PrettyEQ

Now that many of us spend too much time in one video conference or another, it's become a cliche, but sound quality really is everything – and when you're in a meeting with 10 other remotely connected people you really start to notice it. Listening to people with poor audio quality requires significantly more concentration. If you have more than a couple of meetings a day, it becomes much more mentally taxing than the equivalent in-person meetings would be. Unfortunately, there's very little you can do to persuade other people to improve their recording setups. The issue often becomes too personal. Because they don't hear their own voices anyway, it may seem superficial (to them, at least). But there are things you can try to help improve the audio quality as it passes through your system on its way to your ears, and one of the better things to try is it, PrettyEQ.

The EQ in PrettyEQ is short for equalization. If you remember those amazing '80s-era tower music systems, you'll remember their huge equalization sections. These were usually in the middle of the unit, with separate vertical sliders for both the left and right channel, and they allowed you to increase or decrease the levels of specific frequency bands in the audio spectrum. Most of us used these to simply ramp up the bass and high-frequency part of the audio, but the humble equalizer is an incredibly useful audio tool for fixing all kinds of problems, including the terrible audio from colleagues in a video conference call. By default, PrettyEQ plugs itself into PulseAudio so that everything your computer produces goes through the effect. You can roll-off frequencies above 20kHz and below 20Hz and modify five variable bands to increase and decrease specific frequencies, which is perfect for removing whistling microphones, the sound of kitchen appliances, and other annoying background noise.

Project Website

https://github.com/keur/prettyeq

Alongside the adjustable equalization bands, the UI maps input frequencies so you can both hear and see the effects of your tweaking.

Duplicate file finder

dupeGuru

Despite all the power and modularity of the command line, there are a few simple tasks that can prove difficult to perform using this interface. One of these is finding and removing duplicate files. There are various approaches you can take to finding duplicates – from calculating checksums, file sizes, and MD5 checksums, to simply comparing filenames. But none of these gives you the assurance you need when you want to permanently delete files and are anything less than confident about the action. This situation is one of the few times when a graphical desktop application can be a better choice, and dupeGuru is a tool built specifically for the job. It's also a mature application with good support for multiple languages and even multiple operating systems, which means any duplicates you find can be confidently deleted.

The simple Qt-rendered window is easy to understand and navigate. You add folders or files to the main list view and then choose the scanning mode. Alongside a standard file comparison, there are special modes for both audio and images. These both use context-specific comparisons, such as metadata comparisons and even a fuzzy image search for images that are similar but not the same. These tools are exactly what you need when you want to delete lower bitrate audio copies or image thumbnails, both of which are difficult to find any other way. The results list is ordered by filename, with columns for the size of each duplicate and for the percentage confidence in the comparison. You can see the delta of any differences, view image files directly, select only the duplicates, and choose to move them to a different folder. This is all the functionality you need, and it enables you to quickly and confidently remove the many duplicates most of us have littering our home directories.

Project Website

https://github.com/arsenetar/dupeguru/

File scanning does take time, but you can confidently identify and then delete duplicate files.