FluidEQ 2.0 is a new window around a rebuilt sound.
The window stands on one open floor, in the colours of a new icon. The theme
is one slider, Brightness, from near-black to a light ocean blue, and a Plus
visualizer can lend the window its colours or play behind the whole app while
the panes float on it as glass. Dialogs and menus share one material, and one
switch folds everything into the Compact player — the classic amp, or on the
Backdrop a player of glass over the visualizer.
The sound was rebuilt preset by preset. Every music style is a whole chain,
its bass, air and width chosen for that style, measured and levelled so
switching changes the character and never the volume, and each explains
itself: what the style asks for and why every point on its curve is where it
is. On the FluidEQ Engine your curve plays exactly as drawn all the way to the
top, switching presets crossfades instead of crackling, every edit is heard
the moment you make it, and Auto normalize lands on the new level in one
step. Dimension now widens even a mono record.
The graph reads the sound the way studio tools do: twelve professional views,
among them Analyzer, Spectrogram, Third-octave RTA, Peak & average, Waterfall,
Stereo & loudness and Oscilloscope, on scales that hold still, with the live
sound measured 80 dB deep and down to 10 Hz, so what you see is what is
playing.
Every one of the graph's forty looks now draws on your graphics card at your
screen's own rate, Plus visualizers can be real 3D worlds that dance to the
song and throw sparks from your mouse, the Room has twenty-four rooms, free
for everyone; games get their own sound; the Library keeps even a huge
collection on disk and opens it at once; the Studio opens with a free trial;
and Help answers questions in your own words.
1.7.5 and 1.8.0 were never released; everything they carried is here.
A new look
- A new look for the whole window. The panes no longer sit in cards: they
stand on one floor, parted by fine lines. On the equaliser's pages the graph
stands at the top, under the section tabs and the title, and the bands'
sliders share its width, each in a place of its own: dragging a band's
frequency on the graph leaves its slider where it is, and two bands trade
places only when one passes the other. The header's wave lost
its box and keeps only the app's rounded corners, the menus lost their
rainbow edge, and the tooltips are FluidEQ's
own. The boxes on every page — the DSP stage, the empty Library, Share
Audio's roles, the karaoke pitch lane and the whole Karaoke Maker, Studio,
the gallery — lost their grey fill too and stand on the floor as the panes
do, and every dialog is one material: the menus' floor at 95%, the same fine
edge and corner, and no rainbow round it.
- The theme is a slider. Light and Dark became one slider, Brightness,
from near-black at the left to a light ocean blue at the right, and every
step between them is a theme: the window follows the thumb as it moves. The
old Ocean theme stands three quarters of the way along, which is where
anyone who had chosen it finds it. The menu behind the pulse icon has it as
Brightness, as Window colours does, and the Compact player's menu as its
theme, Dark to Light.
- The colours match the icon. The accent is the cyan at the middle of the
icon's wave, at every Brightness alike, and the filled buttons, the
switches, the power key and the bar under the open tab run aqua to azure the
way the wave does.
- A new app icon. The wave, glossier, on a dark tile, in Lagoon's
colours with an edge to match.
- The title is alive. When FluidEQ opens, the wave in its logo draws
itself and the name rises letter by letter; after that a pulse of light runs
along the wave every few seconds. "Fluid" is white, and "EQ" and the logo's
edge and wave are in the window's colours — the accent, a visualizer's
colour or the Rainbow palette; the dialogs keep the app icon as it is.
- Rainbow mode is on from the start, and it is Lagoon. Aqua, cyan, sky,
azure and a soft periwinkle — the icon's own colours — where it used to run
red to violet, and there is nothing to unlock any more: the switch on the
signal, the What's new slide and the offer in the Support dialog are gone,
and Normal or Rainbow is a switch under the sliders in Window colours and
under Brightness in the app menu, and a pill on the wave in the title bar.
The window takes a little of it too: the panes lean toward its sky.
- Window colours, by name. The button beside Auto on the graph says what a
Plus visualizer does to the window — Theme, Colours, Ambient or Backdrop —
and opens all four, each with a line on what it does, under three sliders.
Brightness is the theme's own slider: with the theme it goes from
near-black to the light ocean blue, and while a visualizer lends the window
its colours it goes from their darkest, never black, to their lightest.
Transparency is how much of the visualizer shows through the panes on the
Backdrop, and stands dimmed in any other mode. Both are marked at a
quarter, a half and three quarters, and the thumb falls into each mark.
Daylight is the visualizer's time of day, from night to full day, and two
switches under the sliders can set it for you: Daylight follows Brightness,
on in a new install, and Daylight follows the clock — night until 05:30,
full day from 08:00 to 17:30, night again from 20:00. With both off,
Brightness changes only the window and the scene keeps the Daylight you
gave it. A new install opens at 50% Brightness and 50% Transparency, with a
Plus visualizer on the Backdrop; the full app and the Compact player each
keep their own, and Brightness follows the hand without the window holding
it back.
- Pointer sparks. Move the mouse across a Plus visualizer and it throws
what it is made of — sparks, petals, snow, embers — in a trail behind the
pointer, with a burst wherever you click. They are on in a new install, and
one switch turns them off or on for every visualizer: Pointer sparks, in
Window colours under Rainbow mode. The Studio's stage always shows them, so
a scene's maker can shape what it throws.
- Backdrop. The fourth mode puts the Plus visualizer behind the whole
window, the graph still its frame, and the panes and everything on them let
it show through. Menus do not: every menu stands at 95% whatever the
Transparency, where one opened from a see-through pane used to go
see-through with it.
