Hi Paavo,
After reading the above (several times, because on first reading, most of it went over my head higher than a Boeing 747
) I can understand why it is taking a while. I have a few comments and questions to follow.
By doing time based analysis it allows for the ability to arbitrarily partition a track into segments and have average analyses for each plus individual filters for each segment. Not only does the analysis engine do time based analysis but it also does analysis for mid,side,left and right channels.
This sounds like exactly the feature a few of us have eagerly been awaiting. Is the change between segments going to be instant or can it be "morphed" over a selectable time frame ?
Another possibility that I've catered for in the design proposal is controlling errant peaks in a track. The spectrum analysis has information in it that will allow you to quickly locate the time segments that are responsible for particular peaks in the peak spectrum trace. With that time selection centred on a particular errant peak you will be able to build a filter to just control that, yielding a process which you might refer to as my take on multi-band compression.
Never thought of this as a feature requirement but, now that you mention it...YES, bravo
One thing I'm also working on doing is separating the filter design process from the filtering process. This will allow for a separate standalone and free Har-Bal player, allowing people with Har-bal licenses to design filters and make them available for people to hear without the need for them to purchase the software.
Another good idea that will help to keep the nay sayers at bay when they hear what Harbal can do.
Har-Bal Air as it is now, will be replaced with a more powerful and natural sounding Haas zone ambiance process. That way you use it will be the same but it will sound better and have a greater range of possibilities, one of which is stereo'ising mono sources.
I'm sure this would also be very useful to a lot of us and I am chomping at the bit to hear what this can do.
On the GUI side of things the geometric mean trace will cease to be and is being replaced by a realtime trace which displays the spectrum at a particular 1/20th second time slice. I've actually prototyped this behaviour and it works quite well. It needs some optimisation though.
Would there be a way to Freeze the trace ( I just have a vision in my head that the trace would be jumping all over the place and be slightly distracting and difficult to interpret) or are you saying that you will be able to select a particular time slice and see the trace for just that slice ?
Would you be able to implement a VST Effect slot (as a last process in the chain) into the new Harbal or would that still be something that is not an option ?
It is not particularly important and probably difficult to tell at this stage, but what kind of increase in computing cycles is it looking like taking ?
This all sounds brilliant to me. If you need somebody for Beta Testing (especially for longer files of 20 minutes and more with numerous segments) sign me up.
Keep up the good work.
Dunc
