SotF: an automatic eq for your speakers or headsets

The software helps you to get better sound from your speakers or your headsets. It can run as a TUI app (in a terminal) or a classical UI. What can you do with it?

• play music :)
• add audio plugins to customise the experience, an EQ, an upmixer for spatial audio or a binaural rendered? a limiter or a multiband compressor? a denoiser?
• create an EQ for your headphone!
• create an EQ for anechoic speaker measurements that you find on AudioScienceReview or ErinsAudioCorner (among others)
• create an room optimiser for your room, from simple to use to you are in control of every steps: a state of the art optimiser.
• compare one EQ with another. Customise to taste. Which one do you prefer?

Sound of the Future or SotF in short comes from the song from Giorgio Moroder made popular by Daft Punk. You can find many versions on Youtube. Here is an official one.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Player

How to use?

Download a release from our repo on Github. If you like it, star the directory please. If you dont, please let us know why? All feedback is welcome: you can leave a comment on github or on AudioScienceReview.

Install

Cargo

Install rustup first.

If you already have cargo / rustup, you can jump to:

cargo install just
just

On Linux or MacOS, select the correct install just command for your platform:

just install-...

On Windows,

.\player\windows\build-windows.bat

Then run post-install and download various data files

just post-install
just download-once

You can build or test with a simple:

just build
just test

In order to build the TUI version

just sotf-tui

and for the UI version:

just SotF

Where is the code?

The code is in four parts:

• math-audio : a toolkit for DSP processing, FEM and BEM simulations

• autoeq : a toolkit for generating EQ from measurements (IIR, FIR, MSO, DSO etc)

• gpui-toolkit : a toolkit built on top of GPUI with widgets and graph support

• this repository sotf which is mostly an audio backend and the UI and TUI. The backend audio has a few components:

  • an audio engine : an audio engine (process streams or files and output pcm to your audio device)

  • an audio player: a library doing track management and 3 players, a CLI for testing, a TUI (terminal) based one and a desktop one with a native UI.

  • a set of audio plugins:

    • host: a mini DAW that can run plugins in a list (like a rack) or in a graph (like a DAW)
    • visualisation: loudness, spectrum, lufs
    • classical: iir and fir EQ, compressor (and multi-band compressor), limiter, gain, matrix, resampler, multi-band expander, convolution, delay, crossover, loudness compensation
    • spatial: upmixer from 2.0 to 9.1.6, binaural, cross-talk cancelation
    • denoiser, declicker, polyphonic note detection
    • a/b testing

Why did you not reuse more code? The goal was to learn Rust and to learn other things I always wondered about:

• How to write an audio player? I took inspiration from camilladsp and wrote my own. I could have use Camilla (and I did at the beginning)
• Why are plotting library never perfect? I can usually go 90% of the way with most libraries but then I get block and then it gets complicated to get exactly what you want.
• Can I do everything in Rust from backend to fronted? I am not a fan of Typescript and the context switching between Rust and Typescript is not ideal for me. Using GPUI allow me to stay in Rust and be concentrated.
• Did LLM model progress enough to help building a complex app? Answer is yes since Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3.0. It is of course not perfect.
• Can I reuse my old c++ code with audio plugin? Answer is also yes, I translated most of them in Rust now. I am still unclear if I will be able to build AU plugins with GPUI but it is working for CLAP and VST3. I also get the plugins to work as AUplugin with some hacking and a bit of Swift.

Toolkit

This backend take care of all the Audio activities (from recording to playing). It also provides support for IIR filters, SPL computations etc.

It does provide a lot of features:

• playing:

  • reading from files and audio interfaces
  • computing relay gain, spectrum, lufs etc

• recording:

  • record from N channels
  • play test signals and record on N channels or N times on 1 channel automatically
  • microphone compensation

• plugins:

  • gate
  • limiter
  • compressor
  • eq (iir)
  • convolver (fir)
  • delay
  • crossover (via iir)
  • loudness compensation (via iir)
  • upmixer up to 9.1.6
  • binaural decoder

It does have interfaces to demonstrate how the system works:

• There is a basic CLI
• There is a fun TUI interface that is good enough to use day to day to play music
• A better looking interface is in construction on src-gpui-player but not ready for general use at all.

Status:

• engine: production quality
• plugins: code is good but some plugins need tuning.
• plugins/src-ffi: beta quality
• gpui-au: a bridge between AUv3 plugin and gpui
• player: production quality
• player/app-tui: good quality, can scan by 4k albums and play them with an TUI interface. It is good for testing parameters and plugins.
• player/app-gpui: experimental status

MacOS specific: sotf-macos-hal

sotf-macos-hal crate builds a HAL (Audio Driver on MacOS) such that you can redirect all your music to this driver and benefit from corrected sounds all the time.

Status: experimental for HAL and ok for confbar.

More pictures

Upmixer