Shape the tone of a recording with the ffmpeg equalizer, bass, treble, highpass and lowpass…

Guide ID: art_01M7CBFHXW331JVHKBTGR7F5ZC

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Guide title

Shape the tone of a recording with the ffmpeg equalizer, bass, treble, highpass and lowpass filters on Windows: a script that reports the level change per octave band, the gain at a frequency and the peak before clipping

Coverage

For anyone who wants to change the tone of a recording from the command line and see what the change really did. A PowerShell script sets the ffmpeg equalizer, bass, treble, highpass and lowpass filters, writes a WAV or FLAC, then reports the overall level, the peak before clipping and the change in each octave band. Generated tones and pink noise show the gain of each setting at chosen frequencies.

Example

On generated tones, a 6 dB peaking band gave exactly 6 dB at its centre and about 2 dB one octave away. A shelf gave half its gain at its own frequency. A narrow 12 dB cut read only about half of that in the octave measure. A 6 dB boost pushed a tone peaking near full scale past it. Nothing was listened to.

Useful starting points

• Put a test tone at the frequency you care about through the script to read the exact gain.
• Add a negative gain when the peak line shows the boost going over the limit.
• Move one control per run, then listen against the untouched file at equal volume.