Easy Effects
Live audio effects and microphone processing for Linux. Adds an equaliser, compressor and noise gate to any app.
Our verdict
Easy Effects is the closest free equivalent to the tidying-up half of Voicemeeter. It sits between your microphone and everything else and applies a noise gate, a compressor and an equaliser, which is what most people were really using Voicemeeter for when they set it up for calls or streaming.
It is not a routing tool. Voicemeeter's party trick is sending game sound one way and music another. On Linux that job belongs to the sound system itself, and the volume mixer in your settings app already lets you move an individual program to a different output. Easy Effects handles the sound quality, not the plumbing.
It is free, it installs from the app store, and it saves your settings as named profiles so you can have one for calls and another for recording.
What's good
- Free, and cleans up a cheap microphone with a noise gate and compressor
- Works on output as well as input, so it can tame loud games or podcasts
- Settings are saved as profiles you can switch between
- Effects apply to all apps at once, without setting each one up
What to know first
- It is not a virtual mixing desk, so it does not replace Voicemeeter's routing
- Needs the PipeWire sound system, which recent Ubuntu and Fedora releases have but older ones may not
- The list of effects is long and the defaults are not always the right starting point
The details
- Cost
- Free
- Open source
- Yes (GPL-3.0)
- How you install it
- App store (Flatpak), Built-in app store
Windows apps it can replace
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