Audio effects and filters are useful in VLC Media Player if you use it as your standalone music player or as a movie player. The equalizer, compressor and other advanced effects are put in place to help your audio give that crunchy sound that’s music to your ears. You can use VLC’s equalizer to correct the currently playing sound and music across various decibel (dB). There’s also a 2 pass option. You may also find the use of the built-in compressor to lessen the dynamic range between loudest and quietest audio. Furthermore, there’s also a spatializer for surround sound settings.

1. VLC media player. VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. Plays everything - files, discs, webcams, devices, and streams. Plays most codecs with no codec packs needed - MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, MKV, WebM, WMV.
2. VLC media player requires Mac OS X 10.7.5 or later. It runs on any 64bit Intel-based Mac. Previous devices are supported by older releases. Note that the first generation of Intel-based Macs equipped with Core Solo or Core Duo processors is no longer supported.

If you would like to dig further into the audio filters, there are more options in the advanced settings. You will find filter settings related to audiobar graph, compressor, delay, equalizer, gain, headphone effect, mono, parametric equalizer, remap, scaletempo, spatializer, stereo enhancer and volume normalizer. These advanced settings make it seem that VLC is a total rockstar in audio settings. But a normal user won’t be using most of them. Only a sound engineer will know how to make use of all these options. So, this post is to help you find VLC’s built-in audio effects.

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The Most Used Audio Effects and Filters

It consists of Equalizer, Compressor, and Spatializer. To access it, go to Tools > Effects and Filters or press the shortcut key CTRL + E.

As shown in the screenshot above, it is the first tab in the effects option. There are three areas:

• Equalizer: Enable it and you can load a preset from pre-built ones like Dance, Rock, and Techno (perfect for your music tastes). You can also manually drag the sliders and enable the 2 Pass filter.
• Compressor: Enable and use it like the equalizer.
• Spatializer: It’s the same, enable and drag the sliders to fit your taste.

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The Super-Basic Audio Effects

These are just related to volume:

• Go to Tools > Preferences [CTRL + P].
• Switch to Audio.

You will find options to enable audio, reset audio levels, enable/disable time stretching audio, normalize volume to a certain level, choose the replay gain mode, enable/disable Dolby Surround for your speakers as well as your headphones, select audio visualizations and set the preferred audio language.

The Advanced Audio Effects

If the compressor and the spatializer overwhelmed you then you should not mess with the advanced audio effects. But for those who dare, follow these steps:

• Go to Tools > Preferences [CTRL + E].
• Click the All radio button to reveal Advanced Preferences.

You will find a whole lot of options grouped under the heading Audio.

There are some basic looking options at the base level Audio. Expand Filters and you will find options like Parametric Equalizer, Remap, and Scaletempo. You will also notice the previously discussed Equalizer, Compressor, and Spatializer.

There are also more like Output modules under which you will find DirectX, File and WaveOut settings. There’s also Speex resampler and SRC resampler. And finally, there are Visualizations.

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The Graphic Equalizer and other in-player options are useful when playing media. It can be brought up from the interface itself. We have to go to More Options to bring up settings like Equalizer, Playback speed, Sleep timer, and others. VLC for Android has a number of settings and options. The way they are accessed can be divided into 2 categories. The first one is reached from ☰ Menu > Settings. It contains the longest list of preferences for the app. The second one is the options accessible when the media files are open. Both the video as well as the audio player interface has the More options button. It is represented by the three dots or ellipses shown either horizontally ⋯ or vertically ⋮. The video player interface seems to line the ellipses horizontally and the audio player has it vertically arranged.

How to Access Graphic Equalizer and Other Options

In the Video Player

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This applies to the video player interface (☰ Menu > Video). The full list of options we can access are graphic equalizer, sleep timer, playback speed, jump to time, equalizer, play as audio, pop-up player, repeat mode, A-B repeat, and Save Playlist. When a video is open, there are a couple of buttons in the bottom part of the screen. If they are not showing, a simple tap on the display will bring it up in the lower part of the screen. Tap on the ellipses ⋯ and the options shown in the screenshot will display.

Tap on the Equalizer and it will display an on-screen four-band graphic equalizer.

In the Audio Player

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It can get confusing to access the options and subsequently the equalizer in the audio player interface (☰ Menu > Video). We have to be in the full player interface. As for the video, it switches to the full interface automatically. The music player is minimized to the bottom part of the screen. There will be the song name and details scrolling down there. A pause/play button will also be there.

We have to tap, hold and drag the player from the bottom toward the top. Only then, we can say that we are in the full audio player interface. Once in the full interface, we will see a number of vertical ellipses ⋮ as they are against every media file. What we need to use is the one on the topmost part. It is there on the top-right of the full player interface.

Vlc Player Equalizer Machine

Once we tap on ⋮, the six options that are displayed are Sleep timer, Playback speed, Jump to Time, Equalizer, A-B repeat, and Save Playlist.

Tap on Equalizer to pull up the Graphic Equalizer. It will display above the player’s current interface.

Using the Graphic Equalizer

The equalizer in VLC for Android is a 10-band Graphic Equalizer. It supports 31 Hz, 63 Hz, 125 Hz, 250 Hz, 500 Hz, 1 kHz, 2kHz, 4kHz, 8kHz, and 16 kHz. We might not see all these 10 sliders at once, It should be scrolled, side-by-side, within the on-screen equalizer. With these 10 audio spectrums and a list of presets, the audio output can be configured. The sliders can be dragged manually or we can choose these presets-Flat, Classical, Club, Dance, Full bass, Full bass and treble, Full treble, Headphones, Large Hall, Live, Party, Pop, Reggae, Rock, Ska, Soft, Soft rock, and Techno. The last one, New, allows us to create our custom preset.

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