All user reviews of 4/5 for the Antares Audio Technology Harmony Engine

Antares Harmony Engine Evo is a harmony generator for vocal tracks that has physical modeling. This software has over 15 effects that are all ready to use just by the press of a mouse button. I have used a lot of products made by Antares and they are all pretty easy to use. This Harmony Engine is a little more difficult to use if you want to step outside of just using the standard presets and you want to mold your own sound. As long as you understand the Algorithms and calculations then you might be able to work it easily but I am not big on that stuff so it took me a little more time to learn how to use them properly and get the sound that I was looking for. I had to stick to using the presets for a while before I was ready to start using it without them.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

When I first started trying to dial up the calculations and algorithms myself the sound was not very realistic. The harmonies were really choppy and sounded computer generated, but once I got the hang of how to use it I was able to get that realistic and smooth harmony sound that I was looking for when I purchased it.

OVERALL OPINION

Installing it was a bit longer than I thought it was going to take, it takes up a little more hard disk space than I thought that it would. But after it installed it was not easy to set up with Pro Tools and Cubase. I have only used it in those too DAW programs so far and it has worked great. I have been using the Harmony Engine EVO since February last year (2012) and I still use it frequently to this date, or just when I am looking for my harmonies to be realistic and add them to my main vocals. You can do some really neat stuff with this software if you understand how to dial up the algorithms.

Installing the Antares Systems Harmony Engine plug-in was a quick process and was one without any problems or compatibility issues at all. I had the plug-in up and running in only a couple of minutes from the time that I began to install it. The interface of the software is somewhat complex as there is a lot going on, but after playing around with it a little I was able to figure it out rather quickly. This plug-in has the capability to add four different harmony parts above your original signal, with four separate sections for each of these. Each has parameters for pan, rate, onset delay, pitch amount, and amp amount. It also has an input section as well as a harmony control section and a variety of harmony presets. It also has a humanize section as well as a few other various controls, so as you can see there is a lot of different controls to insure that you will have total control over your sound. I don't have the manual for the Antares Harmony Engine, but its probably a good idea to have it around as this is a complex plug-in.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

I am currently running the Antares Harmony Engine on a Mac Book Pro that has a 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of RAM. I run Pro Tools LE 7.4 off of a Digi 002R audio interface and I've never had a problem using this plug-in with this configuration. While I never use more than one at a time really, it has never overloaded or acted up while using it, and while I can't say how well it would run if you want to run a bunch of them at once, I imagine that most people aren't doing that anyway.

OVERALL OPINION

I've been using the Antares Harmony Engine plug-in for around two or three years and while I don't always like to use synthetic harmonies, this can come in handy and does have a pretty cool sound to it. The price is somewhat reasonable, as this is one of the better harmony engine plug-ins I've used. While it isn't a plug-in I use on a daily basis, it comes in handy when I do need it and I'm glad to have it available to me. If you are looking for a good harmonizer plug-in, the Antares Harmony Engine is worthy of a look.