"Tagged" EQ PreSets - Possible?

[soap]

A negative of making them cumulative all the way down is that you can not put a rock.eq in your rock tree and a Led Zeppelin .eq in your Led Zeppelin branch of the tree with out them both being applied.
1- My hand would be forced to think of the LedZeppelin.eq not as a .eq all its own, but as a tweak to rock.eq which itself is a tweak of the hardware .cfg.  Pretty soon you're working only on a tweak of a tweak of a tweak, and confusion mounts.
2 -I don't want to have to worry about which .eq files might be found in the hierarchy and applied unintentionally.

 
"Why even do cumulative to the hardware EQ if [not cumulative .eq files]"
Because if you change headphones you (manually) change .cfg files, and the next track to get played out of the buffer will (automatically) pull its associated .eq file out of the buffer.
Changing hardware (either through swapping of headphones or the usage of the same directory structure on multiple players) is the strongest reason to have cumulative .eq to the .cfg.

"while cumulative would allow you much more freedom for adjusting the sound of your whole collection as tastes change or other needs change, while having to alter an absolute minimum of files."
I think you're looking East while I'm looking West.
If LedZeppelin.eq and rock.eq get added to my Stairway To Heaven, then if I ever change rock.eq I'm going to have to change LedZeppelin.eq as well!  (if not ACDC.eq and Rush.eq, etc)
Why would I bother making a band-specific .eq file if it did not produce the exact results I wanted?  In my thinking the only reason rock.eq exists is as a generic "boost" for artists / albums I have not yet made a specific .eq for yet.

[Llorean]

In my book, the "Physical Graffiti" EQ would be for example to take into account (in theory) some wrong mastering of the album in the re-release, so perhaps lower treble, while the "Rock" EQ would sate my need for all Rock songs to have a healthy portion of thumping bass.

Therefor if i ever decided I don't need overpowering bass in the future, I could edit Rock.eq to lower the bass, without having to go in and edit the one for the specific album as well, as it only exists as to correct mastering problems.

Basically, I'm really only talking three tiers, "Hardware", "User preference for this category (genre?)" and "Fixing mastering problems" though I think the system should extend to an arbitrary number of levels if it's going to go that far.

This is more or less because Febs mentioned that a lot of his digital downloads are of varying quality, so it seems like you'd need to correct this independently of altering the EQ to meet your tastes, and that should be independently as well of the overall "Hardware" EQ.

[soap]

Something I just thought of - and something which I think we all have been skipping is - if EQ settings a cumulative - they will have to be identical in all but gain.
Center / cutoff and Q values will need to be exactly the same.

[Llorean]

Ah, very good point. Perhaps flexibility will have to be sacrificed, and just forget about cumulative at all.

[soap]

_{*cough*.cfg files in playlists*cough*}

[Llorean]

.cfg files in playlists is something I've wanted for a while.

[Chronon]

Something I just thought of - and something which I think we all have been skipping is - if EQ settings a cumulative - they will have to be identical in all but gain.
Center / cutoff and Q values will need to be exactly the same.

That's true.  I had noted this drawback to myself.

Can either of you explain a bit more about the .cfg files in playlists idea?  How easy would it be to swap out the .cfgs from the playlist in the event that I, say, switch headphones?

[Llorean]

In my personal view of it, automatic playlisting continues to work as it currently does. The only "added" feature is if you explicitly highlight a single .cfg file, and choose to insert it, it's inserted into the playlist. If you insert multiple files (say a directory) only music files are inserted still (so no accidental .cfgs in playlists). When, during playback, the .cfg file is reached, it is executed and settings are changed. If you switch headphones you just use the playlist viewer to remove that .cfg from the playlist and insert the new one. Or use cut and paste to move a couple .cfg files around. Or whatever method suits you.

[Chronon]

This would apply to .cfg files as they currently exist (i.e. with absolute settings)?  If so, it seems a little cumbersome to do much more than simply change EQ when I want to change headphones.  It seems to me that accounting for different headphone responses plus file/genre variation will require a plethora of separate .cfg files.  Am I missing something?

[soap]

What downside do you see, Llorean, to have album.eq (for example) automaticly get inserted if found inside a directory of tracks if the entire folder is inserted?

I'm not sure what the danger is of accidental .cfg files.

[Llorean]

"Insert Shuffled" on your Music folder and you get a smattering of random EQ .cfgs scattered throughout your full playlist.

[soap]

"Insert Shuffled" on your Music folder and you get a smattering of random EQ .cfgs scattered throughout your full playlist.

Solid point.
How about a combination of the two discussed ideas?
.cfg files in playlists automatically loaded in an identical search pattern to album-art, or manually inserted?

[Chronon]

It certainly appears that some compromises have to be made on this idea since relative settings can only easily be applied to pre-defined frequency bands.  Meanwhile absolute settings allow me to set everything I want, but force me to also provide multiple copies of each album (or track or genre) EQ if I want to also account for variations in hardware.  I would like to be able to salvage a relative sort of setting, even if only gain values can be added to existing frequency bands.

===

Actually, for me the most important feature would be setting the crossfeed.  So, I would be happy with what soap said.

[KindOfBlues71]

I just returned to this thread after some time off and there seems to have been some good discussions back and forth regarding EQ, and now playlist .cfg files are being discussed - a very interesting idea!  Are you all still discussing these topics or is a patch in the works?  If we're at the patch-testing stage I'm game for testing it.  I just got a new pair of IEMs and have been tweaking a hardware EQ file while getting used to them.

-KindOfBlues71

[Chronon]

No.  We have just been discussing ideas so far.

soap, I think your suggestion provides the neatest, most tractable proposal for now.  I'm willing to come back to relative settings at a later time.  They are only useful for adjusting levels on pre-defined EQ bands.  I am not interested in holding back the other ideas for the sake of that alone.

If there's no further discussion for now then maybe a feature request would be appropriate.