By-track, by-album or output device DSP settings

I would love to be able to do parametric EQ for a track or album and save that in the Roon db.

Example: Simple Minds’ “Once Upon A Time” would benefit from a little more bass hoomph, but I don’t want that for all my albums or as a default.

I had started another topic, “Flie-based DSP settings” but I realize it might have not been clear what I meant. I imagine a lot of people want this…

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This might be interesting. Maybe it could be done by track, with the option to impose the setting for all tracks on the album.

I do worry that I would like this so much that I would spend the rest of my life tweaking DSP settings though. So you could have a setting for generally thin sounding tracks, one for excessive bass tracks, and so on, but this can already be done. So maybe some easy access toggles to the existing DSP settings would do the trick?

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The way I would like it to work is by saving profiles in DSP, and then applying those profiles to tracks and/or albums.

There are a lot of albums from the 80’s that lack some bass support (eg ABBA, The Smiths, some others) and when you listen to these albums in a higher end system the lack of bass is very clear. When I listen to them on my iPhone it generally doesn’t matter much. So I could see having a profile saved that would apply to many of these without a per-album tweak.

Obviously what profile to apply to a track or album should be saved in the Roon db. This is particularly useful if you decide to modify some profile. Say you added a sub and want to reduce the bass for the “80’s bass boost” profile, you can just change the profile and it gets applied across the board. That would be so neeeeeet!!!

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BTW… In my opinion, this is one of the key strategic advantages of a platform where metadata is at the core of it’s capabilities. Audirvana, HQPlayer, JRiver, etc are all players relying on file metadata. Roon would be much more differentiated by incorporating features such as this. Nevermind the social media capabilities possible… shared eqs, shared commentary, shared album/track reviews… I think the possibilities are endless for something ONLY ROON can do -today-. Seize the opportunity to be IT!

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This is something I wholeheartedly support. Brian has already said that he is positive to using (file)tags to trig for example de-emphasis or phase reversal. This is DSP so using the same logic to apply a tonal profile to certain tracks would be easy.

I like this idea, too. We have discussed it from time to time over the years. It’s an extremely complex piece of product design–will be a challenge to keep it usable while also making it generalize well enough to be useful, and not cause a storm of nit-picking. I would like us to attempt this at some point, but am not sure when.

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To add to the above, I have spent some time recently experimenting with Home Audio Fidelity “HAF” filters. With these, I have a selection of proper convolution filters, some with crossfade correction, some without, and some with different levels of bass correction etc. Some music benefits enourmouly from the crossfade correction, some sounds a little odd. Some music simply sounds best with all DSP off.

I think Miguel’s proposal could easily be extended to allow the above DSP such as those above to be assigned to the albums or tracks that benefit accordingly. This could be very neat.

+1. I was just thinking today how useful this would be.

A good suggestion, I would appreciate this much.

Hi @brian,

Honestly, of all the things Roon can do based on its current design, this one is at the top of my list. Roon is incredibly positioned to implement this and reap its benefits in terms of unique features that would pull people in.

Consider also the social media implications of this, sharing the “80’s EQ” or frankly any other aspects that are not related to playlists - eg sharing adhoc classifications/genres/styles…

You guys need to do this.

Interesting you mention phase - this is a file tag and it is used in some programs - I think Audirvana is able to do this.

But what I am after is something much more widespread: storing of DSP profiles and associating them with a track and/or album or whatever. Could also work with some radio stations that are a little anemic-sounding.

There is no tag for phase or other setting until the tag is added by the user. There might be a de-emphasis setting in tags depending on the ripper used.

That is exactly why I mention Brian’s earlier statements of using tags (or something) to trig a DSP function for a file or a group of files (i.e. one or several albums). The DSP function can be a pre-defined setting or one you create yourself. If I understand programming logic correctly the same code base would be needed to do any of this. IF <DSP Statement>=<THIS> <DO><THAT> or IF <TAG>=<THIS> <DO><THAT>

Roon never touches file-based metadata and we should keep it that way.

My ask is for this data to be based in the Roon db, of course.

As i have requested in the past, I would like to request this again: DSP profiles assignable on a per-track basis. In reality, I probably care about assigning such to albums rather than individual tracks, but if you have the latter you should get the former. Roon is particularly adept at this since it keeps metadata separate from the files. These profiles should also be on top of any other DSP of course (such as room correction).

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I agree 100%; this would be amazing. There are several albums that sound better with unique DSP applied; I was hunting around in Roon wondering where to find an option to assign filter setting to album. That led me to this forum. PLEASE ROON, PLEASE add this very powerful feature.

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BUMP!!! Can we please have this? I cannot think of a more suitable application of Roon and rich metadata!!!

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I’d like to add my request to this. If the complex work that is needed to get the design right and generalize well is done then could you (Brian) please make sure that it encompasses what might be characterised as the simplest DSP, straight forward volume correction. I know there’s sophisticated volume correction/equalisation in the global DSP options but I prefer to stay away from that because 99.99% of the time I can keep my master volume at whatever I feel like and everything is OK except for 1 in 100 albums where I think “that’s quiet”, often an album I’ve added to my library from Tidal (but most Tidal albums are fine). I’d like a way to set a simple volume adjustment for specific albums which hopefully is a capability that would fall naturally out of whatever design might arise for the more comprehensive feature request being asked for here.

  • Julian

Could not better describe the feature. I would pay extra for that! Thanks. Hope it will be implemented. Roon, think of the lock in Effekt!

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Keep it with limited use and simple, see where it goes.

This ranks right up there with mobile roon for me.

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