SHARM 4 Audio Recording Software

Title: SHARM 4

Producer: Cyberteam Ltd.

Format: Audio Recording Software

Source: www.thesharm.com

Price: $229 (Pro Edition); $299 (Studio Edition)

Rating: Good (four stars out of five)

When I was a teenager, I learned to drive in my father's ancient Cadillac. (Don't think we were rich. It was ancient when he bought it, and I'd swear it spent more time in the shop than on the street.) It handled like a boat and took up three-quarters of any road—though it was fun on dates.

Then I got my own car, an equally ancient VW Beetle held together with chewing gum and bailing wire. Well, not literally, but there really was a rubber-band attached to the engine; I'm not making that up. It handled fairly well and could go from zero to sixty in half an hour with a downward slope and a good tailwind.

On one of my college breaks, a buddy of mine pulled up to my dad's house in a muscle car he'd borrowed from a rich cousin—and he asked if I wanted to drive it.

What a thrill it was. I felt as though all the sluggishness and boat-like handling had been a bad dream; now I was driving the real thing!

And that leads me to today's review. After years of using Audacity to record and edit hypnosis sessions, using SHARM 4 feels like driving a muscle car.

This software package is designed to handle all of a hypnosis practitioner's audio needs. It has a fairly impressive list of features:

Record

Live Record

Export to MP3 or CD

Sample Sessions and Suggestions

Pre-loaded Music and Nature Sounds

Import Your Own Music and Audio Files

Ambient Music Creator

Binaurals (and other BWE sounds)

Bilaterals

White/Pink Noise

Breath Patterns

Heartbeat Sounds

Sound Editing

Sound Effects

Print Transcript

Store Session Notes

SHARM is really designed to be used in two ways. The first approach is for a hypnotist to carefully create a professional recording to give to clients or sell to customers, and the second is to use it during a session, not only to provide background music effects, but also to record so that the client can take the session home for reinforcement.

My feeling is that I love it for the first purpose and am not sold on the second one.

SHARM opens with a tutorial screen that is supplemented by extensive online videos and prompt tech support when you need it. I especially appreciated the way that the Help feature responds to anything I click. While I'm pretty good at figuring out software, SHARM made the learning curve quick and painless.

You can record directly into SHARM—it even has a teleprompter—or easily import an mp3 of suggestions and visualizations you have recorded elsewhere. For that matter, if you don't like your own voice or lack a microphone, SHARM has a library of pre-recorded suggestions; you can choose between a deep, male voice or an even more pleasant woman's voice. Though I'm not fond of the declarative suggestion style ("Your muscles are relaxing"), I can see how these could be useful for putting together a quick session.

I tested the record function using the fairly cheap USB headset I keep for Skype sessions. With a little bit of enhancement and a touch of reverb, it sounded like the Voice of God. Even though Audacity has those effects (and many more), hours of fiddling with Audacity never made my voice sound as good as it did after thirty seconds of playing with SHARM. Sure, there are only four effects—but honestly, you don't need more.

After laying down the suggestions, then I started looking at possibilities for backgrounds. Again, there's just enough choices to give lots of options without overwhelming. Need background music? SHARM has a library of royalty-free music. Don't like that music? SHARM has an ambient music generator. Don't like the generated music? You can import your own. Want nature sounds? SHARM'S got 'em. Do you prefer white noise, or pink? SHARM not only generates the noise but lets you edit to your liking. Would you like the sound of a heartbeat or a breathing pattern, gradually slowing or increasing? You've got it in just a few clicks. Looking for bells and whistles? SHARM literally has bells—and gongs, Tibetan singing bowls, marimbas . . . (No shaman drums, but nobody's perfect.)

Perhaps you're into brainwave entrainment—SHARM lets you generate binaurals, monaurals, and isochronics and edit them in a number of fascinating ways, changing not only the entrainment tones but the carrier frequencies as well. In fact, every sound you put into SHARM can be edited in several parameters, and each parameter can be edited in several ways. I particularly like that virtually any parameter can be determined on a graph, so that you can, for example, have an isochronic beat gradually slow down during the induction, maintain a slow pace during the suggestions, and then accelerate during the return. Best of all, you can cut and paste graphs between parameters, so that several different sounds can follow the same pattern. It's simple but powerful.

Perhaps my favorite cool effect is the bilateral function. I'll talk more about bilateral stimulation and brainwave entrainment in an upcoming article, but very briefly, bilateral stimulation is what's behind EMDR, and I believe it's the overlooked element in the old pocket watch inductions. However, it doesn't have to be visual; auditory bilateral stimulation—basically switching a sound back and forth from one ear to the other—is a trance-inducing enhancement that's very effective. And SHARM lets you apply a bilateral filter to ANY sound: an entrainment tone, a babbling brook, bird song, white noise, a heartbeat, music, your voice . . . And of course, that filter is fully editable.

