easyeffects

Easy Effects is a Linux desktop application that lets you apply audio processing to any sound playing through your system. Think of it as a real-time audio mixing board that works at the operating system level, affecting everything coming out of your speakers or microphone rather than just one specific app. It works with PipeWire, which is the modern audio system used in most current Linux distributions.

The effects you can apply include a compressor (which evens out loud and quiet sounds), an equalizer (which adjusts bass, treble, and other frequency ranges), a limiter (which prevents audio from going above a certain volume), noise reduction, reverb, a pitch shifter, and around two dozen others. You can stack multiple effects in any order you choose, rearranging them with up and down arrows in the interface. Some effects, like the deep noise remover and the autotune, depend on external plugin packages being installed separately.

The application was previously called PulseEffects when it used an older audio system. It has since been rebuilt to work with PipeWire directly, and the interface was also moved from one graphical toolkit to another (Qt and KDE Kirigami). This means older presets from the PulseEffects era need to be converted before they will work, and the wiki includes instructions for doing that.

Installation is available through most Linux distribution package managers, or through Flatpak from Flathub. The Flatpak version is the easiest option if your system does not already have all the required audio plugin packages, because it bundles everything together. The README includes an important note: do not set the Easy Effects virtual audio devices as your default input or output in your system settings, as the application is designed expecting your actual hardware to stay as the default.

Help pages are built into the application itself and also available on the project website. The project is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.