No, never tried it. I may download it and give it a try if I have some time. I did read some of their blurb and it seemed to harp on being able to compensate for levels while your eqing so you can do an a/b test. I don't really need this but for someone just starting out, it may come in handy. didn't really read the whole thing, might do other stuff too.

If you download their demo you will find that it only does MP3 quality on playback. In my opinion that does not provide me with a good enough quality playback to allow me to adequately judge their product. When asked why they did not provide full quality sound playback they answered that they were afraid of some one "cracking" their software if they did it that way. I pointed out to them that Waves and a lot of other software vendors allow you a time limited demo without any quality or cracking problems. There are also software authors that put in clicks or dropouts every so often so you cannot use their products without purchasing the full version. They simply repeated their assertion that their software would be cracked if they did it that way.

The software looks interesting but their refusal to have it do a full quality playback limits my looking at it. As an aside they offer a full money back guarantee if you are not happy with the product - excuse me but isn't that more likely to let people pirate their software?

-TOM-

lofi wrote:

heard for harbal ?
supposed to be great masterig tool.
any opinions ? :?:...
if I missed disscusion...
btw GREAT forum !

:D There were some comments a while back but I don't know if anyone bought and tried the complete version.
--Rick

http://www.recordin…

thanx for the link Rick.

but still no answer there...

I must say I completely agree with Tom.

I downloaded demo version, tried it on few songs but couldn't really come to some articulate opinion. those 8 bits are simply not enough for evaluation and way too distracting so I couldn't compensate them no matter how I tried.

and yes. the price and lack of before/after comparison and tutorials lowers the trust ratio in my case.

well... I'll rephrase my question : in case anyone bought and used it please comment !

peace 8)

Har-Bal

Re. Har-Bal - yes I use it all the time. The 8 bit demo wasn't wonderful but it did enable me to understand how the tool worked. In the end I decided not to worry about the audio quality. I just went ahead and ordered with the view if the audio quality was lousy I would just get it refunded. Glad to say there was no need for the refund.
I don't blame the company for limiting the demo to something you wouldn't want to keep. Piracy is rife. There isn't an audio app on the market that isn't cracked or warezed in some form. The Waves plugins are probably the most cracked of the lot - and they use Pace anti-piracy protection. Waves would have been better off adopting the Har-Bal philosophy. I'm happy with a guaranteed money back deal.
I'm not sure what to tell you. I have no regrets buying it and I'm glad i got it at the introductory price phase. I read the eventual retail will be about $300. The price is rising incrementally over time during the version enhancement introductions until it hits the intended market price slot. Is it worth $300. Well I probably use it more than any plugin. It gets used as much as my reverbs.
I don't use it as an Eq - although it is an Eq based tool. I use it as it was intended - to balance the harmonic spectrum - if my mix needs surgical Eq then I'll use a specific Eq device. That sounds double-dutch but the point is if you try and use it as you would an Eq tool you will miss the point of the tool although you could think of it as a type of loudness compensated Eq tool if you were describing it academically. I think with Eq you use it because something needs boosting or cutting. With Har-Bal you use it because the spectrum appears VISUALLY unbalanced. You're not particularly worried about what is boosted or cut - more does everything appear balanced relatively so all adjustments are relative rather than absolute. Sorry if this isn't making sense.

Thomas W. Bethel wrote: If you download their demo you will find that it only does MP3 quality on playback. -TOM-

It's a wee bit fallacious to associate 8-bit representation with MP3 quality. One decreases representation accuracy (hence increasing the noise floor), while the other simply converts information to frequency domain and leaves out unimportant bits - two very different types of signal degradation.

I agree though - limiting the output to 8-bits is possibly the WORST thing one can do to demonstrate a program designed for a field that is all about sound quality. That was my opinion back when the topic came up, and it's not changed since then.

Heck, look at iZotope. I'll bet more than a few people have figured out ways and means to overcome their one-second-silence demo version, yet they're still going strong after a good couple of years.

I personally feel that limiting the demo this way is a sign of insecurity over the selling power of the product, and is detrimental in that sense to the image the product portrays.

I'm willing to bet pirated versions of products exist on various illegal sites, regardless of how the demo is limited. It's inevitable with today's technology... what with new computer games, software packages, lossless-quality music CDs, movies, anime, etc all appearing on torrent sites less than a week after release, it's becoming harder and harder to combat piracy.

Companies can bitch and moan all they want, and governments and ISPs and the RIAA can clamber all over each other proposing new and ingenious methods to combat piracy (such as suing 12-year-old girls), but when it boils down to it, I feel that it's the companies themselves have to change marketing strategy.

It may be wishful thinking, but I forsee that it's going to be a generally accepted moral standard in the future that people pay for what they feel is worth their money, rather than having the mindset that they're 'forced' to pay for a product they can get free illegally. I know a minority of the population does this even nowadays, but it would be great if this was generally accepted behavior, rather than the exception. How fast we move towards this outlook, really depends on how worth-it intellectual property is compared to the cost.

Sorry for the off-topic rant. This has been on my head for a while.