- The Backdrop floats the panes. On the equaliser's page the title bar and
the player bar run to the window's edges, and the side column, the sound
panel and the bands stand on the visualizer as rounded panes of glass with
room around them. Folding the sound panel leaves only its button, and the
graph and the bands take the room it gave up.
- The Backdrop stays behind every page. With a Plus visualizer on the
Backdrop, going to the Library, Karaoke or any other page keeps it playing
behind the window; in Colours and Ambient it rests off the graph's page, so
nothing is spent drawing what nobody can see. Switching between Colours,
Ambient and Backdrop, or into full screen and back, moves the same
visualizer instead of loading it again.
- A Plus visualizer lends the whole window its colours. Five are read
from the visualizer itself as it plays. In Normal the buttons, the switches
and the "EQ" of the title take its first colour and what is switched on its
second; in Rainbow all five run across the bands, the title and the lit
controls. The app's icon stays its own.
- A Plus visualizer fills the graph. It runs up behind the section tabs
and the title, and down to the divider, with no band of floor around it.
- Cards in the window's colour. The Library's tiles, its song list and
Up next, each game's row, the outputs in the engine's config, the
headphone picker, Share Audio's roles and the Studio's AI card are filled
now — a gentle step above the page, never lighter than a pane, with the
accent glowing in from the corner, in the theme's colours or a
visualizer's — where they were outlines or slabs of grey slate. The small
graphs (the headphone correction, the driver sketch, the DSP's plots, the
Share Audio monitor) stand in a darker well, so their lines read on the
darkest thing around them. What holds them, like the grid round the tiles, keeps
its outline, and a control that cannot be used is an outline with dimmed
text instead of a lighter slab.
- The expanded graph is square. Its card and the picture under it have
square corners, as the column they cover does.
- The graph's paper is plain. The shaded bands across its top and foot,
past ±20 dB, are gone; the ±20 dB rule still marks where the scale
tightens.
- One knob, and sliders that feel right. Every knob in the app is the same
lit ring with its reading under it, and the reading can be typed into. The
EQ sliders have round or rectangular handles, as you choose, a core lit
with each band's level, a detent at the centre and a snap at 0 dB. A new
install gives the full app rectangular handles and the Compact player round
ones; a player that never had a choice of its own takes the full app's.
- Every dialog on one frame. Every dialog and notice stands on the same
frame with the same close button, and the keyboard stays inside a dialog
while it is open.
- The sound panel folds to a rail from a button at its top left, the
settings pages and the panel's sections stand on soft cards, as does the
graph under Plus and the forum, lined up with theirs, and every shade's
lines, text and outlines were set for contrast — the darkest end is truly
black. The Bands page has its title back, and the curves a band
layout carries are in one Curves dropdown on its bar.
- Small things made clearer. The info mark beside a preset's name and on
the DSP page glows like the switches, Game mode's pad reads as a gamepad,
and a visualizer's icon no longer sits on a black square.
- On a Mac, FluidEQ looks like a Mac app. The Mac's own close, minimise
and zoom buttons stand in the title bar and in the player's strip, with the
Mac's corner and edge, text drawn the way the Mac draws it, and the green
button and a double-click on the title bar doing what your Mac is set to do.
The Compact player
- The Compact player. The switch beside Help in the title bar turns the
window into a player a few hundred pixels wide: the song and its clock at
the top, then decks you open and close — the equaliser, a visualizer and Up
Next — the window growing and shrinking by what each takes. The equaliser
comes along whole: presets, the band layouts, EQ mode, Smart EQ, Clear EQ,
and the bands or the Bass, Mid and Treble dials. The visualizer plays any of
the graph's looks and fills the screen on a double-click. Up Next shows where
you are in the queue and the time left in it, and music files dropped on it
join the Library and the queue in one gesture. The player remembers its own
size and place, can stay on top of other windows, and folds to one line on a
double-click of its strip; its menu opens the full app on any page. If it
ever ends up off the screen, FluidEQ's icon in the tray has Recover the
window.
- On the Backdrop the player turns to glass. With a Plus visualizer on the
Backdrop, the Compact player is the visualizer itself, edge to edge, with
the song in large type, the controls in a glass dock, and the equaliser and
Up next in a sheet at its foot; in every other mode it is the classic amp,
with its LED clock and lamps. The full app, the classic amp and the glass
player each keep a window size of their own, and a switch from one player
to the other keeps the window hidden until the other has drawn. The classic
amp's colour key opens the same Window colours menu as the graph's button.
- Where the sound goes. Under the song one strip shows where the sound
comes from, FluidEQ, and the output it reaches, with the output's rate and
layout on the FluidEQ Engine, and a light runs along it while sound is
playing. The source opens its page, FluidEQ opens the equaliser, and Game
mode stands beside it with the delay it cuts.
- The Compact player keeps a theme of its own. Its menu has the theme's
slider too, remembered apart from the full app's, so the app can stay dark
while the player sits light beside your work.
- The player's visualizer has the graph's switches. Changing looks by
itself, a scene's colours on the window, the desk lights and the desktop
background, in the same order as on the graph: beside the picture when the
player is two columns wide, and in the corner of the equaliser's screen
when it is one.
- The volume is your computer's own. FluidEQ's separate volume level is
gone: the slider on the player, on both bars and in Karaoke is Windows'
volume, so it sets the level of everything the computer plays and stays
where you leave it. Every player in FluidEQ plays at full level into it.
Presets and the equaliser
- Presets that sound like the music. Every preset was measured again and
levelled, so switching changes character and not volume. Each music style is
a whole chain — its bass, its air and its width chosen for that style, and
only where they suit it. Music, Movie and Gaming each have a Room copy, with
five measured bands in front of the Room so the chain sounds like itself
through it (a record leaves a room about 3 dB louder and 3 to 4 dB darker
than it went in; those bands are that difference).
