Emulating Dolby Headphone under Linux

mixor · 08-31-2015, 05:48 PM

I quite like the 3D sound effect that Dolby Headphone has and the way it creates the feeling that the sound is coming from in front of you and not from the headphones. This is an effect that is applied to stereo sound and it has nothing to do with channel upmixing and etc. I plan to use it for watching multimedia content like youtube with headphones.
So I decided to emulate it under Linux because the Linux driver of my Xonar DX appears to not support it.
The way I plan to do it is with loading LADSPA plugins into pulseaudio and creating a virtual device after I channel the plugins into one device. I load the first plugin to the soundcard and then each plugin on top of the other plugin until I achieve the required effect, and then I set the last module as a default sound device.
I was going to try to load them directly into the ALSA configuration file (/etc/asound.conf) but I can't seem to get it to work under Linux Mint 17.2, so the pulseaudio approach seems reasonable.
The question is, what plugins and settings do I need ? I've gotten the bs2b plugin and tap_reverb, and I'm currently trying to get the settings of these two plugins right, but I think that I'm going to need a bit more than these two to recreate the 3D headphone feeling properly. Any advice on the topic would be amazing.
Thanks.

A123 · 03-04-2019, 03:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mixor

I quite like the 3D sound effect that Dolby Headphone has and the way it creates the feeling that the sound is coming from in front of you and not from the headphones. This is an effect that is applied to stereo sound and it has nothing to do with channel upmixing and etc. I plan to use it for watching multimedia content like youtube with headphones.
So I decided to emulate it under Linux because the Linux driver of my Xonar DX appears to not support it.
The way I plan to do it is with loading LADSPA plugins into pulseaudio and creating a virtual device after I channel the plugins into one device. I load the first plugin to the soundcard and then each plugin on top of the other plugin until I achieve the required effect, and then I set the last module as a default sound device.
I was going to try to load them directly into the ALSA configuration file (/etc/asound.conf) but I can't seem to get it to work under Linux Mint 17.2, so the pulseaudio approach seems reasonable.
The question is, what plugins and settings do I need ? I've gotten the bs2b plugin and tap_reverb, and I'm currently trying to get the settings of these two plugins right, but I think that I'm going to need a bit more than these two to recreate the 3D headphone feeling properly. Any advice on the topic would be amazing.
Thanks.

Hey Mixor,

I see it's been a while. I just started looking into the thing for playing back Dolby Atmos in Linux and I came across your post here.
I am curious to know what have you found out so far with PulsAudio and Alsa plugins?

Thanks

bernd_b · 03-04-2019, 02:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by A123

Hey Mixor,

I see it's been a while. I just started looking into the thing for playing back Dolby Atmos in Linux and I came across your post here.
I am curious to know what have you found out so far with PulsAudio and Alsa plugins?

Thanks

In between, there seems to be no additional plugin needed:
manual on reddit.com for system_wide_hrtf_with_pulseaudio/

But so far, I find it hard to select a suitable *.wav file with the hrtf-infos needed. Also, besides from the site I linked to, I cannot find any documentation which shed more light into this matter.

Further on, vlc has a built in virtual surround filter for headphone. This filter seems to be implemented in ffmpeg, it is called sofalizer. If you manage to compile ffmpeg and after this mpv with this library present on your system, then you can use this filter in mpv too, since (nearly) every ffmpeg filter is available in mpv as well.