Har-Bal Users Forum BBS

First off, I just downloaded the new version. I'm excited. I like it. I play country music similar to an Alan Jackson style. I brought up your templets which doesn't have a country one, but the Rock one sounds better than the one I created myself. Any oppinions on that???

I'm most excited about the average volume/normalizing feature, but what I can't figure out is: If I take my frist song, and match it with the Rock templet, get the volume where it appears best, then I should be able to save this as a filter/reference. (What's the difference between a filter and a reference?) But I haven't been able to figure out what to do to bring that song up so I can A/B it with the next one. Can you talk me through these steps?

I truly appreciate the way you always respond so quickly.

One final comment , that just seems fairly worthless to me, is the zoom in and zoom out to infinity feature, I can see zooming slightly to center it, but the few times I've played with that and finally bring my song back from the micro world, it is just a flat dead lifeless song, where I need to reload it again. What good is this feature?

Thanks Dough!

My only real comment is that most modern country such as Alan Jackson, Toby Keith, Garth Brooks, Dixie Chicks, Shania Twain and most of the "new country" artists have a lot of rock in them...I do not find it at all surprising the typical rock music Har-Bal templates sound well with it.

Many of them may play country, but you can certainly tell they grew up listening to Kiss

Dough,

Seems you are using the Zoom In feature incorrectly. For historical reasons this zoom in works in a different manner to your typical zoom in (which is why the icon looks nothing like the norm either and Dan will be saying I told you so). To use it you need to click and drag (press and hold donw the left mouse button) over the area you want to zoom into. If you do so you will see a rectangular box showing the area you are selecting. Because you are just clicking your zoom area is very small and hence the magnification uselessly large.

On templates I'd imaging that the rock template could work well with country music. Sorry for the omission but on the other hand please be aware that best results are generally obtained without templates (read the tutorial in the help; menu Help/Tutorials...). If you want to create your own refence files from country music recordings that please you just analyze the track with HarBal and put the corresponding .anl file in your reference files folder.

If you want to do A/B testing between your first harbalized track and the next one you will need to open that track and the filter you designed for it as a reference. Enter your track in the "source file" edit box and your designed filter in the "filter file" edit box of the open reference dialog.
Note that you can open playable files or analysis files as a source file in a reference. If you open an analysis file you wont be able to do A/B reference comparision because it has no waveform data in it.

What is the difference between a filter file and a reference? I'll go through the three file types harbal makes use of, wave files of a number of different formats, which is self explanatory; analysis files (.anl) which are files that contain the spectrum analysis data of a given track; and filter files (.mfl) which contain data describing the frequency response of an EQ filter that you've designed. When you open a reference track (playable or otherwise) you typically open it with a filter file designed for that track (or no filter file if the track was exceptionally well crafted).

Some people have a tendency to confuse the spectrum with the filter frequency response. What you see on screen the the spectrum as it would appear after application of your filter and no the filter frequency response directly. If that interests you and you have the latest version you can view the filter frequency response if you wish (menu "Graph/View/Frequency response").

Regards,


Paavo.