- Every music style explains itself. Each genre preset has notes: what the
style asks for, why each point on its curve is where it is, and what every
effect in its chain does or why it is left off, with how loud it plays
against DSP Off. They open from About on the DSP page, from the i on the
preset's chip under Also applied, and beside the list while you point at a
preset in either picker, and the points they explain stand on the preset's
curve on the graph. Every preset was checked against its notes and does what
they say: a style mixed with its bass in the centre plays it centred below
the point that style names, and no curve lifts where its style keeps things
flat.
- A Ballad preset, with the pop styles: the slow song of every
catalogue, pop, rock, soul and Latin alike. The voice stays close and clear — a little
warmth and presence, the low-mid mud and the sibilance eased rather than
brightened — the bass is centred, and a light, slow ceiling keeps the
quiet verses quiet. Nothing is added that the record does not have: no
harmonics on the esses, no invented sub. Its notes explain each choice,
as every style's do.
- None is one choice, first in both pickers. Picked on the equaliser or on
the DSP page, it takes the whole preset away — its tone and every stage of
its chain — and it stands above everything in both lists, the chains you
star included. Reset on the DSP page puts the Default chain back, tone and
all, instead of an empty rack that sounded like None.
- A preset's tone plays in the main equaliser. It used to sit inside the
rack, ahead of its compressor and limiter, where on the FluidEQ Engine Pop
against Metal was barely a difference at all. It is now the Preset layer of
the main equaliser on both engines: it shows on the graph as a curve of its
own, named after the preset, with a strength you can turn down, and its ×
takes the whole preset away. The rack keeps what supports the tone.
- Width you can hear, even on a mono record. Dimension's Spread now makes
width out of the middle of the mix, above the bass, so a mono recording or a
voice dead centre opens out too; before, the stage could only stretch the
width a record already had, and a mono one stayed mono. Someone listening
in mono still hears exactly the same, and the bass stays in the centre. The
Movie preset and the Dimension card's Gaming profile keep the centre
focused, so dialogue and a footstep straight ahead stay where they are.
- Shape a bell across several bands. Select bands on the graph, hold Ctrl
and drag one of them: it becomes the top of a bell and the others follow
its curve, less the further they are from it, without moving along the
frequencies. The bell is as wide as that band's Q, so Ctrl+scroll widens or
narrows it, and letting go of Ctrl mid-drag moves the group as one again.
A Ctrl-click on a selected band still takes it out of the selection.
- Smart EQ measures the song, not what FluidEQ has already done to it. It
used to listen after every layer and the DSP rack and keep correcting its
own previous answer, so the same song never got the same curve and the
rack's colour was "fixed" again on top. It now hears the sound before
FluidEQ touches it: the Library's own input while the Library plays, and
the playing app's sound otherwise. The same song always gets the same
correction, a new song starts fresh, and the correction is replaced rather
than piled up. The graph's gap bars and countdown are gone, and the Smart
EQ button is never greyed out; its bubble says when it cannot hear the
source.
- Bass, Mid and Treble across the whole rack, the way an amplifier has
them, on the main equaliser whenever no band is selected. Each moves its own
third of the spectrum; Ctrl+click puts that third back to flat. They are a
curve of their own — drawn in their own colour, with a chip under Also
applied, and saved with the profile — so turning them never rewrites bands
you tuned by hand. The equaliser now opens with nothing selected, showing
the whole rack.
- A low cut and a high cut on the Tone panel, either side of Bass, Mid
and Treble: off, 12 or 24 dB per octave, at 20 Hz and at 20 kHz. Clear EQ
turns them off with the bands and the Tone.
- The equaliser plays the curve you drew, all the way to the top. On the
FluidEQ Engine a band near the top of the range used to play weaker than the
graph showed — nearly 4 dB short at 20 kHz on a 48 kHz output. It now plays
as drawn. The EQ mode menu's Treble row keeps the old way as Classic, for
your EQ and for headphone corrections separately — Classic is how Equalizer
APO builds a band and how AutoEQ tunes a correction — and the graph draws
whichever one is playing.
- Auto normalize lands on an edit's level in one step. Applying a curve or
moving a band used to drop the volume by the most it could ever need and
climb back slowly, still moving about 2 dB ten seconds later. On the
FluidEQ Engine it now works out the
level the new sound needs from the last ten seconds of music, moves there in
one step, and only fine-tunes after that.
- Edits are heard the moment you make them. On the FluidEQ Engine a band
you drag, a curve you apply or a preset you pick used to wait while that
level was worked out, so a drag was heard three or four times a second and
a preset arrived half a second late. The change now plays straight away and
its level follows a moment later, gliding into place — which also took out
the small click a preset switch made when it turned the volume down. On a
Room preset an edit no longer rebuilds the room either, so a drag there is
as quick as anywhere else.
- The Maximizer lets go without a tick. At the end of every release it
used to jump the last fifth of a decibel in one step: a faint tick after
each peak it held down, clearest a moment after switching to Punch. It now
eases the whole way.
- Linear phase on your EQ and on the curves shares one delay, instead of
adding the two together.
- A twenty-band quick layout, and every layout moved onto the
international standard's frequencies: a band labelled 64 Hz is now the
63 Hz everything else means by it. Bands also open as wide as their spacing
— a thirty-one-band rack no longer has three bands playing the same note,
and a six-band no longer leaves holes between them.
- The EQ sliders keep up with the hand. A drag moves the slider at once
and the graph follows without holding it back; the engine gets the newest
value as soon as it is ready for it. Only the slider being dragged redraws,
where every band and control on the page used to.
