"Tagged" EQ PreSets - Possible?

[Old Schooler]

Hello,
I am quite new to this and have only barely tried modifying WPS settings so I don't know if this is possible to do or not.
Anyway I, like most I am sure, have several different types of music on my player(s) and listen to them in different environments as well and I am frequently calling various EQ presets I have stored or elsewise changing tone settings.
Is there a way to "Tag", for lack of a better term, an EQ Preset to be called up when a given type of music is played?
Or, better yet, can an EQ preset cfg file be stored in a particular folder or directory with the desired settings for the music in that folder and maybe be accessed through an addition to the "Context Menu" or be caused to run simply when that folder or directory is accessed?
I imagine it would involve a lot of initial work to make and store a desired eq cfg file each folder or directory so is it possible even to have some type of "exe"(?) file when a given directory is accessed to call up an eq preset from their present location?
If it could be done without the need to navigate to it, it would be a very handy item indeed.
Thanks for listening,
Old Schooler

[saratoga]

No.

Also, EQ is generally used to compensate for hardware, so changing it based on music files would be quite odd.  If you need to do this, you probably have not chosen very good EQ settings.

[Old Schooler]

Well actually, some of the music I have suffers from inexperienced recording and "over use of enhancements" when it was transferred from LP to MP3.
Anyway, guess that ends that idea.
Thanks

[karashata]

If you want to use EQ settings to adjust how the poorly recorded songs sound, why wouldn't you just fix them in an audio editing application on your computer?  Then you wouldn't need to adjust the EQ settings all the time for every song.

[Calculus]

do you realise how long that is to do?
to edit each file.

[MarcGuay]

Most audio editors have batch processing.

[Febs]

I think that the "EQ is supposed to be for hardware" mantra is really overused here.  There are good reasons that I can think of to have folder-based configuration settings, including EQ.  For example, I generally use certain EQ settings for music, but not necessarily if I am listening to audio lectures. 

Similarly, there are also many good reasons for not wanting to have to pre-process music files to apply EQ.  For example, I have a substantial amount of music that I have downloaded in MP3 format from emusic.com.  The quality of these recordings varies widely.  There is no way that I am aware of to use an audio editing program to adjust the EQ on these recordings without suffering a quality loss as a result of decoding and re-encoding the MP3s.  It would be very helpful to have a folder-based EQ setting for such files.

Folder-based configuration settings would have additional benefits other than just allowing users to specify EQ settings for a particular album.  For example, I would generally like to have study mode on in my "Audiobooks" and "Recordings" directories, but off otherwise.  Folder-based configuration settings would make this possible.

[KindOfBlues71]

Well said Febs! This open-source project seems quite closed-minded at times...

[Llorean]

It's closed minded to realize "adding every single idea can make the software worse, not just better, so everything needs to be carefully challenged and weighed"?

It seems closed minded to me to dismiss the project as closed minded just because you don't agree with certain choices it has made.

Every idea should be challenged. Period. Socrates once said "The unexamined life is not worth living." Simply accepting an idea, or simply dismissing it, would be closed minded. But to challenge it, seek its weaknesses and strengths, and once fully examined, to make a decision, is quite opposite. But to call it closed minded just because you think the decision is wrong is still foolishness.

As to what saratoga said, his no was in response to whether or not it's possible. The person simply asked "can this be done with Rockbox" rather than "can this be added to Rockbox", and he said "No, plus it doesn't seem to make sense."

In response to Febs: Why would you need different EQ settings for your audiobooks, etc? Wouldn't they still be played back on headphones with the same response curve? As to folder based EQ, wouldn't it make more sense to have perhaps tag-based EQ offsets or something? If it's truly individual songs that are poorly mastered, it seems like you'd want to correct that song back to being "neutral", then have your EQ corrections for the hardware still applied on top of that.

[Chronon]

In response to Febs: Why would you need different EQ settings for your audiobooks, etc? Wouldn't they still be played back on headphones with the same response curve? As to folder based EQ, wouldn't it make more sense to have perhaps tag-based EQ offsets or something? If it's truly individual songs that are poorly mastered, it seems like you'd want to correct that song back to being "neutral", then have your EQ corrections for the hardware still applied on top of that.

I can see that with audiobooks it may be less important to the listener to preserve a flat frequency response over the whole audible spectrum.  I can easily see that a user might prefer to avoid expending the battery cost (however meager) associated with the software EQ in this case.

With regard to correcting a song back to "neutral" and then applying hardware corrections on top of that: Are you talking about some kind of delta configuration that allows you to adjust a parameter relative to its current value rather than setting an absolute value?

[Llorean]

Well it seems that if you're going to try to correct individual songs, an offset value just for that song would be necessary. Otherwise if you changed hardware (moved from headphones to speakers) any individual corrections you had would be more or less useless, or even worse, accentuate the new hardware's response differences.

