Reading Maemo Brainstorm I happened upon a complaint: Mediaplayer and other players do not have an equalizer. Though I don’t use equalizers very often, sometimes I did it, and I find a bit upset not having one in such cool device.

Being a MAFW development, I think MAFW can provide this feature. So I made a fork from mafw-gst-renderer, and I’m pleased to announce mafw-gst-eq-renderer, which can be summarized as mafw-gst-renderer + equalizer. It’s totally open, and you can follow its development from gitorious. It must be clear that this plugin is not part of official MAFW, but a community plugin that I did in my free time.

The main goals for this fork were adding equalizing capabilities to mafw-gst-renderer, and providing a graphical equalizer. I think both were achieved.

Both in Gitorious and [Projects Maemo][2 you can find two branches/flavours.

MTR (master branch) is the upstream development: this provides Mafw-Gst-Eq-Renderer-Plugin, which creates a Mafw-Gst-Eq-Renderer source, which is accessed through gsteqrenderer UUID. If you install it in your N900, you’ll have two renderers: the original one (mafw-gst-renderer) and the new one (mafw-gst-eq-renderer).

Unfortunately, Mediaplayer only handles mafw-gst-renderer. If you want to use mafw-gst-eq-renderer instead, you must replace mafw-gst-renderer with the MGR flavour (mafw-gst-renderer branch). It provides the same capabilities as MTR flavour, but inherits the names from mafw-gst-renderer: the plugin provided is named Mafw-Gst-Renderer-Plugin, which creates a Mafw-Gst-Renderer source that can be accessed through gstrenderer UUID. Install this flavour and remove mafw-gst-renderer and Mediaplayer will be able to use the equalizer.

Setting equalizer values is as easy as changing values in GConf. If you’re writting your own mediaplayer, you can provide your own equalizer but reading/writting gconf values. For those that doesn’t have an equalizer (like Mediaplayer) a Control Panel applet is provided. With the applet a set of predefined presets are provided, though applet allow to save user configurations.

My aim is to synchronize this development with original mafw-gst-renderer, integrating all relevant changes whenever new versions are released.

I hope you find this plugin useful.