyone who can to
git clone git://gitorious.org/pulseaudio-equalizer/pulseaudio-equalizer.git
git clone git://gitorious.org/qpaeq/qpaeq.git

And install my pulseaudio branch for testing.  You will need fftw3 (and
fftw3-devel).

Configure it, like ladspa, and put something like the following in your
default.pa:

.ifexists module-esound-protocol-unix.so
load-module module-esound-protocol-unix
.endif
.ifexists module-dbus-protocol.so
load-module module-dbus-protocol
.endif
load-module module-native-protocol-unix
load-module module-equalizer-sink sink_name=equalized
master=alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-surround-51
set-default-sink equalized


You might try the following all of twice, with and without -vvv to
gather a few lines of the "took x seconds to process/grab data" lines:

See how it performs under normal system load.  You should be watching
out for crashes (of course) and especially popping/crackling/dropouts.
I'm trying to determine if this popping is a driver bug, a PA bug, or my
own bug.  Any help in finding the culprit is much welcomed.  It seems to
happen at least on snd_hda_intel with snd_hda_codec_reltek/analog

Secondly, I'd like to know if things sucked under normal load, how they
are under high performance modes and if they get sucky if you put your
computer in min performance (powersave) modes.

You can try min and max modes via (might not work for all cpus):
cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq
echo userspace > scaling_governor
cat scaling_min_freq > scaling_setspeed
or
cat scaling_max_freq > scaling_setspeed

If interested in using the equalizer note that things aren't finalized
yet but not only have I switched my ladspa equalizer out for it, but its
already significantly more functional/tunable than the ladspa mbeq.
There shouldn't be much to worry about except for the possibility of
incompatible presets in the future.

You will need python, pyqt4, and python-dbus to launch the gui (qpaeq),
launch it via:
python qpaeq.py

Please submit backtraces if you can get things to crash! See
http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/Community#BugsPatchesTranslations for info on
how to collect backtraces.

For those of you on opensuse, I have packages in my repo
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home://jenewton/
Not all of them are finished building yet though (i586 not done at all,
x86_64 only for factory).

-Jason