Releases · thefreshoffice/omarchy-speaker-calibrator

Speaker Calibrator measures your laptop's speakers with a microphone and corrects their sound. Version 1.2.0 is the biggest update so far. There was no public 1.1.0: everything planned for it is in this release.

The three big changes

1. Share your calibration, and use one that someone else made

If you have the same laptop as someone else, you have the same speakers. So one good measurement can help everyone with that model.

Share with one button. "Share this calibration with everyone" sits in the main panel. The first press shows you exactly what would be sent, and sends nothing. The second press shares it.
Find calibrations for your machine. The panel can look up what other people shared for your laptop model and offer the best ones. You hear one as a preview first, then keep it or go back. You do not need a microphone for this.
A score tells you how much to trust one. Each shared calibration is rated excellent, good, fair or rough, with a number from 0 to 100. A measuring microphone, a repeatable measurement and a check of the result all raise the score.
Your privacy. Nothing leaves your machine until you press a button that says so. A shared calibration contains numbers and the model name of your laptop. It never contains your name, your files, a serial number or any text you typed. Shared calibrations live in a public place anyone can inspect: omarchy-speaker-profiles.

2. No more extra bass add-on to install

Earlier versions needed a separate add-on called bankstown for the "deep bass" effect, which had to be built and installed from outside Omarchy.

That dependency is gone. Deep bass is now made entirely with the sound system Omarchy already has, PipeWire. There is nothing extra to install, nothing to build, and nothing that can break on an update. It sounds the same: it is the same recipe, the one James Calligeros wrote for bankstown, rebuilt from PipeWire's own building blocks and checked against the original.

3. Your calibration can become the official sound of your laptop model

Because everything now runs on PipeWire alone, a calibration no longer depends on this plugin being installed. That makes a new thing possible:

Export as an Omarchy vendor tuning. Omarchy ships ready-made speaker tunings for known laptops. The plugin can now write your calibration in exactly that format, deep bass included, so it can be offered to Omarchy. You can try it first, played the same way Omarchy would install it.
The best shared calibration becomes a tuning automatically. For every laptop model, the public registry turns the best checked calibration into a ready-to-offer Omarchy tuning. A person still has to listen to it on the real hardware before it goes to Omarchy.

In short: measure once, share it, and everyone with your laptop model can get better sound, even people who never install this plugin.

Measuring got much more reliable

It picks the right microphone. Some laptops list an empty headset jack as a microphone, and the plugin used to pick it and then fail. It now chooses the working built-in microphone, says "nothing plugged in" for an empty jack, and falls back to another built-in microphone when one hears nothing.
It sets the volume for you. You no longer adjust levels by hand before measuring. A microphone that is too sensitive is turned down for the measurement and put back afterwards.
It switches off microphone "enhancements" that would distort the measurement, puts them back afterwards, and checks that the microphone responds honestly to louder and quieter sound.
It refuses to measure while music is playing, and tells you why, instead of producing a wrong result.
Apple Silicon Macs running Asahi Linux are supported, and the panel explains how to make the built-in microphones available there.

Better sound

Loudness compensation now follows your real volume, so quiet listening keeps its bass and sparkle.
No more crackle at high player volume. Bass notes could distort when a music player was set above 100 percent. That is fixed.

Good to know

Updating keeps your existing calibration.
The panel's Advanced section is reorganised: the action buttons now sit right under the settings.
For the technically curious, the full list of changes is in the pull requests.