[heysoundude]

Shouldn’t you ask that of someone involved in pipewire? They’ll know better than us here.

[wastis]

My comment was more an open question on how I see the current status. This topic actually was discussed between people and the pipewire developers over the last two years.

Never mind, for now I have pulseaudio equalizer and that works very well and will still be around for quite some time.

[wastis]

By searching the source code of pipewire, I discovered that the pipewire developer had worked on that filter topic over the last months and weeks. There are pipewire builtin bi-quad filters (low/ high/ band-pass - low / high-shelf,  peak/notch), a builtin fast convolver and a lv2 module. So pipewire will hopefully be well prepared to do basic static filtering on audio  at OS level, which could enable Kodi addons on Linux such as the PulseEqualizer addon and with a bit of luck, the migration effort of PulseEqualizerGui will not be to big.

[wastis]

Created Release v2.1.2.

There are a few improvements mainly target for slow devices like the Raspberry PI 2.

I did set-up a Kodi with PulseEqualizerGui on a Raspberry Pi 2B connected to my old Flat-TV. I am really fascinated how much digital room correction improved the sound quality of these crappy booming speakers reflecting the sound on the back wall.  

If possible, as some have wished, this is also preparation to get the PulseEqualizerGui into Kodi's standard repository. For this I did some structural changes and code cleanup.

I will do the pull request soon.

[heysoundude]

That would be momentous if they accept and add it!

[wastis]

I did create  v2.1.4.

Main purpose was to make some improvements on the user interface and skin support for the 18 "standard" skins.

Also the settings handling significantly improved, as of v2.1.3 future upgrades will not overwrite the configuration and profiles anymore.

Pulse Equalizer is still in the progress to be included into the Kodi standard libraries (not yet happened), I did create a new pull request with the recent version, which should now be fully compliant to the code requirements.

Code quality is very high, Codacy rates the code as A class, now (excluding the third party libraries).

[heysoundude]

Once it is included, I’ll be installing it. [emoji1303]

[wastis]

v2.1.5 is out.

Main feature is the improved automatic switching of the output device when a Bluetooth device or headset is connected or disconnected.

Unfortunately I did not receive any feedback from the maintainers of the pull requests in the last four months, so I have no idea what stops them to include this addon into the standard libraries.

[wastis]

v.2.1.7

I did create an own repository Linux Addon Repository and included PulseAudioEqualizer and others. This is better for version control.

[teus]

What about on the Pi4? 4GB of RAM should help…
This is a Feature I would LOVE to be able to use

 Ok, I did a closer look to it, still using Pi3, the performance actually is not the problem, it consumes about 25% of one core, so 6% overall.

The problem currently is that Kodi somehow is set to ALSA output only, so far I did not manage to output the sound directly to pulseaudio (without ALSA in-between).

There is this ALSA plugin pulseaudio, which is currently use for BT devices. I did hijack this to route the audio from Kodi via ALSA to the pulse equalizer and this works perfect with the annoying drawback, that the audio latency naturally caused by the equalizer is not reported back to Kodi and thus Audio and Video are out of sync of about 350ms.

Currently I have no Idea how to fix this other than changing Kodi source, a route I currently don't want to go.

The changes to the Kodi PulseEqualizer GUI Addon are minor and only required if ALSA would remain the main source for the equalizer.

Any ideas are welcome, I did use latests Raspberry Pi OS Lite version for testing with default Kodi 18.7.

EDIT: OK, I go this sorted. Update on Addon package will follow.

I'm moving away from Libreelec because it can't do something basic like audio equalization.  I'm trying OSMC, but I can't get the alsa equalizer to work either (Kodi doesn't pick up the audio device).
Should I try installing pulse audio, and try routing it through ALSA?

[wastis]

What hardware are you on? Pulseaudio + pulseaudio-equalizer consumes more cpu than ALSA+ALSA equalizer, but this is not a problem, if your HW is powerful enough. I have it running with Kodi on a raspberry pi 2 playing H264 video hw decoded.

I do not know OSMC in detail, but I am very happy with Debian based installs. Here is a HOWTO for Debian & Kodi & Equalizer on a x86  and one for raspberry pi os lite + kodi + equalizer + bluetooth. 

I personally would select full chain pulseaudio if it comes to equalization with Kodi.

[teus]

What hardware are you on? Pulseaudio + pulseaudio-equalizer consumes more cpu than ALSA+ALSA equalizer, but this is not a problem, if your HW is powerful enough. I have it running with Kodi on a raspberry pi 2 playing H264 video hw decoded.

