A little over a week ago our web site www.har-bal.com
was broken into by a hacker who caused a great deal of trouble to both us and
our customers. As a result we have abandoned the registered user access to protected
areas and all that went with it as a means to ensure the proper functioning
of our site in the future. The web site has been completely re-designed.
We shall be returning to our normal approach of making updates available to
registered users if and when they become available. Version 1.5 is not officially
released yet except as beta 3 There are a couple of outstanding issues with
ASIO and unusual speed / performance issues on specific machines. Below are
the details of the latest version. Please forward this message to other producers/engineers
through your mailing lists that the site is up and running again.
Visual Changes Changes to the GUI include the introduction of a volume control
plus the replacement of the gain drop down list with a slider control. Furthermore
the track statistics are now displayed on the graph (source file name, filter
file name, peak and average power figures of merit). Finally, five small buttons
appear in the bottom right hand corner of the application screen. The first
two control whether focus markers are displayed and whether the original spectrum
is displayed. The focus markers show you which spectrum represent what is currently
playing.
The remaining three buttons toggle the spectrum traces on or off (i.e.. average
power, geometric mean, and peak power). New Tools Two new shelving tools now
appear to the left of the gain tool (now renamed parametric EQ). The first is
a low shelf, the second a high shelf tool. Use of these is largely self evident.
An extra menu command, Equalizer/Match Loudness, can be used to match the average
loudness figures of merit of the current track with the current reference in
an instant. This is quite useful for normalising. An Equalizer/Loop menu command
has been added which does as it says it does. When pressed while the track is
playing the track will loop between the point at which the play button was pressed
and the point at which the loop button was pressed. Looping will continue indefinitely
or until the loop mode is toggled off.
A tip files feature has been added that gives you information regarding the
character of particular parts of the spectrum while you make adjustments based
on advice stored in a tip file. A tip file is simply a text file and you can
easily create your own tip files should you wish to. An example is included
in this beta and more will be compiled for the final release. To test this feature
open the tip file in the HarBalTip_Files folder and show the tips. Then select
one of the editing tools and move it over different parts of the spectrum to
see what happens. A range of views have been added to give more information
to the user.
You can now select between Spectrum View, Frequency Response View, and Impulse
Response View. You can use the tools to make adjustments in the former two views
but not the latter. To change the view use the Graph/View menu command. When
Recording EQ’d tracks the track is now queued to be recorded via a recording
thread of execution and control is immediately returned to the user. This allows
you to move on to adjusting the next track immediately. A job list window opens
to show you the queue jobs and also allows you to delete jobs that you don’t
want completed.
Similarly you can open a number of tracks to be analyzed by an analysis thread
using the File/Batch Analysis menu item. This opens a multiple select open dialog
and the selected files are then queued to be analyzed. Finally, the file menu
popup now supports recent files history. It records recent files, recent filters
and recent references. Other improvements HarBal now supports various modes
of operation controlled under the Equalizer Options dialog, one of which is
selection between Linear or Minimum phase filter topologies. Try using the impulse
response view to verify the differences between minimum phase and linear phase
filters.
HarBal now supports sound device driver selection which is user selectable
under the Driver Options dialog. HarBal supports ASIO, DirectX and multimedia
style drivers. HarBal supports mono files. HarBal has fixed filter code which
produces glitchless transfer between filter in / filter out (provided your PC
is fast enough). Earle Holder Har-Bal
International.