- The equaliser shows the output's rate beside its name, as the DSP page
does: the rate Windows runs the output you are listening to at, read again
when the output changes or you come back to the window.
- The FluidEQ Engine has a new build. The copy on your machine is offered
an update the first time you run 2.0.0: one press in the notice, and Windows
restarts its audio itself. Until you take it the equaliser keeps working and
the DSP effects stay off, which is what the "Update engine" card says.
Games
- Every game its own sound. A chain per game — from Steam, Epic Games, EA,
GOG, Ubisoft, Battle.net and Xbox, or any program that is open — switched
the moment the game comes to the front, and kept until the game is closed,
however often you alt-tab. A card on the desktop — on the screen FluidEQ is
on, in the window's own colours — says what was loaded and another what came
back. While a game holds the sound, the player bar names it. The equaliser's
fourth pill is named for what it holds — Game presets.
- Game mode, and the delay you can see. Game mode cuts the delay FluidEQ
adds, for aim and for voice chat, and the Gaming presets turn it on. The EQ
and DSP pages now show the delay the chain adds as measured, broken down by
the effects that add it, and Linear phase says what it costs.
The Room
- Thirteen new rooms, told apart by measurement. Twenty-four in all, each
with its speakers where that place would put them and its own air, and none
of them another one under a different name: every pair is measured against
every other for level, for how wide it sits at the ears, for top against
bottom, and on a surround stream for the centre, a side and a rear against
the front. Three rooms written that week measured as copies of ones already
there and were taken out again.
- The Room's page hides nothing. The rooms are in the same picker every
other stage uses, under Featured, Classic rooms and Yours; what a room is
made of is on the page rather than behind tabs; the room stands on the left
with six bands beside it, and the speaker you pressed has its own pane from
the moment you press it, with its angle as a number you can type.
- The Room is not part of Plus. Shaping a room, saving one, fitting the
head by ear: all of it is open to everybody.
The graph and the visualizers
- The graph opens where it is used. Only the equaliser's Bands page opens
with the graph, above the bands. Every other page — the equaliser's
Presets and Convolution, DSP, Online Media, the Library — opens without
it, and a graph switched on there stands under the page.
- The graph shows the whole spectrum, on scales that hold still. With the
grid on it starts an octave below 20 Hz, where a low cut does its work; with
the grid off it is trimmed to 20 Hz – 16 kHz, where records have sound, so a
full-screen picture has no empty strip down the side. The equaliser's ±20 dB
scale no longer stretches when a curve runs past it: the last tenth at the
top and bottom holds everything out to ±60 dB, compressed, so a curve that
goes further — the final output under a deep preamp or Auto normalize — is
drawn whole instead of cut off flat. The live sound has a scale of its own
on the right, 80 dB deep as a studio analyser draws it, so the top octave
and a high cut show. Frequencies are labelled 10, 20, 50, 100… the way
analysers print them.
- Double-click the graph to fill the screen, Ctrl+double-click to fill the
window, and double-click again to come back from either. Help lists the
graph's keyboard shortcuts.
- Twelve ways to read the sound. The graph's plain drawings gave way to
the views studio tools use: Analyzer, Before & after, Spectrogram,
Third-octave RTA, Peak & average, Waterfall, Stereo & loudness,
Oscilloscope, Mid & side, Note spectrum, Energy bands and Phase history. The
Waterfall is a wireframe surface of the last second and a half, gliding back
from a front edge that follows the music. A look you saved on one of the old
drawings still draws.
- Every look on your graphics card. All forty of the graph's looks now draw
on the engine the Plus scenes run on — the same drawing in the pane, the
expanded view and full screen — at your screen's own refresh rate, where
the standard looks used to be held to 30 frames a second. Changing looks
fades from one to the next, and a look keeps its peaks and particles
through the hand-over.
- Eighteen new visualizers under Scenes. LED wall, Glass towers, Tide,
Halo, Synthwave and Horizon; LED bars with square segments, Neon bars, 3D
bars and Spectrum wave; and Pixel bars, Spark bars, Glitch bars, Halftone,
Bouncing dots, Falling blocks, Fiber optics and Afterglow.
Each moves with the bass, the beat and the treble separately, keeps its
shape upside down and mirrored, and follows the look editor like every
other look: colour by frequency, level or loudness, pieces and gap, filled
or outline, opacity, line width, texture, lit peaks and glow.
- The looks and the level meter wear the window's colours. A look with no
colours of its own draws in the accent and its lighter and darker shades in
Normal, and in the Rainbow palette — Lagoon's or the Plus visualizer's — in
Rainbow. The level meter and the look editor's colours follow the same way.
The meter's ten styles are drawn flat and clean, and the title bar's wave
draws crisp bars on the screen's own pixels.
- Plus scenes turn from night to day with Brightness. Every FluidEQ scene
has a day look, and slides toward it as the window gets lighter.
- A visualizer keeps its subject in view in a narrow window. In the
Compact player and any other narrow window, a Plus visualizer slides its
picture to keep what it is about on screen instead of squeezing it.
- 3D worlds run lighter on laptop graphics. A world no longer spends a
quarter of each frame on work Intel graphics did not need.
- The wave's height and position are kept per view. Set in the graph's
View menu, they are remembered separately for the pane, the expanded view
and full screen, and for each Plus visualizer. The Compact player and the
desktop backgrounds draw a visualizer with its full-screen setting.
- Another player's cover behind the graph. When the sound comes from
Spotify, a browser or any other player, its album art fills the graph
behind the wave in the expanded view and in full screen.
