Shape it
to your
own ear.

What you can do

The equalizer is a 10-band graphic EQ you reach from the Now Playing screen: tap the mini player at the bottom of the app to expand it, then tap the teal equalizer button. A sheet slides up with ten vertical sliders. Boost the bands you want, cut the ones you don’t, save the result as a preset, and switch between presets with a single tap. Your settings stick around across app restarts and travel to your Apple Watch automatically.

Ten bands, ±12 dB

The sliders use the industry-standard ISO octave set — 32, 64, 125, 250, 500 Hz and 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 kHz — spanning the full audible range, the same layout (and the same ±12 dB range) you’ll recognise from Apple Music and iTunes.

• Drag a slider up to boost that band by up to +12 dB, or down to cut it by up to −12 dB.
• 0 dB on every band is the flat default — no colouring at all.
• Double-tap any single slider to instantly zero just that band.

Presets — save a sound, switch in a tap

Most people don’t want one EQ — they want a few, one per pair of headphones or per situation. Run2Beat lets you save the current curve under a name and recall it instantly.

• Save. Tap the + button in the top-left of the sheet to store the live curve as a named preset — “AirPods”, “Bass boost”, “Car”. Saved presets appear as chips above the sliders.
• Activate. Tap any chip to load that preset’s curve in one move.
• Update. Tweak an active preset and an Update button fades in next to the +; a small yellow dot on the chip marks the unsaved change. Tap Update to overwrite the preset with the current curve.
• Rename & delete. Long-press any chip for Update, Rename and Delete.
• Reset. Tap the Standard chip to zero every band at once and return to a flat response.

Editing a slider never throws you out of the preset you’re on — you leave a preset deliberately, by tapping another one or tapping Standard, not by accident while dragging.

The glow in the mini player

You don’t have to open the sheet to know the sound is tuned. The equalizer icon in the mini player glows the moment any slider leaves 0 dB or a non-flat preset is active. When everything is flat again, the glow switches off — a quiet, at-a-glance indicator that the EQ is doing something.

It shapes everything, instantly

The EQ sits in Run2Beat’s audio engine, so it colours every playback path — a library track, a tempo-matched BPM-list song, a playlist on shuffle. On iPhone the curve lives in a dedicated EQ node wired right before the mixer, which means a slider move takes effect on the currently playing track immediately, with no pause and no audible glitch.

On your Apple Watch

Every preset you save syncs automatically to the watch over the regular sync. On the wrist you pick a preset straight from the Home view and change your sound profile without touching the phone. If you haven’t saved any presets, the watch simply plays flat — and the equalizer card is hidden until there’s something to choose.

Two sensible rules keep this predictable: the phone is the source of truth for the preset list (the watch holds a read-only copy you can’t edit), and the active choice is per-device — what you pick on your wrist won’t silently change what’s selected on the phone, and vice versa. Delete a preset on the phone and it disappears from the watch at the next sync.

Under the hood, for the curious

watchOS doesn’t offer Apple’s built-in EQ audio unit at all — the entire effect family is unavailable on the platform. Rather than ship the watch a flat, EQ-less player or bloat every sync with multiple pre-rendered versions of each track, Run2Beat brings its own EQ: a custom 10-band peaking-filter DSP (a biquad cascade derived from the well-known Audio EQ Cookbook, with a per-band width of about one octave to match the ISO spacing). It pre-processes the decoded audio on the watch itself before playback, so any preset you pick applies with zero extra transfer cost.

A nice side effect of that design: a perfectly flat curve is detected and skipped entirely, so the default sound costs no processing at all. And whether you’re on the phone or the watch, changing the curve mid-track is engineered to be click-free.

It remembers

Band gains, your saved preset list and the currently active preset all survive app restarts — on both iPhone and Apple Watch. You set your sound once; Run2Beat keeps it.