Har-Bal Upgrade Available

Har-Bal has won numerous industry awards including the coveted “Exceptional Quality Award” from EQ magazine.

The success of the Har-Bal International is rooted in their passion to put out a superior product at a cost the masses can afford along with their excellent customer service skills.

The company released Har-Bal last August and it has now become a must buy in most studios worldwide.

The tool is an aide for engineers in all facets of the recording industry. The initial volume level of your file remains unchanged even after performing eq changes, thanks to the latest "loudness compensation" technology.

Har-Bal version 1.5 is now available. The upgrade will be automatically sent to registered users. You can purchase the program at www.har-bal.com

Below are the details of their latest version:

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 normalizing.

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 has 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 uses 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 DEFANGED_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).

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