Easy Effects, the free open-source audio equalizer and effects application for Pipewire, released new major 8.0.0 version few days ago.

The new app release switched its UI backend from GTK4 plus LibAdwaita to Qt6, QML and Kirigami. The Flatpak package is now based on KDE runtime platform instead of GNOME.

Easy Effects now based on Qt and KDE framework

Due to moving to Qt from GTK, the dependencies changed. Distribution or third-party package maintainers are suggested to look at the Arch Linux PKGBUILD page to see everything required to build it from source.

The global shortcuts are working well on KDE, but not so much on GNOME. And, the presets, impulse response, rnnoise and autoload profile files are now saved in ~/.local/share/easyeffects while only database files kept inside ~/.config/easyeffects.

The 8.0.0 release also introduced new system tray indicator applet, which, provides menu options to show input/output presets, turn on/off audio effects, open shortcuts dialog and manual, and quit app.

Instead of presets menu, it now has a new presets dialog that contains three tabs, allowing to load local presets, get presets from community (it’s empty somehow in my case), and set auto-load presets.

And, it supports renaming and exporting presets, and setting fallback preset, that is applied automatically for any soundcard or microphone that does not have an autoloading preset.

New Presets dialog

The app window is now more friendly to small screens and tiling window managers. It added new global shortcuts (experimental) for the global effects on/off and the microphone monitor, and new configuration allows the microphone monitor output to be sent to the output effects pipeline input.

Other changes include:

• Remembers last used plugin or tab.
• Add “Pink noise” to test signal.
• Replace global bypass button with a tradition on/off button.
• Add dry and wet controls for the convolver and pitch plugins.
• Add ‘reset history’ button for pitch plugin.
• Draw spectrum by Qt Graphs, and only Qt color presets are allowed so far.
• Add adaptive intensity mode to crystalizer plugin.
• Echo Canceller plugin is now based on the webrtc library.
• New Autogain parameter to force output level to zero.
• Improve compatibility with the latest Linux Studio Plugins.
• Add ability to show Calf Studio Plugins native window.

For more about Easy Effects 8.0.0, either see the CHANGELOG in source tarball or go to Flatpak package page via the link below.

How to Install Easy Effects 8.0.0

The app provides official installer packages through Flatpak, which runs in sandbox environment for most Linux on either amd64 or arm64 platforms.

Linux Mint and Fedora Workstation (with third-party repository enabled) can search & install the package from either Software Manager or GNOME Software.

While Debian/Ubuntu and other Linux may do the steps below one by one to get it:

• First, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to install the Flatpak daemon:

  sudo apt install flatpak

  For other Linux, follow the official setup guide to enable Flatpak support.

• Next, run the command below to install the flatpak package, as well as the dependency runtimes.

  flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects.flatpakref

  

If you already have the package installed, then you may run the command below instead to check & install updates:

flatpak update com.github.wwmm.easyeffects

And, you may replace update with run in last command to start the app from terminal, which is useful for debugging purpose.

Uninstall Easy Effects

To uninstall the Flatpak app package, run command in terminal:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data com.github.wwmm.easyeffects

Skip --delete-data option if you want to keep the personal app data, and run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove the useless runtime libraries.