What is the simplest way you can imagine to formulate a simplistic audio equalizer for a computer game?

Question

The idea is that a game might need something fast but also simplistic. Mainly a "give me more highs or give me more lows" kind of thing. I googled whole libraries of audio processing but that might not be ideal. What do you think is the best way to formulate a very simplistic approach suitable for the quick switching for a computer game? (which also facilitates low CPU consumption and live processing).

Do you know code examples? Where does one start to effectively program it?

Imagine you're talking to someone with c programming experience but no audio processing experience at all.

Answer 1

Given that filtering audio in software is a rather expensive task, I don't think you'd like to do it on the CPU at all. At least not if you're doing something CPU intensive along side it like a game. Perhaps the audio card could provide something, but I guess you'll need to determine that at runtime, if its supported by the driver. (I have no idea about audio drivers). Even the simplest form of what you're looking for, the tone control, which is basically a low-pass, band-pass and/or high-pass filter with cut-offs at fixed frequencies, I still don't think you're going to be able to keep up with both high quality audio (44khz 16bit stereo(?)) and frame rate (60hz, hopefully you have a GPU to do the rendering at least) at the same time.

The only other solution I can think of would be to supply multiple sets of your audio, one for each setting.