Pretty much everyone listens to music in the car from any of the numerous music sources for cars these days. But almost no-one is setting their car stereo’s EQ for the best sound possible.

The problem with adjusting equalisers when listening to music is that each track is produced differently and sounds best with different levels, so setting the levels whilst driving is clearly inadvisable. Gracenote look to solve that problem with their Dynamic EQ for car stereos, that automatically adjusts the levels track-by-track.

Gracenote are already embedded in 65 million cars in the form of it’s music recognition and metadata technology which shows information about artists, albums, tracks etc. Using their cemented presence in the automotive industry Gracenote hope to deliver their new Dynamic EQ feature to cars.

Reportedly Gracenote have already created profiles for tens of millions of songs that have been analysed so they have preset equaliser options. Extracting a tracks ‘sonic profile’ Gracenote are able to look at the low, mid and high frequencies as well as the range in frequency.

Gracenote’s chief strategy officer and co-founder Ty Roberts said: “The idea is we look at hundreds of tracks – how they’re mixed, their sonic profile and then we create an EQ profile that reproduces them the way they should sound.  Gracenote is going into new areas with the idea that we’re going to change how you listen to music by affecting the sound using our metadata to power the experience. Our metadata has been about visually enhancing the audio experience and now it will be about audibly enhancing it.”

General manager of Auto at Gracenote, Brian Hamilton said: “Tuning an EQ can be incredibly complicated for the average music fan and virtually impossible for drivers who have to keep both eyes focused on the road. The introduction of Gracenote Dynamic EQ marks the first time that Gracenote, or any other company, has used track level descriptive metadata to drive the quality of the musical experience.”

Gracenote’s Dynamic EQ can work with all of your potential music sources from AM/FM radio, aux cable, USB, Bluetooth, CD and whatever other audio mod cons your car has.