The Challenge

Creating Harmony4 is truly a challenge. I’ve been working heavily on all TC-Helicon’s harmony projects ever since VoicePrismPlus, including Quintet, VoiceWorks, VoiceLive, and most recently VoicePro. VoiceDoubler isn’t a harmony product, but I simply have to plug it here because it was one of my favourites to work on (next to VoicePro). Anyway, Harmony4 is a massive challenge to TC-Helicon and myself, because it’s the first software plugin we’ve done all by ourselves. Our previous plugins were worked on in conjunction with TC-Works. We’ve now taken complete control over our plugin destiny! It’s a massive challenge because the differences between software land and hardware land are immense. Let me explain.

Hardware:

• We build the operating system ourselves (sorry Apple and Microsoft, we won’t be upgrading to the newest version). We do this to be as efficient as possible. We also have complete control. As a user, you can’t install a bunch of lousy software (not your fault, trust me, I know!) on your machine that brings the rest of the system to its knees.
• We build the hardware ourselves. 3rd parties can’t sell you hardware devices with poorly written drivers that seem to enjoy the colour blue (yes, a little Windows jab, but OSX isn’t innocent either).
• We select the memory and processor speed. We don’t have to worry about how recently you as a user had to shovel money over to Intel or AMD or whoever, to keep up with a recent operating system upgrade.

Software
Software is just the opposite. Sure, I can abuse high-level programming languages, play with gobs of RAM and hard-drive space, make easy upgrades in the field with Internet downloads, but all the other benefits are gone. And everyone thinks plugins should be free. Wonderful!

That about ends my rant for the day.

Stephen Evans
Developer