FluidEQ 1.1.0

Equalizer APO's configuration used to be one block per output, with every layer
poured into a single run of numbered filter lines and nothing in it saying where
the voicing stopped and your own bands began. It is now a file per layer, and
that is where most of what follows comes from: a layer with a file of its own can
be switched off without being taken apart, told apart from your own tuning when
FluidEQ starts up again, read on disk, and sent to somebody else.

New

• Any layer switches off without being lost, and every correction has a
  strength. Switching one off leaves its file out of the chain rather than
  clearing its settings and stashing them, so pressing the switch again puts
  exactly the same thing back, and it survives a restart. Your bands can finally
  have a switch of their own, so can the impulse response, and Smart EQ has
  joined the driver, headphone and voicing layers in having a strength — half of
  a measured correction is a reasonable thing to want when the measurement is
  more confident than you are.
• A headphone correction is a layer of its own, on a page of its own.
  Applying a published measurement used to replace your bands outright, so
  clearing the EQ threw the correction away with your tuning and Smart EQ read it
  as error and flattened it over a few passes. It now sits beside your bands with
  its own chip, strength, switch and curve, from either headphone database.
• Continuous EQ. Pressing Smart EQ applies one measurement whole; this is a
  mode instead — measure, move a fraction of the way, measure again, for as long
  as there is music — so one track's emphasis and the next one's cancel out and
  only what every record agrees about survives, which is your headphones and your
  room. Detail corrects peaks and dips, Balance also evens out a bright or
  warm recording, and Target brings every record to the same tonal balance.
• A Config tab, showing what is actually on disk. Every other panel shows
  what FluidEQ intends; this one shows what Equalizer APO has got, and the two
  differ exactly when it matters — after a hand edit, another tool, a restore
  from backup. Each output also gets one file FluidEQ creates empty and never
  writes again, applied last, for the APO commands that have no interface here.
• Send a chain to somebody. A whole output's tuning exports to a .fluideq
  file and imports back, always onto the output you are listening to, because
  that is the only one you can judge the result on.
• Media buttons in the title bar — previous, play/pause and next, commanding
  whatever is playing anywhere on the computer rather than only our own player.
  Expect up to a second between the press and the track changing. Windows only.
• Play to a second output at the same time, with a level for each and nothing
  to install. What it is not: the sound arrives about a fifth of a second late,
  so it suits music in another room and not video; it runs only while FluidEQ is
  open; and every mirror carries the correction of the device you are listening
  on, because that is in the sound before FluidEQ sees it.
• A level meter that reads in real decibels, both channels separately.
  Nothing on screen answered "how loud is this, really" before.
• Eight genre voicings — rock, metal, pop, hip-hop and R&B, electronic, jazz,
  classical, acoustic — beside the five that were already there.
• The graph remembers each of its sizes separately, so arranging the plot for
  a video in full screen no longer rearranges it for editing bands afterwards.
  The legend is a set of switches, one per curve, and the View menu can switch
  off the level meter and the title-bar wave.
• The player stays signed in between runs. It ran on a session thrown away
  when the app closed, which made it no use to anyone with an account: a
  signed-out music service shows ads to somebody who pays not to see them. The
  guarantee changes from "nothing is kept" to "nothing is kept that you did not
  ask for, and one press throws all of it away" — that press is a new button in
  the player's toolbar, always visible.