If it's just turning EQ off and on for spoken word or whole folders, a .cfg file stored in the folder (or alongside the .m3u, perhaps even with the same name: x.m3u and x.cfg) would mean the user can just click one file, then the other, very quickly changing the relevant settings. Automating it for large selections of content that would all have the same EQ applied to them doesn't seem to make sense to me, since it takes about a second to load a presaved .cfg file manually if it's at the top or bottom of the folder, or alongside the m3u. But if you have mixed content that cannot be re-encoded without loss such as these files from emusic being played alongside files that don't need correction, the only two options seem to be either to encourage them to provide lossless, or to create a system for individual files to have offsets relative to the global equalizer.

[Febs]

Every idea should be challenged. Period. Socrates once said "The unexamined life is not worth living." Simply accepting an idea, or simply dismissing it, would be closed minded. But to challenge it, seek its weaknesses and strengths, and once fully examined, to make a decision, is quite opposite.

I agree with this in principle.  In this particular instance, however, I disagree with the assumption underlying the challenge, which is the proposition that that the exclusive purpose of EQ is to adjust for hardware differences.  I see that statement presented as if it were a fact.  It is not.  It is a preferene, or a philosophy, that is subject to debate.  I do not think that we need to have that debate here (and in fact, I strongly hope that we don't, because I've been through it enough times in other forums to know that there is no "correct" answer), but I do think that we should recognize that not everyone subscribes to that philosophy. 

With that in mind:

In response to Febs: Why would you need different EQ settings for your audiobooks, etc? Wouldn't they still be played back on headphones with the same response curve?

It is purely a matter of personal preference.  I enjoy adding a small amount of bass boost to certain music recordings both when listening on headphones and in my car.  However, I prefer to listen to spoken word recordings flat.

If it's just turning EQ off and on for spoken word or whole folders, a .cfg file stored in the folder (or alongside the .m3u, perhaps even with the same name: x.m3u and x.cfg) would mean the user can just click one file, then the other, very quickly changing the relevant settings. Automating it for large selections of content that would all have the same EQ applied to them doesn't seem to make sense to me, since it takes about a second to load a presaved .cfg file manually if it's at the top or bottom of the folder, or alongside the m3u. But if you have mixed content that cannot be re-encoded without loss such as these files from emusic being played alongside files that don't need correction, the only two options seem to be either to encourage them to provide lossless, or to create a system for individual files to have offsets relative to the global equalizer

I tend to listen to albums rather than individual selections, so the folder-based approach makes sense to me, particularly in light of the fact that folder-based configuration files could be used to adjust many things, and not just EQ.  (See the example I used above with respect to study mode.) 

In terms of being able to quickly select a .cfg file from within a directory, you are correct that that would not take very long to do.  But there are plenty of situations where it would be convenient not to have to do so.  For example, when one album ends and you have Rockbox set to advance automatically to the next folder, or a random folder.

[Chronon]

or to create a system for individual files to have offsets relative to the global equalizer.

That's what I was thinking.

I agree with this in principle.  In this particular instance, however, I disagree with the assumption underlying the challenge, which is the proposition that that the exclusive purpose of EQ is to adjust for hardware differences.  I see that statement presented as if it were a fact.  It is not.  It is a preferene, or a philosophy, that is subject to debate.  I do not think that we need to have that debate here (and in fact, I strongly hope that we don't, because I've been through it enough times in other forums to know that there is no "correct" answer), but I do think that we should recognize that not everyone subscribes to that philosophy. 

Keenly argued, Febs.  I agree with you.

[Llorean]

I agree that an assumption of that as fact is flawed. I think some rephrasing though could fix it. "The intent of the EQ in Rockbox is to fix shortcomings in the hardware." While this may not necessarily be the exclusive purpose of an EQ in general, this may be the exclusive intended purpose of the EQ in Rockbox. This could, though, be extended to "and make up for flawed files." But the statement does exist as a simple means of explaining what can become a complex argument. People frequently request things like "have the genre of my audio determine which EQ preset should be automatically loaded." There are many feature requests that can made regarding automated equalizer behaviour. But it's much more reasonable to have it be an aspect of the song either by way of preprocessing or the aforemention offset method. Anything unique to the song should be contained in it, while anything unique to the hardware should be handled by the actual direct use of the equalizer. This more or less boils down to "The equalizer is there for hardware deficiencies."

If an equalizer were loaded when you play a song, then you stop the song, and play another that doesn't have an equalizer preset associated, you're stuck with the strange preset. If you have it reset when there's not one associated, then the manual equalizer is useless. Meanwhile, if you go with an offset somehow embedded in the file, or associated with the file, and don't have it actually change any settings, it's much less accident prone (or containing hidden behaviour).

Edit: Note, I see no mention of "exclusive" purpose, only "general" use. Which is probably untrue in terms of statistics anyway, but just thought this bore mentioning. Judging at least from commentary, the majority of EQ users find that the normal Bass boost isn't enough, so make use of it to add some more.

[Chronon]

I would still identify changes unique to a given song as part of the EQ setting.  But it seems that now we wish to distinguish between persistent, absolute settings and temporary, relative settings.

Certainly, I agree that persistent settings should have something to do with the static properties of your hardware setup.  Temporary settings would more logically correlate with properties of a given file or set of files.

I would agree with Llorean that as it currently exists (with only persistent, absolute settings) the EQ is more suited to compensating for variations in hardware performance.