- Visualizers in real 3D. A scene can now carry a 3D world — shapes and
models, materials, lights, reflections on wet floors and water, glow —
standing in front of its painted sky and moving with the music: the kick,
the snare and the hats each their own way, gathering in a build and
breaking on the drop. It goes through the same smoothing, FSR upscaling
and brightness limiter as every scene, everywhere a scene plays — the
graph, the desktop, the lights, the Studio and the gallery — turns with
your mouse where its maker allows, and hands its graphics memory back
while the window is covered. In the Studio a world is a file beside the
scene with its own GLSL and models, and opening one of FluidEQ's scenes
writes its world out for you to look inside. A FluidEQ from before this
plays the same scene without its world.
- Scenes can dance to the song. A scene now hears the tempo and where
each beat and bar falls — a clock that lands on the beat instead of
answering after it — the kick, the snare and the hi-hats apart, how intense
the song is, when it builds and when it drops, where the music sits between
the speakers, and the singer's voice. The AI prompt teaches all of it, so a
scene written from one line can step on the kick and leap at the drop.
- Turn a 3D scene with your mouse. Where its maker allows, drag a scene to
see it from another side, Ctrl+scroll or pinch to move in and out, and press
Reset view for the view it was made with — on the graph, in the Studio and
in the gallery. On the graph a plain drag still selects bands; the right or
middle button turns the scene there. A scene can also answer where you
point and tap.
The desktop, Online Media and Windows
- YouTube, YouTube Music, Twitch and Suno in FluidEQ's colours. Match
FluidEQ's colours, in Online Media's toolbar, puts a site's dark page in the
colour of the card it stands on, its cards, menus and top bar a step
lighter as the app's own are, and its search field and playlist in the
app's outlines. It is on your screen only: text keeps its own colour, and
videos, pictures, ads and logos are never changed. It is on in a new
install and can be switched off, and works in each site's dark mode.
- A Plus visualizer behind Online Media. With a Plus visualizer on the
graph and the site's colours matched, the video's own full screen plays the
visualizer behind the page: the chat, the comments and the suggestions
stand over it, and the video stays solid on top.
- A desktop background keeps its place. It plays on while its replacement
is prepared, pauses while windows cover its whole monitor or a game is in
front, gives the desktop its own wallpaper back while it waits on battery,
and follows the visualizer's settings from the window as you change them.
- The desk lights stay on while FluidEQ runs. Minimised, covered or
behind another app, your devices keep following the scene. They stop only
when you switch them off, pick a look that isn't a Plus one, or close
FluidEQ.
- The desk lights come on as FluidEQ opens, music or not. They used to
wait for sound, and stayed dark while Windows was still opening or
restarting its audio.
- A monitor can follow the graph. Switch on Follow graph when you put a
visualizer on the desktop from the graph or the player, or for each monitor
in the Manage dialog, and that monitor changes to whichever Plus visualizer
the graph shows, whether you picked it or the graph changed looks by itself.
When the graph shows a standard look, the monitor keeps the last Plus
visualizer it had. Follow graph starts on when the visualizer you put on
the desktop is the one the graph shows, and off for any other, so the one
you picked is the one that plays. A monitor that follows the graph wears a
small link mark in both dialogs, and turns from night to day with the
window's Daylight: Brightness, the clock, or your own.
- The desktop dialog chooses the monitors for you. A visualizer no monitor
shows yet starts with your main monitor chosen, and one already on the
desktop starts with its own monitors chosen. The first monitor chosen plays
the visualizer live in the dialog's picture, with the wave it will be set
with, before you set it.
- The window gives way on a small or zoomed-in screen. The graph's
buttons fold onto a second line instead of running off its edge, and the
title bar lets its level meter go first, then moves Help and the Compact
player switch into the actions menu; the tabs and the window's own buttons
always stay.
- Start with Windows. A switch in the actions menu, under Animations,
starts FluidEQ when you sign in. It needs no administrator, and it says so
when Windows' own Startup apps has FluidEQ switched off.
The Library
- The Library keeps your music on disk, not in memory. Songs, albums,
artists and folders are read a page at a time from a database on disk, so a
library of tens of thousands of songs opens at once and costs little
memory. The library you already have moves in by itself the first time 2.0
starts.
- Search inside a folder finds the whole library. Matches in the folder
you are in, and the folders under it, come first under "In ".
Everything else that matches follows under "Everywhere else".
- One Back, and a trail of where you are. Every shelf and view of the
Library shows Back and the path from All music down to the folder you are
in. Switching views inside a folder never leaves you without a way back to
the top.
- The player bar keeps the last thing you played. After a restart, a
closed browser tab, the other computer leaving Share Audio, or Stop, the bar
and the Compact player go on showing the last song — from the Library,
another program or another computer — until something new plays. They used
to say Nothing playing. A click on its title goes to the page that played
it.
Plus and the Studio
- The Studio is part of Plus, and opens with a free trial. Fifteen days,
no card, nothing charged when it ends — for an account created on or after
20 September 2026, the day the offer opened. Somebody without Plus meets a page that
says what the Studio is and how to get in, and names the folder any project
of theirs is sitting in, whole and untouched, for the day they come back to
it.
- Publish a scene, keep FluidEQ free. A scene of yours that is approved
earns the next month of Plus. The account panel shows the month you earned,
counts down its last week and says so on the day it ends: nothing renews
quietly and nothing is charged. A maker whose month has run out can still
publish the next scene, and keeps one project on the bench.
- Every member's scene is held for approval before anyone sees it, and a
new version is published above the highest number that scene was ever out
at, so a number can never come back around. A scene you find wrong can be
reported from the looks menu.
