Preamp is a system-wide equalizer for Omarchy with AutoEq headphone profiles and a bar widget
Ten bands per channel, correction curves for thousands of headphones and a widget that lives in your bar: Bjarne Øverli’s new audio app shipped four releases on launch day.
Image: preamp (bjarneo.github.io)
Omarchy has a proper system equalizer. On October 26, 2026, Bjarne Øverli, whose X bio lists him as an Omarchy Core Team member, announced Preamp on X: “Launching preamp. Designed to solve my audio needs. Made available to all Omarchy users.” According to the README on GitHub, every app plays through Preamp into your speakers or headphones, and both its window and its bar widget follow your Omarchy theme, rounding and language.
The everyday flow is quick. Click the widget in the bar and pick a preset like Bass boost, and the sound changes at once. Right-click the widget to bypass the equalizer and hear the difference. Open the app from the launcher for a presets view with one card per curve, then press tab to reach the Studio, Modes and Signal chain views with the detailed controls.
Under the hood there is a lot to play with. The README lists a ten-band parametric equalizer for each channel, with left and right edited together or apart, an automatic preamp that keeps the loudest point of the curve at 0 dB, and a live analyzer. Twelve presets are built in, alongside your own: keys 1 to 6 apply the everyday ones, 7 and 8 the others you used last. You also get LV2 and LADSPA effects after the equalizer, such as a compressor or a limiter, plus a room reverb, stereo width and balance.
Headphone owners get the headline feature: profiles from AutoEq, covering “more than 6,000 headphones” according to the README. Run preamp autoeq "hd 650" with the name of your model and the correction curve becomes a preset. The project site adds that you can pin it to an output, so Preamp applies it every time you plug those headphones back in.
Volume goes up to 150%, and you can set the volume and mute of each app. Auto-switch rules let a preset follow an output, an app in a call or a fullscreen app. Scripters are covered too: every action has a command, the CLI offers --json output, and preamp skill install teaches coding agents how to use it. The app speaks the same 50 languages as Omarchy.
You need Omarchy 4.0.6 or later with the Omarchy shell, PipeWire and WirePlumber. Preamp is not in the AUR: you download the .pkg.tar.zst package from the GitHub release and install it with sudo pacman -U, then run systemctl --user enable --now preamp.service to start the service now and at each login, and preamp shell install to put the widget on your bar. The README even includes a prompt you can paste into a coding agent to do the install for you.
Launch day was busy. Øverli shipped four releases on October 26, 2026, from v0.1.0 to v0.1.3, which, according to its release notes, makes the bar widget load on Omarchy 4.0.6, “the current stable release.” If you installed an earlier version, the notes say to run preamp shell install again after upgrading.
One known issue for laptops: with an Omarchy speaker tuning, “the Omarchy volume keys change the volume of the tuning, not of the speakers,” the README warns. Until it is fixed, set the volume in Preamp, for example with preamp volume 60. Øverli has proposed a fix for Omarchy itself in omarchy#16687, which was still open at the time of writing. Preamp is released under the MIT license.
