AI summary
System-wide audio processor with ViPER4Android effects, parametric EQ, presets, and per-app processing controls. This rooted build requires its engine module; Android 15+ devices using the AIDL audio effects HAL cannot load it.
Generated by AI. May contain inaccuracies.
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About this app
RootlessViPER4Android (RootlessJamesDSP — ViPER4Android Edition) is a system-wide Android equalizer and audio effects app that brings the beloved ViPER4Android (V4A) sound experience to non-rooted phones. It combines the powerful open-source JamesDSP engine with native re-implementations of ViPER's classic effects — Dynamic System, ViPER Bass, ViPER Clarity, Spectrum Extension, Field Surround, Tube Simulator (6N1J) and many more — all running without root, without Magisk, and without custom ROMs.
Beyond the ViPER suite, it adds a fully reorderable DSP chain, so you decide the order every effect runs in, with the output limiter always kept last. An interactive parametric equalizer lets you drag bands directly on the response curve, add or remove them with a long press, and fine-tune frequency, Q and gain on rotary controls with full undo. A studio-grade echo/delay offers mono, stereo and ping-pong modes with a filtered feedback path, sample-rate and bit-depth crushing, tape-style modulation, diffusion and feedback distortion — all laid out on a knob panel that reflows to fit any screen. Up to four Liveprog (EEL2) scripts can be chained together and picked in one multi-select pass, and 446 official ViPER DDC profiles are bundled and ready to load.
The interface is yours to arrange: reorder, hide and group the effect cards, search across every effect, and save the whole setup — including your layout and chain order — into portable presets. Effect cards load as you scroll so the app opens instantly, and large effect buffers are allocated only while an effect is switched on, keeping memory use modest even with many apps playing audio. Processing also stands down on its own once playback goes quiet, so nothing is spent grinding through silence while your music is paused.
The Reverberation effect offers four rooms — the classic ViPER model plus a smooth studio Plate, a large warm Concert hall, and a natural Room with early reflections — and the output stage adds a ViPER classic limiter, a faithful re-creation of the original V4A limiter with the lookahead and transient bite that made it distinctive. The convolver and DDC libraries have their own search, custom sorting, hiding and groups, and can pull fresh impulse responses and DDC profiles straight from public repositories, skipping anything you already own.
Prefer the original experience? ViPER4Android-only mode narrows the app to the effects V4A shipped, using its naming, its processing order and its limiter, and switches everything else off so it costs nothing. A matching ViPER4Android classic theme is available on its own too, if you want the classic look without giving up any of the extras.
RootlessViPER4Android RootlessViPER4Android (RV4A) — a RootlessJamesDSP fork ViPER4Android effects natively ported to Android — no root required. Build status Release License
Features • Download • Limitations • FAQ • Credits
RootlessViPER4Android (RootlessJamesDSP — ViPER4Android Edition) is a system-wide Android equalizer and audio effects app that brings the beloved ViPER4Android (V4A) sound experience to non-rooted phones. It combines the powerful open-source JamesDSP engine with native re-implementations of ViPER's classic effects — Dynamic System, ViPER Bass, ViPER Clarity, Spectrum Extension, Field Surround, Tube Simulator (6N1J) and many more — all running without root, without Magisk, and without custom ROMs.
Beyond the ViPER suite, it adds a fully reorderable DSP chain, so you decide the order every effect runs in, with the output limiter always kept last. An interactive parametric equalizer lets you drag bands directly on the response curve, add or remove them with a long press, and fine-tune frequency, Q and gain on rotary controls with full undo. A studio-grade echo/delay offers mono, stereo and ping-pong modes with a filtered feedback path, sample-rate and bit-depth crushing, tape-style modulation, diffusion and feedback distortion — all laid out on a knob panel that reflows to fit any screen. Up to four Liveprog (EEL2) scripts can be chained together and picked in one multi-select pass, and 446 official ViPER DDC profiles are bundled and ready to load.
The interface is yours to arrange: reorder, hide and group the effect cards, search across every effect, and save the whole setup — including your layout and chain order — into portable presets. Effect cards load as you scroll so the app opens instantly, and large effect buffers are allocated only while an effect is switched on, keeping memory use modest even with many apps playing audio. Processing also stands down on its own once playback goes quiet, so nothing is spent grinding through silence while your music is paused.
The Reverberation effect offers four rooms — the classic ViPER model plus a smooth studio Plate, a large warm Concert hall, and a natural Room with early reflections — and the output stage adds a ViPER classic limiter, a faithful re-creation of the original V4A limiter with the lookahead and transient bite that made it distinctive. The convolver and DDC libraries have their own search, custom sorting, hiding and groups, and can pull fresh impulse responses and DDC profiles straight from public repositories, skipping anything you already own.
