Har-Bal site up again PDF Print
User Rating: / 0
PoorBest 

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
www.har-bal.com




Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
Reddit! Del.icio.us! JoomlaVote! Google! Live! Facebook! StumbleUpon! Yahoo! Free social bookmarking plugins and extensions for Joomla! websites!

Add your comment

Your name:
Subject:
Comment:
  The word for verification. Lowercase letters only with no spaces.
Word verification: