Welcome to the first Feature Friday — a new weekly series where we pick a corner of Veilamp and walk through what it does and why it’s there. Some weeks that’ll be sharing, some weeks skins, some weeks the stuff hiding three menus deep. This week we’re starting with the part a lot of you asked about first: the sound.

Veilamp has a genuinely serious audio engine under the hood, and the whole thing is built around one idea — you decide how much the player touches your music. Want it to get out of the way completely and hand your files to your DAC untouched? Done. Want to shape, correct and level every signal to taste? Also done. Here’s the tour.

Feed the DAC, untouched

The headline feature for a lot of people: bit-perfect, exclusive-mode output. When it’s on, Veilamp bypasses the operating system’s mixer and drives your DAC at each track’s native sample rate and bit depth — no resampling, no volume curve, no DSP in the way. On Linux that means grabbing an ALSA hw: device for exclusive hardware access. The bits on disk are the bits that reach your converter. That’s it.

And if your library has DSD files, Veilamp plays them straight through — native DSD where your hardware supports it, or DSD-over-PCM (DoP) where it doesn’t. It picks the right path per track, so your SACD rips and your FLACs can sit in the same playlist and both just work.

You also get to pick exactly which output device Veilamp uses, independent of your system default. Your listening chain is always the one you intended, not whatever the OS decided this morning.

…or shape it, exactly how you like

Not everyone wants a purist passthrough, and that’s the whole point — the DSP chain is there when you want it.

  • 10-band graphic EQ — ISO octave bands from 31 Hz to 16 kHz, ±12 dB, with a preamp and presets. Classic, fast, and does what you’d expect.
  • Parametric EQ + AutoEQ import — flip into parametric mode for per-band control of type, frequency, Q and gain. Got a headphone correction profile? Paste an AutoEQ ParametricEQ.txt and you’re dialed in for your cans in one shot.
  • Convolution correction — load an impulse response or correction profile and Veilamp convolves it into the output with a partitioned FFT. Great for room or headphone correction, fully bypassable, and shown in the signal path so you always know it’s active.
  • ReplayGain normalization — match loudness by track or by album from embedded ReplayGain tags, with an adjustable preamp and clip prevention so nothing ever peaks. No more lunging for the volume knob between albums.
  • Headphone crossfeed — blends a low-passed slice of each channel into the other for a more natural, less fatiguing headphone stage. Adjustable crossover and level.
  • Crossfade — blend the tail of one track into the head of the next, or leave it off for true gapless. Your call, set it to suit the music.
  • TPDF dither — when digital volume or EQ has to truncate to 16-bit, optional triangular-PDF dither preserves the low-level detail instead of letting quiet passages distort.

And when you want to hear exactly what your files hold, one DSP bypass toggle drops all of it for a pure passthrough — perfect for A/B-ing the processed signal against the raw one.

See what you’re hearing

A nice touch we’re proud of: you don’t have to take the engine’s word for any of this. The now-playing readout shows the real sample rate and channel count of whatever is decoding — local file, LAN server or live stream — and flags when the output is genuinely bit-perfect. Alongside it, an EBU R128 loudness meter reads momentary, short-term and integrated LUFS, loudness range, and true inter-sample peak. The numbers are live, read straight off the signal, not a canned animation.

Oh, and all of this works across FLAC, ALAC, WAV, MP3, AAC, Vorbis and DSD — lossless, lossy and DSD libraries play side by side, untouched.

That’s the tour

If you’ve been running Veilamp with everything on defaults, poke around the Settings panel this weekend — turn on exclusive output, feed it a correction profile, A/B the DSP bypass. It’s a different player once you’ve got it tuned to your gear.

Next Friday we’ll pick another corner of the app. If there’s a feature you want us to dig into, we’d love to hear it.

Until then — happy listening.