Prefer the original experience? ViPER4Android-only mode narrows the app to the effects V4A shipped, using its naming, its processing order and its limiter, and switches everything else off so it costs nothing. A matching ViPER4Android classic theme is available on its own too, if you want the classic look without giving up any of the extras.
ViPER effects & FIR EQ Output control & Bass exciter Surround, Dynamic system & Clarity ViPER effects and FIR equalizer Output control and dual-band bass exciter Surround, dynamic system and clarity sections
✨ Features
🐍 ViPER4Android effect suite (native ports) Arranged in the classic V4A order:
Effect What it does Playback gain control (AGC) Evens out quiet/loud tracks automatically FET compressor Punchy studio-style compression ViPER-DDC Headphone correction profiles — 446 official DDC files bundled! Spectrum extension Restores sparkle & air to compressed music FIR equalizer Precision fixed-band EQ Convolver Impulse response processing Field surround Widens the stereo field naturally Differential surround Classic V4A channel-delay surround Headphone surround + Speakers-in-a-room simulation for headphones Reverberation Full room reverb (size, damping, width, wet/dry) Dynamic system ViPER Dynamic Bass with all 19 original device presets + custom mode Tube simulator (6N1J) Warm analog tube saturation (up to 24 dB drive) ViPER bass Natural / Pure Bass+ / Subwoofer modes ViPER clarity Natural / OZone+ / XHiFi treble enhancement Auditory system protection (Cure+) Anti-fatigue crossfeed for long sessions Speaker optimization Corrective tuning for phone speakers
🎚 Plus the full JamesDSP toolkit Output limiter (with selectable peak / soft-saturation modes), auto-loudness compander, bass boost, dual-band psychoacoustic bass exciter, stereo widener, crossfeed, virtual room reverb, arbitrary-response graphic EQ (AutoEQ import), and a scriptable Liveprog (EEL2) engine.
💜 Quality-of-life Plain-language "ℹ️ what is this?" explainers on every section Smart UI: irrelevant sliders hide automatically Crash-safe DSP dispatch with built-in diagnostics Works per-app, session-based — no audio HAL patching
🆕 Added & changed vs. upstream RootlessJamesDSP
Added in this fork:
🐍 16 native ViPER4Android effect sections (see table above) — including brand-new engine code for Dynamic System, ViPER Bass, Clarity, FET Compressor, Cure+, Field/Differential/Headphone Surround, Reverberation, Spectrum Extension, AGC & Speaker Optimization 🔊 Dual-band psychoacoustic bass exciter — two independently tunable harmonic bands (the second band hides until you enable it) 🛡 Selectable output limiter modes: classic peak limiter, smooth soft-saturation (tanh) mode, or fully off 🎧 446 official ViPER-DDC correction files bundled and auto-installed on first launch ℹ️ Collapsible plain-language explainers on every effect section 🧰 Built-in crash diagnostics: native + JVM crash reports auto-copied to clipboard on next launch
Changed & fixed:
🔥 Tube simulator actually works now — upstream divided the drive value by 100 before it reached the engine (max ≈ 0.12 dB, inaudible); fixed and range extended to 24 dB 🐛 Fixed a crash when seekbars use a % unit label 🪄 Smart UI: Dynamic System custom sliders only appear in Custom mode; irrelevant controls stay hidden 🗂 All ViPER-equivalent sections renamed to their authentic V4A titles and reordered into the classic V4A layout under a dedicated header ➖ Removed the redundant Parametric EQ card (Arbitrary-response/graphic EQ covers it) 📛 App renamed to RootlessViPER4Android (installs alongside the original RootlessJamesDSP) 🆔 From v3.35.0 the package is this project's own — com.alienware377.viper4android.rootless, and com.alienware377.viper4android.rootful for the rooted build. Earlier releases still carried upstream's me.timschneeberger.rootlessjamesdsp, which this fork stopped being a long time ago. The rooted build is now called RootfulViPER4Android rather than confusingly shipping "Rootless" in its own name
What's new
- Per-channel parametric EQ Every band in the parametric EQ now has an L+R button: tap for left only, again for right, again for both. It is for earphones whose two sides do not sound alike, which Balance cannot fix, since it moves the whole signal rather than one frequency on one side.
- Import and export understand EqualizerAPO's Channel: lines, and ordinary presets save exactly as before. Rooted mode can only take one curve for both ears, so there it uses the left one. Asked for in #9.
