Making Music
  Computer Music Software and Hardware

Copy cat

It's important to realise that the best results will generally not come from trying to copy the spectrum of a reference file exactly. You can, for example, load a CD track that you'd like your song to sound like and use that as a reference. In fact, that's a jolly good way to get started. However, every song has its own characteristics with energy concentrated in different areas because each uses different sounds and instruments, and creating an exact copy of another song's spectrum will probably not pick up those areas in another song. Music is still an art and your input is still required.

Compensation society

Okay, so perhaps you could do something similar with a multi-band filter but it won't be so easy and it almost surely won't be as cheap! And HarBal has another major plus up its sleeve - loudness compensation. This is incredibly important. If you're mixing a track and boost the EQ, does the result sound better or worse? It sounds better because the boosted frequencies make it louder and our ears tell us this is better. This makes it difficult to tell whether or not the EQ change itself is an improvement.

The only way to do an accurate A/B comparison is to reduce the loudness by a commensurate amount when you boost the EQ - or increase the loudness if you cut EQ. HarBal takes the hard work - or impossibility! - out of doing this by automatically compensating for any increase in the loudness so you get an accurate impression of what the filter is doing. Brilliant!

You can download a demo from the site but playback is limited to 8-bit which sort of defeats the object of the exercise. However, there's also an active forum where you can find answers to most questions you may have. HarBal could be improved in a few areas and doubtless many are being considered, and the developer is already working on Mac and plug-in versions. Meanwhile, it's an ingenious program, well worth a close look by anyone who wants to improve their tracks.