Product Review - Harbal 3

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Article Preview :: Analysis & Mastering Software For Mac OS & Windows

Published in SOS February 2013


If you want to know how your mixes match up to commercial masters, Harbal will show you!
Mike Senior
The main window of Harbal, showing the main level timeline display at the top and the spectrum analysis window below. The yellow and green curves are the overall peak and average spectra of the track to be mastered, while the dark blue curves show these same curves for a selected reference track. The purple block graph is a real-time analyser display.
The main window of Harbal, showing the main level timeline display at the top and the spectrum analysis window below. The yellow and green curves are the overall peak and average spectra of the track to be mastered, while the dark blue curves show these same curves for a selected reference track. The purple block graph is a real-time analyser display.
The Harbal mastering software has been around for more than seven years now, and its first release version was reviewed by Martin Walker back in SOS March 2004. However, although it had evolved significantly into version 2 by 2006, development seemed to have stalled by the time I started using v2.3 regularly in 2009, and I recently began to worry that OS updates might force me to put this tremendously useful utility out to pasture. It was with a sense of relief, then, that I greeted the news of an all-new Harbal v3, which overhauls both the program’s internal coding and its user interface, as well as making it available to Mac users for the first time.
Before I dive into the new features, let me first provide a quick overview of where the software stood as of v2.3, for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t yet encountered it. A stand-alone application, its single-window interface was dominated by a large, multi-function display area which was used to display cumulative frequency-response and level statistics for an entire stereo mix file, derived from peak and/or averaged signal levels. The frequency response could then be tweaked with minimum- or linear-phase EQ tools, while one made visual and auditory comparisons against a simultaneously loaded-in reference recording. Equalisation changes were loudness-compensated to discourage our natural bias towards louder settings, and there were also tools for automatically or manually reducing the loudness of your reference to match that of the file you were processing, working in concert with a simple one-slider output limiter.
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Published in SOS February 2013

 

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In this article:
New Filter Frills
The Dynamics Histogram
Split Points & Segments
Should I Buy Harbal?
Alternatives
information
£119.53; upgrade from v2 $29.95. Prices include VAT.
www.har-bal.com
$175; upgrade from v2 $29.95.
www.har-bal.com
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