Equalizer support in Amarok - patch

[Artur Szymiec]

Dear Nikolaj,

below i tried to answer you as best as I can.

2009/7/20 Nikolaj Hald Nielsen <nhnfreespirit at gmail.com>

> I already have the very latest from svn. I still get significant distortion, especially in the bass with some presets ( and if I make a custom setting with the lowest slider maxed out, everything just becomes a "grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" noise basically (even at fairly low volume, so its not my speakers giving up! :-) Perhaps this is just the way its meant to work. I admit that I dont know much about equalizers.

Well - I presume that by saying lowest slider you mean the 1st slider
from the left - labeled as preamp ?? If so it's a additional gain
applied to all bands.
Turning it to max will certainly make a nois out of input signal. Well
yes - the equalizer works like this - if you will put too much gains
over a bands it'll cause clipping anyway.
I think the best thing what we can do at this moment is let the people
compare it with xmms / audacious / rhytmbox / exile / banshee / xine
and state their opinion.
Personally I don't think it's a good idea to limit the scale (orginaly
+- 12dB) - it's up to user to decide whatever the setting will be.

> Oh, I managed to completely miss that there was manual settings in the config dialog. Whoops! :-) In any case, I still think we should put the equalizer in a seperate dialog.
> As it is right now, you have to select the select  "manual" in one place, and then go into the config dialog to actually edit it. I think that these 2 things should be avaialble in one place.

Well I'm so sorry if I can't understand you correctly - because it's
NOT true that you have to select a preset which you want to edit in
one place (for.ex action menu in main window) and go
to config and edit it. Simply please go to settings / playback - the
actualy selected preset name is displayed in combo box and values are
presented in sliders. Please note that when you're going
to this dialog the preset initialy displayed in combo is that one
selected from main menu window. Moreover even during this dialog is
open when you'll change the selected preset from main menu
this dialog will change it content to stay in sync.
It's not a problem to select from this combo list a antoher preset.
Also if you select a preset (whatever you like) then you can start
playing with sliders (name will be changed in combo to manual)
and then simply you can type a new (or existing) name for that preset
in combo - press save and voile ! The main menu action is kept in sync
all the time - whatever you're doing in config
dialog is visibile from main window menu and vice versus.

> Also, I am not sure most people wil considder tweaking theie equalizer levels to actually be changing the configuration of Amarok, so having it in the same plase as the persitant settings seems a bit odd to me.

But this is a change in configuration - and the settings are saved
with amarok ones - moreover it's related to  playback so I can;t
imagine a better place.
So we can say about crossfade or replaygain. Anyway I'll do whatever
most people will suit.
Please note that all built-in presets can be changed but also they can
be restored to default settings. They can't be deleted as oppose to
user ones.

> I was also pondering putting it either in a context applet or maybe making it a dockable widget, but I am not sure if these are good ideas at all..
>

Maybe in future. For the first step I would like to bring it back to 2.x series.
Then maybe I or maybe a completly different person will try ? Who knows ...

Best regards

Artur