As a test project, I made a session for a friend of mine, who commented, "I love the way that the river sound kept moving around me . . . " I'm looking forward to creating a dual induction in which the two voices switch sides. Heck, when playing around with the brainwave entrainment and bilateral features, I tranced myself out several times. This is by far the program's best feature.

Can I gripe about SHARM? Hey, as my father used to say, any job worth doing is worth complaining about, and there are some little things about SHARM I don't like. (And I'm not even counting how many times I've had to use Caps Lock during this review.)

While the interface looks appealing, it occasionally can become problematic. I found the playback overload meter to be a thoughtful inclusion, but the lack of an absolute playback counter really bugged me, as did the absence of one-click muting and soloing for tracks. I also want a one-click "Delete All" in the Stage Editor. I very much want Ctrl-Z to work the way it does in every other Windows-based program.

There are a few features I found too simplistic or cumbersome to rely on. The audio editing feature, which is kind of a program within a program, is one of them; I quickly went back to using Audacity to edit individual elements, even though there are a few ways in which the SHARM audio editor is superior.

Likewise, while the program is designed with the idea that a hypnosis practitioner can use it during live sessions with a client, I don't think I'll ever be doing that for several reasons. One is simple latency: When I speak into the mic, the playback is delayed just enough to make it very hard to concentrate. So without spending a lot of money on a really fast computer, the latency is going to make that feature untenable. Sure, I could not wear headphones or silence the playback, but then it's really hard to balance the volume of my voice and the background sounds. (Admittedly, this is a problem with every software package of this type, not just SHARM.)

Even so, the Live Record feature is such that as soon as you start recording, you start a new track—with all of the default settings for effects (i.e. no effects). Now, part of what I love about a program like this is being able to apply and tweak the effects on my voice—but if I want to do that, then I have to start the live recording, spend a couple of minutes getting the effects to the Goldilocks point, and then start working with my client. Can you say "awkward waste of my client's time"? Of course, there's no way to cut out that initial goofing around stage in the recording I'll be giving my client—not without having to mess with Audacity for a while—nor is there any way to change the default settings for the live voice recording.

Now, suppose I'm in the middle of a session, and I decide to say, "Walk over to a waterfall." (I don't know about you, but I improvise quite a bit during sessions.) It seems that a cool program like SHARM would let me bring in a waterfall sound effect, right? Nope. Once you are making a live recording, you can't add anything.

Now at the end of the live recording, you get your options for rendering the final product: you can save it as an mp3 and/or burn it to a CD. The CD burning process is fast and smooth, but that's about the only good thing I can say about it. Even though SHARM creates a temporary WAV file in the CD creation process, you don't have the option of saving the recording as a WAV. But hey, at least you don't have to download a separate LAME encoder plug-in so that you can make an mp3, nor do you have to use a separate program to burn a CD. (By the way, when I say a "LAME encoder," I'm not making an adolescent value judgment; that's what the encoder is called!)

And the program gives you the option of burning a second CD immediately—but then the option is gone forever. In fact, your live SHARM session is lost forever as soon as you click stop; it exists only as an mp3. You have to import the mp3 and then export that session to burn another CD later, for instance, if your client comes back the next week and says, "My dog ate the CD you gave me." If your client says, "The background music was a little too loud for me to follow your voice," then all you can say is, "Too bad; there's no way to change that now."

Suffice it to say that I found the live recording function to be a bit LAME. (That was an adolescent value judgment.)

So, where do I stand when it comes to SHARM?

If you're looking for a great way to record live sessions, I'm not convinced that SHARM is it. (In all fairness, I haven't found a software package that is. In later reviews, I'll talk about some hardware solutions.)

However, if your goal is to easily create professional-quality recordings with all the bells and whistles, SHARM is a must-have program.

In fact, from now on, my process for creating professional recordings is this: record my voice tracks on my ZOOM H2 Handy Digital Recorder (review forthcoming), do a quick edit in Audacity, and then enjoy creating the final product with all the cool sounds, effects, brainwave entrainment, and so on in SHARM. I suppose if I had a good enough PC microphone, I would skip the H2 and record my voice tracks directly into SHARM or Audacity.

(Another reason I choose SHARM for this purpose is it has a reasonable licensing agreement that allows the professional to use recordings created with the software in any way desired. Upcoming reviews will show that's not the case for certain other software packages.)

Compared to a free program like Audacity, SHARM might seem expensive, but compared to any other product on the market that has similar features, SHARM is a sports car at an economy price. If you want to easily make recordings that go beyond the basics, SHARM's functionality, ease of use, excellent tech support, and reasonable licensing make it a good investment, even for the bootstrapping hypnotist.

Full Disclosure: The makers of SHARM were kind enough to provide a full copy of the software for review.