- Your AI can see your scene, and hear the song. Copy the AI prompt in
the Studio and your AI assistant — Claude Code, Codex or another that
speaks MCP — connects to FluidEQ on this computer by itself. It can draw
your scene at any shape and moment, with music or in silence, read why a
scene cannot play, and hear how the song you are playing moves — its
sections, builds, drops, drums and tempo — as numbers, never the sound and
never which song. The switch is on the Studio's card, and nothing of it
leaves your computer.
- The Studio's meters follow the rhythm and the song: the tempo and how
sure it is, a lamp each for the kick, the snare and the hats, a spin the
music winds up, intensity, build and drop, the voice and its note, and
where the music stands left to right. The test music plays a song's shape —
a verse, a build and a drop, the kick on one and three and the snare on two
and four — so a scene's answer to each can be tried.
- The Studio keeps its stage in view. The work on a scene sits in tabs
under the stage, the stage offers Full screen and the grid, and the
Studio's window colours are Theme, Colours and Ambient.
- The Studio shows a scene behind the Compact player from a button on
the stage, so a maker sees how it frames in a narrow window. Each "things in
the window" slider shows the icons of what it moves, and Brightness and the
wave's height snap to 25, 50 and 75%.
- Add to my looks says what it did: a notice under the button says whether
the look was added or updated, and the Studio's notices show above its work
again.
- The Plus terms, third edition. They now cover the approval every
published scene waits for, the free trial, the month an approved scene
earns and the one Studio project a maker keeps without Plus, that a scene
can carry 3D models, and what an AI tool on your computer can see once you
let it look at the Studio's stage. Members who agreed to an earlier edition
are told once, in a small card, what changed.
Help
- Two videos. The guide's first chapter plays a four-minute video of
FluidEQ's first steps, and the FluidEQ Plus chapter a tour of Plus:
Visualizers, the Studio from an idea to a published scene, the desktop
visualizer, Dynamic lighting and the Leaderboard. Both are narrated in
English with captions, streamed from fluideq.com when you press play and
never before; the site shows them too.
- Ask the guide in your own words. Help's search ranks what it finds,
forgives typos and plurals, knows the words people use for things in all ten
languages — "no sound", "limiter", "wallpaper" — and searches the English
guide alongside your own, so an English word finds its chapter too. Each
result quotes the
passage it found with the words marked; the guide takes you there and rings
the control on its picture, and Enter walks to the next match.
- Help shows the 2.0 window, and has a chapter for the Compact player.
Its pictures were taken again at the middle of the Brightness slider, so
one set reads on a dark window and a light one. Help itself is now the book
in the title bar, beside the actions menu.
- Reset all settings. A new item in the actions menu puts every setting
back the way a new install starts. Your EQ, presets, curves, DSP, outputs
and audio engine stay as they are.
Fixed
- A band's fader moves its own band, and stays where you leave it. Turned
with the mouse wheel, the arrow keys or a screen reader, without a click on
the band first, a fader moved whichever band was selected, or none at all.
And the last step of a quick movement could be lost, leaving the sound and
your saved profile a step behind what the fader showed. Each fader now
moves its own band, and the band plays exactly where you left it.
- The graph fades in, and nothing in it slides. Opening a page with the
graph, the grid and the curves used to glide in from the edge, and leaving
full screen squashed the visualizer through each size the window passed on
its way back. The graph now stays out of sight until the window has its
size and fades in there, whole; the grid and the curves take any new size
at once. Showing and hiding the graph still slides the band sliders.
- Your Plus visualizer comes back after a slow moment. When the computer
could not keep up with a visualizer for a while, or it failed to start,
the graph showed its plain look for the rest of that session — and kept the
plain look for good. The next launch tries your visualizer again.
- Every hint is FluidEQ's own, even one that appears under the pointer.
A button that gains a hint while the pointer rests on it — the Gallery's
Add, which becomes Remove once pressed — showed Windows' own tooltip; it is
the app's now, and after a press it waits until you move on.
- A visualizer on the desktop changes with a crossfade. Switching it,
following the graph's automatic switching or saving your scene in the
Studio used to blink the screen dark and cut to the new one; the old
picture now stays until the new one has drawn and fades into it.
- The Studio's edges are solid. The Plus side rail, which opens over the
Studio when folded, is the menus' material now instead of see-through; the
buttons pinned at the foot of the Studio's controls hide what scrolls under
them; and the bar across the top of the Studio is the window's own colour
instead of a lighter band.
- The EQ opens with its sliders at full length on any screen. On a large
screen the bands under the graph used to open squeezed to their shortest,
because the Tone dials there are bigger; the first height of that pane is
now what the bands need, until you move the divider yourself.
- The wave in the title bar follows quiet music. A song played softly, or
at a low Windows volume, used to lie almost flat on the middle line and
jump from frame to frame; it now fills the strip and glides at any volume.
The flat line means real silence, and only once it has lasted half a
second, so the gap between two notes no longer flashes it.
- A Plus visualizer's colours arrive as you choose it, not after it has
loaded — even the first time, before it has ever been measured.
- Automatic switching gives every visualizer its whole turn, counted from
its first frame rather than from the moment it was chosen, so a slow one is
never passed over before it has shown.
- The equaliser's sliders are never cut off at the sides, with the grid on
or off.
- A rack with every effect off plays the sound as it came. Two things
inside it were never shown on any card: a three-band compressor that every
factory preset switched on, and a final limiter with a low-cut filter that
was always on. Both are gone. Switching DSP on with nothing on no longer
changes the sound, and a loud record no longer lights clipping warnings it
did not earn; the Master card shows the true peak instead. Where a chain has
no Maximizer or Master ceiling it can now peak above full scale like any
equaliser, and Auto normalize keeps the headroom, as it does for the main
EQ.
