Har-Bal Mastering Program

[highkoo]

Originally posted by 5am
hehe, quality. ur right.

scott

you got me sketched out!!

anyone heard anything about this.....?

im super interested in it.... but it does look a little 'cheap'...and the concept is a little 'gimmicky'....

damn it...

if it was fifty bucks id be all over it just for curiosity...

ima hafta listen to those samples closely.....


peace.

[neilwight]

i get tracks sent to me at my mastering house more and more that have been run through HARBAL.
while it has never done anything negative to the tracks it certainly isnt a home mastering solution, even if by some miraculous stroke of fate you had no issues in your track.
what it does do however is attempt to address frequency spread and balance and the changes it makes are for the better though never complete or fully satisfactory.

mastering is much more complicated than this program makes out and the only real tool is your ears. a visual feedback can be helpful for specific taks but should never be relied upon over anything your ears are telling you.

it certainly wont destroy your tracks however.

[highkoo]

cool!


but do you think a 'real' mastering engineer would be able to get good results from it? i mean, i would assume most of the people that would be using this thing are amateurs, to say the least, but if someone who really knew what they were doing got ahold of it, would it hold any weight? or is it best left to ozone and L3...?




peace.

[neilwight]

a real mastering engineer would not even bother to use this program, or izotpe ozone and some wouldnt touch L3 either.

all it does it point out any deviations from an ideal frequency spread (based on a full orchestra spread id assume which is regarded as the ideal) and adjust it to this ideal range.

it will not address any inherent mix problems, compression etc etc.

this adjustment of spread would be carried out by a mastering engineer manually after listening to the track and using EQ.
all it does is offer home users an easy solution to this step however since it takes no account of any underlying issues, genre or programme material is a far from complete solution even to this limited task.

i am however yet to hear it make anything worse but as mastering solution it certainly is not. i would even question it being a full solution to a mastering step.

[highkoo]

yea what im saying is, is it a case of a good tool in inexperienced hands, or is it a mediocre tool in ANY hands?... but i guess if its not doin anything good to the sound, then its doin somethin bad.....thats how i look at it. i like to put it through as few steps as possible. thanks for giving me your perspective on it.




peace.

[neilwight]

highkoo,

id say it was a pointless tool in experienced hands (as it would all be done with EQ and listening) but for inexperienced users who arent sure what they should be listening for and adjusting or who are working with cheap DAs and monitors that it could perhaps be quite a good program for them.

it should balance out their audio to a more acceptable frequency spread/tilt than they would perhaps have otherwise achieved.

as i said, ive never heard it make anything worse. everything its done has been a step in the right direction though ive always had to do more (and thats not including other things like compression etc etc)

one worry i would have however would be when dealing with tracks with poorly compressed material. if for example you had a hihat jumping up out of the top end, would it see this as too much content rather than what it is and drastically reduce the volume as a result giving an effect thats definately not wanted.

whether its of benefit to you i really couldnt say but it certainly does nothing you cannot do with an EQ of which im sure you have many to choose from.
just remember to use broad sweeps at this stage.