This app is ALMOST exactly what I wanted

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1

So, recently my old headset started to fall apart. I had owned it for many years and the fake leather on the ear cups was flaking away, so I decided to throw them out and start using a new pair of Sony bluetooth headphones, just with the aux cable plugged in. There was just one problem, the Sony headphones are extremely muffled and awful sounding.

I was looking everywhere for a simple and intuitive EQ software that could make the sound quality in the new headphones better and I stumbled upon FxSound. It ticks all the boxes for me, and the sound is exactly what I wanted. The only issue is that I use an Elgato Stream Deck to control my audio outputs in windows (swapping from headphones to speakers, etc), and I was pretty pissed off to find that this app FORCES you to always have FxSound selected as the audio output on windows.

Now, I understand that I can just go into FxSound and change the output in there, but the fact that it is now impossible for me to do it any other way is honestly ridiculous. I was searching this forum for possible fixes, and saw many instances where owners/admins/etc would say, “Well, you need FxSound to be the output at all times for the app to work!!!”. I understand that is the case, but to implement this sketchy and outright annoying measure to force people to use the app is really stupid. What if I just want to process the audio through the headphones?!? I don’t need the app for the speakers, they sound fine! Why the hell would I want to go into the app, swap the output and then just TURN OFF the processing because I don’t want it on the speakers.

Overall, I really want to like this app and maybe I’ll just deal with this massive flaw, but I think completely removing the user’s choice to use the app or not when its installed is inherently poor design. So just remember that you had me in the beginning, but this one stupid feature has honestly turned me off of the whole thing, and I would much prefer to find another software to solve my headphone issue.

Its a good app, but just let the user choose what they want to do please.

Regards,
Disgruntled Customer

2

Hey @saha. So the design choice to automatically switch your output to “FxSound Speakers” was one that was made before my time. So I don’t have the full context for why that decision was made, but here’s my guess:

  • FxSound doesn’t work if it’s not the output device in Windows. New users may not know this and out of habit change to another output device in Windows when they want to switch to another device (say from their headphones to their speakers). Then FxSound would be running but it wouldn’t be processing their audio.
  • It allows the user to switch output devices in Windows in the way they’re used to without needing to do so within the FxSound app
  • Most people using FxSound want to be using it all the time

This all said, I can understand your frustration. While I’m surprised to say that I can’t recall any other user bringing up this issue, maybe other new users run into it and just delete the app without bothering to contact support.

@bvijay would it be hard to add a checkbox option in the settings to turn off the functionality that automatically resets the playback device back to “FxSound Speakers”? Also can you think of any reason why this can’t be done or wouldn’t be a good idea?