- The Maximizer holds its level instead of pumping. On a dense record its
gain dipped on every kick and sprang back before the next, so the loudness
swung with the beat. It now settles at the reduction the record keeps asking
for and stays there, still catching every peak the moment it comes: the
swing is about a third smaller, and the ceiling is exactly where it was.
- The queue no longer skips a song at the end of a crossfade, Next is
instant, and the seek bar no longer jumps back and forth after you drag it.
Getting the next song ready used to reset the effects under the song that
was playing twice a track — a small hiccup mid-song — and no longer does.
- Up Next keeps the order you give it. A song dragged to a new place went
back to its old one when the next song started, and a song taken out came
back; and after taking any song out, the whole queue was gone at the next
launch.
- Switching to the player and back no longer shows a stretched window, and
neither does the player's picture going to full screen: the window changes
size out of sight and comes back drawn, full screen fades in from black,
and a view that measures the sound keeps its grid there.
- The player's visualizer, two columns wide, reads like the graph. A view
that measures the sound shows the graph's grid and scales there, and Ctrl+G
shows and hides them as it does on the graph; the level meter runs across
the whole picture; a view's legend sits under the picture instead of behind
the look picker; and full screen has no frame around the picture.
- The output level meter no longer slows the window. It printed its scale
afresh on every frame, about a quarter of a processor core's work; it now
prints it only when something on it changes.
- The graph's curve chips are in the order of the chips under Also
applied: the headphone correction first, then the convolution, the
preset, the Tone and your EQ, with the final output after them.
- The Compact player recovers from an error. Its recovery screen said it
was reloading and never did; it now reloads, and comes back as the player.
- The Studio's colours stay on the Studio's page. Going to the player or
another page from the Studio, the window takes the colours of the
visualizer that is playing instead of the Studio's scene.
- Scene icons show in the player's look picker, where they were blank.
- The desk lights switch on the graph shows its light only while it is
on. Switched off, it drew the same rays as on.
- A visualizer looks the same wherever it plays. Your own scene on the
desktop was treated as another member's and left a ghost of each frame
behind it, while the Studio showed it clean. The graph, the gallery, the
Studio, the player and the desktop now play every scene by the same rules.
The desktop also follows the music on every frame it draws, where it used
to move in steps thirty times a second.
- Another member's scene that flashes is calmed, not smeared. The flash
protection used to blend the previous picture into fast motion, which showed
as a double image. Now it only dims the patches that flash, and everything
else moves as drawn.
- FluidEQ fits a screen scaled to 200%, such as a Mac showing it at
1440 × 852: the title bar and the playback bar are shorter, the DSP pages'
pictures fit beside their controls, the cover flow shows more songs, and
Karaoke's pitch lane keeps its notes readable.
- Repeat One repeats the song again in the Library.
- An EQ switched off from its chip comes back on when you clear its bands.
Switched off from Also applied and then cleared with Clear EQ, the chip's ×
or the Squiglink panel, it stayed off for good with the band editor greyed
out.
- Resizing the window no longer throws it into the recovery screen, and its
edges no longer show a tint of the wallpaper behind it.
- The title bar makes room for itself. The tagline and the little creature
leave as soon as the signal would have to narrow, in every language. The signal
and the meters no longer stay frozen after you come back from the Compact
player.
- Smart EQ's speech bubble no longer covers Game mode, the delay or the page
title. It finds room above or below its button at any window width.
- Each DSP card is one colour. Every box of controls or readings on a
card, the phase meters on the EQ and Dimension cards among them, wears the
card's own colour with a thin edge, in both themes, instead of two or three
shades of slate; the graphs keep their darker ground. The scopes' trails
fade into the card instead of leaving the dial's ghost behind them, and the
line under the DSP title is one strip with its button at the end.
- The Denoise graph shows its numbers. It printed {{count}} and {{hz}}
instead of how many clicks it repaired and the hum's frequency, in every
language.
- The DSP page's header keeps to one row on a window 1100 pixels wide and
up: the presets no longer leave their file actions on a line of their own,
and the Dimension card's legend no longer stands across the header.
- Renaming a profile says why a name was refused in your language, and the
Config page calls the preset's layer a preset, not a voicing.
- FluidEQ says when it is not reaching the output, instead of looking
switched on while nothing goes through it, and the EQ page stops taking
changes the engine cannot hear, the way it does when FluidEQ is off.
- A headset connected after FluidEQ started is no longer reported as out of
its reach while FluidEQ is processing it. A Bluetooth headset switched to
mid-session was marked in red, and the EQ page stopped taking changes, over
an equaliser that was working.
- Switching output keeps the preset you picked. The new output's profile
used to bring back whichever preset it had been saved with, so the preset
picker named one preset while its chip under Also applied named another.
- Changes no longer click. Every change the FluidEQ Engine hears — a band
moved, the preamp — now fades in over a fiftieth of a second with each band
carrying on where it was, where a big move used to click. Dragging a band
through 0 dB no longer clicks either, and switching presets no longer
crackles: where a preset holds the sound back by a different amount, the
sound crosses from the old preset to the new one, and the effects a preset
switches on or off glide in and out.
- A headphone correction plays as published, even where it goes past the
sliders' ±20 dB, and the preamp you set by hand now reaches −60 dB to hold
it, as Auto normalize already could. A deep preamp is no longer put back to
−20 dB after a restart.
- The engine does less work. With no headphone curve on it no longer
spends two thirds of its effort on a filter doing nothing, the headphone
curve in minimum phase adds about 13 ms of delay instead of 55, and silence
from a paused player no longer costs thirteen times what the equaliser does.