Changed

• Auto-normalise gives volume back as well as taking it away. The preamp
  could only ever attenuate, so a chain that merely cut made everything quieter
  and nothing put it back. It will not invent volume either: a narrow cut
  restores nothing, because away from its centre the chain never moved.
• Smart EQ measures the record, not what you have already done to it. It
  treated everything it heard as correctable, so it could not see past a cut —
  a range dropped 20 dB by mistake hid the very evidence that the cut was wrong.
• Loudness has been removed. It was an EQ curve wearing the name of something
  Equalizer APO cannot do: a loudness control on an amplifier raises perceived
  level, and APO has filters and nothing else. Measured, it lifted the ends by
  4.5 dB, the preamp reserved 4.1 dB against that boost, and the midrange ended
  five decibels down — turning it on made things quieter. The equal-loudness
  voicing curve stays, being the same idea stated honestly.
• Spotify and SoundCloud have gone, and Suno is being tried. A button leading
  to a page that does not play is worse than no button. Spotify signed in,
  browsed and searched perfectly and never played a note, its audio being
  encrypted with a system this runtime has no decoder for; SoundCloud refused a
  sign-in by all four of its routes without producing a single error anywhere we
  could see. Suno is on the same terms as everything else: it stays only if it
  works.
• A published correction reaches Equalizer APO as the curve it was published
  as. Some ship as a list of points rather than as filters and APO draws those
  natively, where until now it was FluidEQ's approximation being written out.
  Nothing on screen ever showed the difference — only the file APO reads.
• On startup, FluidEQ can tell which layer wrote what. It used to refuse to
  read a config back at all while any layer was live, because a voicing and a row
  of hand-placed bands looked identical in the text. That refusal now applies
  only to a flat config, and which layers you had switched off comes back too.
• Zoom moves in half steps, about 9.5% a press instead of 20%, because
  settling on a size is what people actually do with it.

Fixed

• A chain somebody sends you can no longer carry code into Windows audio. A
  .fluideq is advertised as a settings file, and the part of it holding your own
  Equalizer APO commands was written into the config word for word — into a file
  included all the way up to APO's own, in a language that can load libraries. An
  imported block is now refused if any line loads code, includes another file, or
  carries a control character that could end one command and start another; the
  rest of the chain still imports, and the panel says what was dropped and why.
• The player no longer writes sign-in addresses to the log. Every address it
  navigated to was recorded whole, and the report-a-problem tool attaches the
  tail of that log and offers to post it publicly. The tail of a sign-in address
  is not a location, it is the credential.
• The player stopped handing a storage permission to anything that asked, and
  an impulse response file name can no longer smuggle a second command past the
  config writer — a newline in a name ends a line in an Equalizer APO config.
• A band drag starts where you grabbed it. Pressing a handle threw the band
  upward before the cursor had moved a pixel, and grabbing one off-centre snapped
  it by however far off you were: it was measured against the drawn curve rather
  than against your pointer, and the two had stopped being the same curve.
• A layer that is switched off stays switched off. Smart EQ preserved the
  voicing, the driver and the headphone correction whether or not you had
  bypassed them, so it looked for shapes that were not in the sound and rebuilt
  the layer you had just switched off inside its own.
• Importing a chain no longer destroys the thing being imported. It dropped
  the headphone correction on the way in, then saved the profile back from what
  was live a moment later.
• Clear on the AutoEQ page clears the correction and leaves your bands alone.
  It flattened every band, which was right back when clearing a reference meant
  undoing the bands it had written — so it wiped a tuning it no longer owned and
  left the correction playing with nothing on screen naming it.
• A strength slider can always be moved. It was disabled while its layer was
  off, which pinned the strength wherever it happened to be. Dragging it brings
  the layer back, dragging it to zero switches the layer off, and switching a
  layer on from zero goes to full.
• The bands do not vanish when every one of them is at zero. A flat chain is
  written as a preamp and no filter lines, because a band at 0 dB does nothing —
  but read back, "no filters" and "no bands" look identical.
• A switched-off equaliser cannot be edited, and neither can the band handles
  with the engine off. Both stayed draggable while looking inert, so you could
  spend a minute shaping a curve connected to nothing.
• The EQ chip is about the bands, which is all it holds now; it was naming
  itself after the headphone model, so one pair of headphones appeared twice in
  the same row. The headphone chip no longer vanishes at zero strength either.
• Opening a dropdown no longer takes the pane's scrollbar with it, freezing
  the panel and letting its content jump sideways into the gutter. The View menu
  measures itself rather than running off the bottom of the screen, and the
  expanded graph has its left edge back.