Comment by myself248 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by myself248 | Hacker News Reader

I use EasyEffects constantly (and have since it was called PulseEffects) to compress and limit the dynamic range of what comes out my speakers.

So much content is made with low voices and incredibly loud effects, and if I turn it up to where I can understand the speech, everything else just blasts me. But with a compressor and limiter in the chain, I can turn it up as much as I need, and the loud moments are simply not that loud.

Lack of this capability on my phone is the main reason I don't consume videos or streams there -- the audio engineering is just beyond terrible. For the moment, desktop is the only place I have the tools to fix it, so desktop is where I listen.

Android does support audio effects [1]. You cannot create new ones, but the built-in ones are very broad. For example, the DynamicProcessing effect can be configured for your loudness compression use case. Note that you will have to attach your effect to the global session, which was deprecated more than a decade ago but support has never been removed as there are no alternatives for global audio effects.

[1]: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/audiof...

I'm constantly fiddling with the volume when listening to extremely dynamic classical music. Not at all what the composer intended.

My high school biology teacher likes to tell the story of a King Crimson album -- Lark's Tongue in Aspic, I think -- that he and his friends listened to for the first time in the 70s that's quiet for such a long time that you don't realize it, so you've probably turned up the volume really high when it suddenly blasts you. He says he fell over in his chair and loved it. That sounds awful to me.

I also like the "Dynamic Gain" effect. Used this to great effect recently in a conf call, with multiple people sharing a microphone. Without it, it was barely possible to make out the words of some speakers. With it, it was passable, except when it went under the cutoff level of the transmitter.

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