- The Target button on the EQ page no longer flashes the wrong look for a
moment at launch.
- Leaving a Plus visualizer no longer flashes the screen white. Pressing
Back, going to another page or starting a scene on the graph showed one
white frame where the visualizer had been.
- The graph's View menu is never cut off at the top. It opens clear of
the bar above the graph and scrolls inside itself when it is taller than
the room.
- Help's pictures point at things, the way a printed manual does. Each
control on a picture has a numbered circle beside it and a line to it, with
the same numbers in the list underneath, in the app and in the printed guide
alike, and the pictures were retaken against the window as it is now.
- Every language uses the names on its own screen. Labels that stayed in
English are translated; Smart EQ, the Studio, the Exciter, Karaoke and the
Equalizer APO engine are called in every sentence what the screen calls
them; Portuguese is Brazilian Portuguese throughout; Russian writes decibels
as дБ; and the theme picker calls its two themes Light and Dark.
- "Voicing" is gone for good. The equaliser's picker became Presets, and a
preset's curve on the graph, its chip under Also applied and the driver
list's hint say Preset too.
- The engine finds the place a sound card actually loads it from. Windows
keeps an effect in one of eight places and which one a driver reads is
written down nowhere, so FluidEQ steps through them on the machine itself.
It was stepping over three of them, and on a Bluetooth headset it came to
rest in a place that endpoint is never read from.
- The Room is as loud at 192 kHz as at 48, a flush of Windows' audio
pipeline no longer puts a hole in it, and the room you draw is drawn to
scale: a speaker further away than the room is wide stands outside its
walls, where it is. Saved rooms keep every speaker's setting, mutes
included.
- The Master's loudness target works everywhere, not only on tracks played
from the Library, and its readout says why it reads +0.0.
- The DSP page comes back to the stage you left it on, instead of always
the Normalizer, and no longer shows a "System-wide" pill that told you
nothing the page did not.
- Eight controls that took an answer and did nothing with it are either
wired up or gone, and three more are no longer drawn on the screens that
cannot read them.
- Shared audio arrives exactly as it was recorded. The computer you share
from sends its sound untouched, and the computer with your headphones or
speakers applies its own EQ and effects to it once. Share Audio no longer
asks the sender to pick Music or Game/Video.
- The leaderboard lists every place from first down. The three on the
podium are in the list under it too, their ranks in gold, silver and bronze,
where the list used to start at fourth.
- Plus given as a gift is not described as a subscription, and a maker
with another earned month waiting keeps Plus the moment one runs out.
- Sending more scenes than a month allows says so, and when you can send
again; a server answer nobody can read no longer shuts the Studio. A member
with as many scenes out as one member can have is told that, and to
unpublish one, instead of being asked to fix a scene with nothing wrong in
it.
- The Studio's meters keep time with the music. They move the moment the
sound reaches you, where they came a drawn frame behind it; Bass follows the
bass line and the kick, where a man's singing lit it; the beat lamp flashes
on every beat once the tempo is found; and the stage keeps one steady frame
rate instead of stumbling between two.
- A scene's colours reach the rest of the window, and the Library stops
blurring FluidEQ's own scenes as though they were a stranger's; on a scene's
page the picture fills the height of the panel beside it instead of leaving
an empty band under it.
- Signing out asks through a clear card, the Animations switch takes effect
at once, and the player bar no longer leaves an extra copy of its helper —
the one that follows what other programs play — running in the background
after the window reloads, where it could also say Nothing playing over a
song another program was playing.
- Double-click a playing song to start it again, in the Library's list,
grid and Cover Flow and in the Compact player's Up Next. A double-click in
the Library's Up Next no longer skips to the song after it.
- Up Next stands still while the music is paused. The bars beside the
playing song kept moving while the Library was paused, even when another
program was the one playing.
- With the grid off, the drawing stands on the graph's floor, instead of
keeping the grid's margin as an empty strip above the band sliders.
- Braid is back. It had been folded into the Analyzer with the plain
drawings.
- Full screen shows the graph on a zoomed-in window, where below 940
pixels wide it showed an empty window; and the Analyzer spans 10 Hz again
after a look was previewed, where it was squeezed into 20 Hz – 20 kHz.
- The Room says what it is doing while the Library plays it. Its chip
said "Room off" over a room that was playing, and its picture lit every
speaker for a stereo song; it now reads the Library player's own room.
- The FluidEQ Engine installs only the files it was built with. Setup
checks every file it puts into the engine's folder against the ones it
shipped with and refuses any other, and only the engine's own settings
folder can be written to without an administrator.
- The last English left on screen is in your language, in all ten.
- The Processes list names every program FluidEQ starts. The helpers that
follow Windows' volume, tell FluidEQ which game is in front and play audio
another FluidEQ shares with you each have a row saying what they do, and
their memory is in the total. The audio capture row no longer says it runs
only while you share your audio: a second output and Smart EQ use it too.
- The Room is built on other people's measurements, and says so. The
acknowledgement names them, and SwiftF0's author with them.
- Every library inside FluidEQ is listed with its licence. The About panel
points to a list of all of them, each with its own licence text, beside the
notice that says what the main ones are for. A Karaoke Maker project now
credits the melody model that actually found its notes, where it named
SwiftF0 for notes another model had found.
- Bloom draws one flower. It no longer draws a second flower under its 3D
one, and its petal layers no longer show through each other.
- The Voice cleaner's model download can be cancelled, and coming back to
the page while it downloads picks it up instead of looking stuck.
- Less memory held for nothing. A graph effect that fails to start no
longer leaves its leftovers on the graphics card, and the Karaoke Maker no
longer keeps up to thirty minutes of pitch data it never uses.