Advanced Equalizer

[Razecew]

I'm loving MusicBee, but in competition with foobar2000, an easy improvement for the equalizer would be an "advanced" option for toggling the default number of equalization bands into say, either 18 or 30 bands.
Another great option would be plugin support for other (e.g. parametric) equalizers.

Keep up the good work!

[beehive]

I remember a post about someone installing some other equalizers for winamp. You could try this post http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=4693.0
or try searching the forum

[Anti]

Install DSP plugins just by putting them in the /plugins directory in your musicbee folder.
Manage them either from the equaliser screen, or from preferences -> plugins

Note the more plugins you use, the higher your resource usage will become.

[voon]

Are there good winamp plugins (as in high quality rendering, calculations)? And do they run stable? So far, I ran through the winamp VST plugin as there are excellent VST choices. That's however a highly volatile setup with more crashes and defunct plugins suddenly than anything else... maybe due to the VST plugin.

[Anti]

I don't know. I'm using the default EQ, and the ten-band EQ which comes with the Stereo Tools plugin.
I get a pleasing enough sound on low-fi equipment.

I think the reason there aren't a lot of more serious software EQs around is that when people get *that* serious about their sound, they usually shell out for a hardware EQ.

[voon]

Whoopie .. I just found out, one of my favorite EQs is available as winamp plugin as well, so no VST plugin hassle anymore:

http://www.aixcoustic.com/index.php/Electri-Q-posihfopit/30/0/

Install Winamp, Install this plugin (select winamp, not VST), copy over the dsp_eqfree.dll from the winamp plugin directory to the MusicBee plugin directory and dive into musical greatness or so

Oh and maybe just browser here: http://www.winamp.com/plugins/dsp-effect/5

note, that the plugins come as exes. In W7 it will complain .. can't write to C:. Run them as admin then.

Of course, with VST plugin chainer/manager, MUCH more would be possible ... but alas, I never got that stable.

[Anti]

> note, that the plugins come as exes

What do the .exe do? Are they just installers that unpack the dlls in the right location?
Do you need winamp installed for them to work?

[voon]

Yes ... some create their own directory in programs, but usually, they just throw the ddl to the winamp plugin dir (at least, their suggested path was where I had winamp ... in usualy programs(x86) etc. I think you do need winamp installed.

[Steven]

it would be useful to add this to the winamp plugins topic

http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=1341.0

[Razecew]

Hey all, thanks for the replies! I just tried out the EQ that voon recommended and it has just what I need.

[Skoop]

18 Bands?  Really?  30 Bands?  Holy shit.

Color me skeptical, but I am not persuaded that an ordinary human can make that kind of granular auditory discrimination. 

[Razecew]

Skoop, except for these harsh-sounding headphones I recently acquired, I'd have agreed with you. I got a pair of cheaper studio monitor headphones that sound great except for one thing: the spoken letter "S". Without equalization, any whistling sound is piercing and literally painful to the ears when coming through these headphones. While this is probably great for music recording/post-processing, it's just plain unpleasant in personal music listening.

By turning down two bands on the 10-band equalizer, I was able to get rid of the whistle. Unfortunately, this also reduced all of the sound between those two bands. Turning down 2/10 bands (or something like 20% of the sound) on the default equalizer is a poor trade-off just to get rid of one piercing whistle - everything sounded pretty bad.

With the equalizer voon recommended, I was able to test very narrow bandwidths, find the offending whistle, and reduce a very specific range. Much better now!

[lnminente]

This tutorial might be of some interest here:
http://www.head-fi.org/t/413900/how-to-equalize-your-headphones-a-tutorial

[Razecew]

Skoop - I guess it would be more helpful to say that for the headphones, everything sounds tremendously more lifelike. Except for the whistle.
Inminente - Thanks a bunch for the tutorial!