We are all familiar with the standard alsamixer. To me the name is a little misleading, it's more of a volume control than anything else.
No effects, just volume.
For something a little more advanced, with a nice looking interface, jack/calf is nice, but you need a jack server.
This doesn't play well with pipewire on some distros.
But you gotta admit, it looks cool. Depending on what plugins you're running, and how many, Jack can cause latency.
if you're sound card supports it, Qasmixer will display and use the hardware settings it's capable of, this is awesome if you
have a nice sound card or DAW. (i.e. soundblaster). But doesn't help much for most "on motherboard" sound chips.
another part of the QAS suite is QasHctl, again.. only useful if your hardware supports all these options.
If you have the right card, there can be literally hundreds of these options.
I would like to talk about "software" controlled effects vs "hardware" controlled effects. The QAS stuff uses the actual hardware chip options on your audio chipset. This means no latency, over process overhead. Having said that, for playbook it doesn't matter. however if you're a pro musician (or wannabe pro like me) latency matters when recording and adding tracks to audio files. But for most of us, most of the time, software editing is fine. The perennial favorite would be easy effects.
The nice thing about using software effects, is for the most part they don't care what hardware you have, not only that, they don't care what sound server back-end you are running. (I haven't actually tested that, but the documents say so) but I can say it works with pipewire for sure.
The other nice thing about easy effects, is that you can get "canned" presets, if you're not an audiophile, and you're not sure what settings will help you get the sound you like, just play with the presets until you get what you want.
Unless you're recording with something like ardour, it doesn't matter that much.
Now, some of you might say what about audacity. Audacity is a wave editor, yes, you can use it for "multitrack" recording.
But that's misleading because you can only do one track at a time, no effects, no EQ, no mixing, no overlays. Audacity
isn't really a DAW, Ardour is.
If you're still runnng pulseaudio (not pipewire, you might be interested in "qpaeq". I don't have a screenshot, as I don't run pulse.
There is also pavucontrol
It has the same pros and cons as easyeffects, it's software so it works with anything (even has a pulseaudio compability layer).
But has more latency than the hardware controllers. So fo rme.. I use programs like alsamixer.
Direct hardware control, no software emulation or latency. Again.. your mileage may vary.
No effects, just volume.
For something a little more advanced, with a nice looking interface, jack/calf is nice, but you need a jack server.
This doesn't play well with pipewire on some distros.
But you gotta admit, it looks cool. Depending on what plugins you're running, and how many, Jack can cause latency.
if you're sound card supports it, Qasmixer will display and use the hardware settings it's capable of, this is awesome if you
have a nice sound card or DAW. (i.e. soundblaster). But doesn't help much for most "on motherboard" sound chips.
another part of the QAS suite is QasHctl, again.. only useful if your hardware supports all these options.
If you have the right card, there can be literally hundreds of these options.
I would like to talk about "software" controlled effects vs "hardware" controlled effects. The QAS stuff uses the actual hardware chip options on your audio chipset. This means no latency, over process overhead. Having said that, for playbook it doesn't matter. however if you're a pro musician (or wannabe pro like me) latency matters when recording and adding tracks to audio files. But for most of us, most of the time, software editing is fine. The perennial favorite would be easy effects.
The nice thing about using software effects, is for the most part they don't care what hardware you have, not only that, they don't care what sound server back-end you are running. (I haven't actually tested that, but the documents say so) but I can say it works with pipewire for sure.
The other nice thing about easy effects, is that you can get "canned" presets, if you're not an audiophile, and you're not sure what settings will help you get the sound you like, just play with the presets until you get what you want.
Unless you're recording with something like ardour, it doesn't matter that much.
Now, some of you might say what about audacity. Audacity is a wave editor, yes, you can use it for "multitrack" recording.
But that's misleading because you can only do one track at a time, no effects, no EQ, no mixing, no overlays. Audacity
isn't really a DAW, Ardour is.
If you're still runnng pulseaudio (not pipewire, you might be interested in "qpaeq". I don't have a screenshot, as I don't run pulse.
There is also pavucontrol
It has the same pros and cons as easyeffects, it's software so it works with anything (even has a pulseaudio compability layer).
But has more latency than the hardware controllers. So fo rme.. I use programs like alsamixer.
Direct hardware control, no software emulation or latency. Again.. your mileage may vary.