- Choose which apps are processed The Excluded apps list can be flipped round to name the apps you do want processed, and it becomes Included apps. No more keeping a list of every app that misbehaves just to process your music player. An empty list processes as normal rather than silencing everything, and apps that forbid recording are left out automatically, since capturing them only gives silence. Asked for in #10.
- Processing on or off per output Device profiles can now switch processing off entirely for an output, say the phone speaker, and back on for headphones. Find it under Settings, Device profiles, "Switch processing by output". Off by default.
- On the rootless build, off really stops capture, notification included. Restarting it without a popup needs the PROJECT_MEDIA permission granted once through Shizuku or ADB, plus Display over other apps; without them the option is greyed out and says why. With processing off, Android may close the app, and it then misses output changes until you open it again. Asked for in #11.
- Smooth Concert hall and Room Two new reverb types, Concert hall (smooth) and Room (smooth), rebuilt to get rid of the few strong early echoes at a repeating spacing that made the originals sound metallic. The tail is much denser, and Tank modulation now works on them. The originals stay exactly as they were, so presets sound the same, and the card now shows only the sliders the chosen type uses. From #6.
- ViPER4Android-only mode gives your effects back Turning the mode off used to leave your whole chain switched off. It now remembers what was on when you turn the mode on, and puts exactly that back when you turn it off. If you turned it on in 4.0.0, there is no record to restore from, so nothing is changed. Vinyl and Balance now hide in the mode too, and loading a preset or switching device profile there no longer switches hidden effects back on.
- Rooted mode The engine module is attached as RootfulViPER4Android-engine-module-v4.4.0.zip. Update it together with the rooted app, then reboot: several of the fixes below need both, and the smooth reverbs need the new module.
- If the rooted app finds a different engine on the device, such as the stock JamesDSP module, it now says so and offers the download page, instead of showing every card as working while the ViPER ones do nothing. That is what was happening in #12.
- Still untested on a real rooted device. Rooted devices on Android 15 or newer that use the AIDL audio effects HAL still cannot load the module, and multiband distortion and Liveprog slots 2 to 4 are not in rooted mode yet.
- Fixes Crashes and freezes while changing settings
- Changing compander settings or the crossfeed mode while playing could crash or freeze audio. EQ changes at the start of playback, a reorder mid song, or stopping the service during a Liveprog compile could all hit a timing crash or a pop. High echo feedback with resonance could grow into a howl and then go dead. Feedback is now capped just below that point, and settings that were fine before sound the same. Sound that went silent or glitched
- One corrupt sample anywhere could silence the whole output until the service restarted. The output stage and the effects that held on to it now recover on their own. Revoking capture permission with the app open left every processed app silent until the service was stopped by hand or the phone restarted. Differential surround could tick every 0.37 s at common settings, and Smooth pitch drifted out of tune on long held notes. Switching the graphic EQ's phase could crash, and a malformed DDC file could corrupt memory. After a sample rate change (every 44.1 kHz session, since the engine starts at 48)
- Echo, maximiser, surround, Clarity and many more kept old timings: a 350 ms echo played at 381 ms. On the rootless build every card is now set up again on a rate change. DDC sat about 9 % off in frequency and vinyl crackled about 8 % less. Bass boost and the older reverbs could overrun their buffers. Rooted mode
- Plugging in headphones or connecting Bluetooth silently reset every effect to off, and leaked memory. The compander, EQ, crossfeed and DDC could not be switched off, Liveprog could not be switched on, and Reset processing order did nothing. The limiter mode, the spectrum extension and the graphic EQ's linear phase switch did nothing, and bass boost was rounded to whole dB. Impulse responses played at half speed on 96 kHz outputs, and true stereo ones were refused. Audio streams below 44.1 kHz could write past the engine's buffers. Screen and layout
- Garbled characters in the English text, about 70 of them including the ViPER4Android section header, are fixed. Thanks for #16. Hidden cards no longer come back after switching apps or clearing a search, and new groups no longer land unreachable under the bottom bar. Licence notices for borrowed code are restored, with credits in About.
- Which file do I want? rootless is the normal one. No root needed. rootful is the rooted build, to be installed with the module above. There is now one file per build, and it works on every phone and tablet, so there is no need to pick a processor type any more. Upgrading from 4.0.0 installs straight over the top.
About this version
- Version
- 4.4.0 (128)
- Size
- 32.51 MB
- Requires Android
- 8.0
- Target SDK
- 26
- Architecture
- arm64-v8a, armeabi-v7a, x86, x86_64
- Downloads
- 26
- Updated
- Nov 2, 2026
- Package
- com.alienware377.viper4android.rootful
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