Harmor

This review will be wierd. Usually I get to know new stuff pretty quickly, but with Harmor, it kinda didin't happen. I love IL stuff. Toxic Biohazard is one of my favs to date, bit I still don't know what to think about Harmor.

Features: 8/10

This confuses me a lot. It feels like developers thought: "Ok, let see what's cool today and get it all into one synth!" They made it at time, when additive synthesis was popular, so it's additive synth. ...but also you've got "regular" OSC's and the resynthesis mode which I'm not really sure how to switch to other way then just dropping image on certain tab. Also, while mentioning resynthesis, some kind of graphical editor wouldn't hurt. Now it just imports images. It has an unisono engine, some kind of light physical modeling included, some harmonization effects and so on. ...alltogether it's really nice and rich package, it just feel somehow unorganized.

Sound 8/10

Not bad. Not bad at all. When you manage successfulyl switch to resynthesis mode, I think it has even better results then Alchemy's spectral mode. As far as traditional sounds go, it's pretty good average. It gets interesting when you start messing with all those advanced features, but then you can't objectively compare it to anything. In other words, when you make it sound good, it sounds good, when you make it sounds bad, it sounds bad...

GUI 7/10

Same problem as with the features. There is a lot to explore. It uses IL's envelope framework to effectively modulate prety much anything ... but the way you "search" for the parameters is really a torture. You've got a lot of functions right in front of you on the "dashboard", but all the additive and resynthesis stuff is hidden. It's not a bad gui, it just takes much more time to get into in comparison with Toxic, or Sytrus.

Value 8/10

I might be affected here, becouse I take extremely long times to finish my tracks, but it happens quite a lot that when I use Harmor, I end up replacing it by synth I know better. On the other hand, Harmor is excellent for this "I have no idea what I need, let's go turn some knobs and see!" kind of situation. While that, In synths I know, I sometimes end up with something I've made before. Not the case in Harmor. ...so ironically, it's over-complexity might be a realy good thing that makes the value.

Cheers,
Martin.