EQK 3.0 - Mac app with dynamic AI Equaliser

EQK began as a way to make sound enhancement through the equaliser accessible beyond audiophiles- to let the rest of us experience music the way the small minority who know the basics already do.

Most people don't know how much difference an EQ tweak can make to their listening experience. Two things kept them out: the technical, formalised structure of every existing EQ app made the first step overwhelming; and the learning curve was steep enough that meaningful benefit only came after real effort.

EQK solves both. The learning curve, by running an on-device engine that together with Apple Intelligence- dynamically tunes music on the go, learns it side-by-side to apply a more accurate EQ on the second play, and saves the per-song, per-app profile locally. Up to 1,000 songs get their own remembered EQ shape, refreshed every second to twice a second- saved by the app, not downloaded.

The intimidation, by dressing what was otherwise a cerebral process in a UI meant to keep you inside the experience of entertainment, not analysing it.

v3.0 introduces the Optimiser engine. It scans for broken song profiles, incompatible layouts, and anything else that might break the seamlessness of the app.

Since a large part of EQK is made by AI, and the whole thing began as a vibe-coded experiment, the Optimiser is a unique answer to what to do with the creative freedom AI gives us in a short amount of time: use it to accelerate the intelligence and working of the dynamic AI EQ engine itself. Some songs may appear over-EQ'd but the overall response from listeners so far has been phenomenal. The Optimiser doesn't touch code, only broken and incompatible app-created data.

https://www.kuja.dev/eqk

A dynamic EQ that reacts to what's playing is a nice idea, but it puts you in an awkward spot with anything that was already mastered carefully — the mastering engineer made specific decisions, and an adaptive curve is second-guessing them in real time.

So what's the target? A correction layer for bad source material and cheap output, or an active shaping tool applied to everything? And does it react per-track or continuously within a track — I'd guess a curve that moves mid-song would be audible in a way that isn't always pleasant, especially on anything with a big dynamic shift.

The feature I'd want most here is a bypass I can hold down, level matched. An EQ that nets even 2 dB of gain sounds better for reasons that have nothing to do with the curve, so if the engine learns from what people keep rather than what they prefer at matched loudness, it's learning volume and calling it taste. That's the quiet failure mode in adaptive audio, nobody complains because it does sound good, and the listener can't tell whether they like the shape or just got used to it. A held bypass at matched RMS is the cheapest thing that keeps the loop honest, and it would give you a real signal on the genres where you say it's doing too much.