Original by David Balazic, updated by Alexander Thomas (aka Dr. Lex)
(Click here to mail me)
This is an updated version of David Balazic's Speaker Simulator XMMS plugin, inspired by the Speaker Simulator plugin for WinAMP.
This plugin is intended to make listening with headphones less fatiguing, by simulating the effect of listening to speakers in front of you. This is especially useful for music with extreme stereo like Beatles songs. The plugin achieves this effect by mixing a bit of the left channel into the right channel and vice versa, and slightly delaying the mix. Some extra realism is added by lowpass-filtering the mixed sounds.
When approximating a typical head by a sphere and considering the speed of sound, a good delay can be calculated to be approx. 390 microseconds. For the crossmix intensity, I mostly use 0.30 to keep a good amount of stereo separation. You can change both parameters to your own taste, but I recommend keeping the delay in the proximity of 390µsec.
The only change since the 0.0.2 version, is that the plugin now remembers its settings when quitting XMMS. Also, I provided a configure script for easier installation. And another improvement is that you now can actually download the plugin again, for it became very hard to find since Balazic's webpage disappeared. I can't remember where I snatched a copy of the source, but it seems I was lucky.
Download the plugin (bzip2 compressed tar archive)
This software is released under the GNU General Public License. Most likely I won't change anything about this plugin anymore, so if you have an idea to improve it, just go ahead!