Five workspaces, one listening system
Online Media, EQ, DSP, Library and Karaoke share one transport, one volume and one clear signal story. EQ keeps its bands, headphone corrections, presets and convolution together; under the FluidEQ Engine the DSP rack works on every app.
FluidEQ’s own audio engine runs inside Windows’ audio service, after your sound card’s effects, so the maker’s panel keeps working. Setup asks which engine you want, and the actions menu switches between it and Equalizer APO at any time — one Windows permission and a few seconds of silence, no reboot.
Normalizer, Denoise, Exciter, Bass Forge, Equaliser, Bass Punch, Dimension, Room, Maximizer and Master, in the order their arithmetic belongs. Under the FluidEQ Engine the rack works on every app, with nothing playing in the Library; under Equalizer APO, on audio played inside FluidEQ. The Normalizer levels live audio song by song and remembers the songs it has heard, and Denoise repairs hiss, hum and clicks as they play.
Save and name a complete rack, share it, keep a different profile for each stage, and draw the crossfade curve. The DSP Equaliser adds 112 presets with their own headroom plus imports from Squiglink, AutoEq and Equalizer APO text.
The Room places speakers around your head and plays them through a measured dummy head, so headphones sound like speakers in a space: 24 rooms, from a treated studio to a live venue, each with its speakers where that place would put them. Every channel of a surround stream arrives from its own direction, and a stereo record can be spread around you. Shaping a room, saving it and fitting the head by ear are free.
Coming in v1.8.0Twenty-four rooms, all of them free
Every setting belongs to the device you tuned it on. Plug in your headphones and their tuning comes back; switch to speakers and theirs does. Mapped to the stable Windows endpoint ID rather than the display name, so it survives renames and re-plugs.
Each layer stays its own part of the chain, so switching one off leaves it out instead of clearing it. Press the switch again and exactly the same thing comes back — after a restart too. Every correction has a strength, because half of a measured fix is a reasonable thing to want.
A menu on the Bands toolbar sets how strongly your EQ and your curves apply — Normal, Studio ×1.5 or ×2 — how Q behaves as gain grows, curve smoothing and, under the FluidEQ Engine, minimum or linear phase. Save a band layout’s frequencies and Q under a name and bring it back on any output; designs never store gains. A band can be switched off without being lost.
With no band selected, the equaliser shows three knobs the way an amplifier has them. Each moves its own third of the spectrum smoothly, across every band at once, and Ctrl+click puts that third back to flat.
6,229 headphones and 12,594 published curves ship offline from OPRA, the community directory of headphone EQ profiles, grouped by brand and credited to whoever measured them. For anything not in it, a Squiglink export comes in as EQ bands or as a curve with its own strength and switch. A correction is a layer of its own, so clearing your bands never throws it away with them.
Measures what is actually coming out of your output and flattens what it hears. As a mode it keeps going — measure, move a fraction of the way, measure again — so one track's emphasis and the next one's cancel out and only what every record agrees on survives.
Music, movies, games, speech and late night — the first three also as a Room copy — plus 81 chains tuned by music style, each with the bass, the exciter, the width and the compression chosen for that style rather than a curve alone. Every one is measured and levelled, so switching changes the character and not the volume.
Give each game a preset of its own. When the game comes to the front, FluidEQ switches to that sound and keeps it until you close the game, whatever you alt-tab to in between, then puts back what you had. Games are found in Steam, Epic, EA, GOG, Ubisoft, Battle.net and Xbox, or picked from any program that is running.
A measured impulse response applied ahead of everything else — verified minimum-phase responses from the AutoEq catalogue, or any WAV of your own. It has a switch of its own now, so trying the room without it is one press.
Every layer contributes to a single preamp value derived from the real combined response, so stacking a preset on a convolution cannot clip you. It gives volume back as well as taking it away — though it will not invent any, because away from a narrow cut the chain never moved.
Both channels separately, in true dBFS — nothing on screen answered "how loud is this, really" before. The title-bar wave draws the same measurements ten different ways, and the graph legend is a set of switches, one per curve.
Under Equalizer APO, a Config tab shows what APO has actually got, not what FluidEQ intends — and the two differ exactly when it matters, after a hand edit or another tool. Each output also gets a file FluidEQ creates empty and never touches again, applied last, for APO commands with no interface here.