I do not know OSMC in detail, but I am very happy with Debian based installs. Here is a HOWTO for Debian & Kodi & Equalizer on a x86  and one for raspberry pi os lite + kodi + equalizer + bluetooth. 

I personally would select full chain pulseaudio if it comes to equalization with Kodi.

raspberry pi 4, with 8GB of RAM. 4k playback is too limited, it only works with x265/HEVC, so I gave up on that.
I'm not too fond of setting up an entire OS from scratch. I would think a readymade distribution would perform better, but I don't even know how to work my way around ALSA if I'm installing Pulseaudio afterwards. OSMC is debian-based, however.

[wastis]

but I don't even know how to work my way around ALSA if I'm installing Pulseaudio afterwards. OSMC is debian-based, however.

ok, as I wrote I do not know OSMC, but this should be the principal steps:

1. install pulseaudio and pulseaudio equalizer
 

Code:

sudo apt install -y pulseaudio pulseaudio-equalizer

and start and probably tune it by playing around with the audio buffer size in daemon.conf.
 

Code:

#daemon.conf pulseaudio buffer size
default-fragments = 8
default-fragment-size-msec = 15

this assumes kodi runs in a user session on omsc
 

Code:

# enable pulseaudio
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable pulseaudio.service
systemctl --user start pulseaudio.service

Then you need to tell Kodi to use Pulseaudio instead of ALSA, you do this in the startup script, by setting the enviroment variable KODI_AE_SINK=PULSE
so in the systemd kodi service file (I do not know the name or path location) add a line like this.
 

Code:

...
[Service]
Environment = KODI_AE_SINK=PULSE
...

Typically pulseaudio and kodi should run in a users session, that it works, I do not know how this is setup in OSMC.

Maybe later today,if I find some time, I will give OSMC a try and figure out whether equalizer is feasible on it.

[wastis]

I had a brief look at OSMC.
 

Code:

#stop kodi and disable the start of it (testing purpose)
sudo systemctl stop mediacenter
sudo systemctl disable mediacenter

#install the missing packages
sudo apt install -y pulseaudio pulseaudio-equalizer dbus-user-session

#enable and pulseaudio as user
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable pulseaudio.service
systemctl --user start pulseaudio.service

#ensure dbus-module is loaded by pulseaudio
mkdir -p ~/.config/pulse
cp /etc/pulse/daemon.conf /etc/pulse/default.pa ~/.config/pulse/
echo -e 'load-module module-dbus-protocol\n' >> ~/.config/pulse/default.pa

#reboot to get dbus --session up and running
sudo reboot now

check if pulseaudio is running
 

Code:

#looks good pulseaudio daemon is running
osmc@osmc:~$ ps -ef | grep pulseaudio
osmc       462   416  0 11:13 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no

#looks good dbus-daemon --session is running
osmc@osmc:~$ ps -ef | grep dbus
message+   201     1  0 11:13 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --system --address=systemd: ...
osmc       480   416  0 11:13 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --session --address=systemd: ...


#looks good at least one pulseaudio sink is available
osmc@osmc:~$pactl list sinks
Sink #0
    State: SUSPENDED
    Name: alsa_output.platform-3f902000.hdmi.hdmi-stereo
....

#looks good, pulseaudio sockets exists
osmc@osmc:~$ ls -l /run/user/1000/pulse
total 4
srwxrwxrwx 1 osmc osmc 0 Sep 12 11:13 dbus-socket
srw-rw-rw- 1 osmc osmc 0 Sep 12 11:13 native
-rw------- 1 osmc osmc 4 Sep 12 11:13 pid

So I am pretty sure pulseaudio is running, even with the dbus-socket, which is needed for equalizer

So let's start Kodi with pulsaudio support.
 

Code:

#start kodi from command line
KODI_AE_SINK=PULSE
export KODI_AE_SINK
/usr/lib/kodi/kodi.bin --debug

And this is where I got stuck. So Kodi is not recognizing the pulseaudio devices. Looking at OSMC source, there are a lot of patches applied to Kodi. Quickly searching those patches I didn't find any that prevents Kodi to load the pulseaudio devices, however one never know.

So the chances are quite low to get pulseequalizer running that way, but it might be that I am missing something.

[teus]

Ah, wow. thanks a lot for trying. Your chances with it must be a lot better than mine. 
When I look at the wiki, it says "PulseAudio is used when Kodi is installed in a desktop-environment rather than a dedicated/direct boot setup. "
I guess I should take another SD card and install Kodi in a desktop environment. See if I can get an equalizer working, and what the performance for media playback is. 
I've been considering to upgrade the Raspberry Pi 4 to a more powerful single-board computer. I don't want to use an old PC or anything too power hungry because the electricity is expensive when you run something 24/7.