Point it at a folder and FluidEQ walks it for music and video, reading tags, cover art, durations and bitrates into an index it remembers between runs. Browse by album, artist, song or video, as a dense sortable list, a grid of covers, or a Cover Flow you sweep with the wheel. Double-click and what you were looking at becomes the queue, with a transport at the foot of the window that stays there on every tab. Cover art comes from the file itself or a cover beside it — nothing is fetched, and no album name leaves the machine.
Library, Karaoke and Online Media share one transport and one volume instead of playing over one another. Starting one stops the other FluidEQ players; if you choose, it can pause players elsewhere in Windows too. Previous, Play/Pause and Next sit on the taskbar button, even while FluidEQ is minimized.
Open a song and its lyrics — LRC, eLRC or UltraStar — and FluidEQ builds a stage: words timed to the track, a pitch lane showing whether you are high, in tune or low, a melody guide tone, guitar chords estimated from the backing track itself, and a review afterwards naming the parts worth practising. Drop in a whole folder and same-name files pair into a playlist. Ctrl+F goes full screen. Your microphone is analysed on your own machine, never recorded and never played back through your speakers.
The tab plays the audio you give it: no vocal removal, no key or tempo change. Splitting a song into voice and backing is the Maker’s job, on the card beside this one.
When a song has no karaoke file, the Maker builds one out of the song alone. It can split the track into voice and backing and keep both with the draft, each with its own level. The words are transcribed off the recording — Whisper large-v3-turbo, told which language rather than guessing — or pasted in and kept. Timing is tapped by ear, line by line and then word by word, and the melody is read off the recording into notes you can hear, split, retune or add to by hand. Transcription downloads its model the first time; everything else runs here.
Your gaming PC, your work laptop and the media box all play into the headset on this one, over your own network: Float32 PCM, AES-256-GCM on every packet, private LAN only. Music and Game/Video priorities trade buffer for delay. The pairing survives closes and reboots.
The receiver’s bar shows what each sender is playing, named after that computer, and its buttons press the sender’s own player. Pausing keeps the song on the bar to resume. Smart EQ recognises the shared song. One player at a time works across the wire, in both directions and among several senders.
Play your headset and speakers at the same time, each with its own EQ and the profile picker right below it. Game/Video keeps a small buffer that catches up after a stall; Music keeps more playback reserve. No extra routing driver is needed.
Living scenes drawn on your graphics card, where the bass, the beat and the treble each move something different. One searchable picker holds the 28 free styles and the Plus visualizers, and the window can take a scene’s colours or its light.
Describe a scene to your own AI assistant, paste FluidEQ’s prompt, and watch it come alive on your music as the files are saved — test signals, a live code pane and scene settings on one page. Publish to the gallery, share it as a file, or open one of FluidEQ’s own scenes to see how it is made.
A Plus visualizer behind your desktop icons — a different one on each monitor, moving with the music or calmly on its own. It pauses for full-screen apps, a locked PC and, if you choose, battery power, and comes back the next time FluidEQ starts.
Your keyboard, mouse, mousepad, headset and stand light up with the visualizer on the graph, through Windows Dynamic Lighting and Razer Chroma: Scene, Colour wave, Spectrum or Beat ripple for each visualizer, each device tuned on its own, and a live preview of your own desk.
Help → Forum brings FluidEQ’s GitHub Discussions into the app. Anyone can read; sign in with GitHub to post and reply under your own name — no FluidEQ account needed, and everything posted is public on GitHub.
Black is the default: a true black floor, surfaces a few values above it, hairline edges and an ice-blue accent that stays cool beside the rainbow. Every window and every drawing follows. Ocean, the original look, is one pick away in the pulse-icon menu.
Every label, hint, error and tooltip is translated — with a test that fails the build when one falls behind English. The installer offers a language too, preselecting your Windows one.
No virtual audio device, no telemetry, and no account needed for the free app.
New in v1.7.4
FluidEQ now shapes everything the computer plays, and FluidEQ Plus arrives with visualizers drawn on your graphics card. Swipe through what changed, then read every line of it.
Parametric bands and live response
The Maximizer, in the DSP rack
Your music, by album
Online Media, inside FluidEQ
Karaoke, with a pitch lane
The Plus Studio
Dynamic Lighting, following the scene
Setup asks how FluidEQ should process your sound — the FluidEQ Engine, recommended, or Equalizer APO, bundled — and Windows asks for permission once. You can switch later from the actions menu.
Choose the device at the top right. Headphones, speakers, a USB DAC, anything Windows lists as an output endpoint.
There is no save step. Every edit attaches itself to the output you are listening on, and comes back when that output does.