Auto-Gain for plugins, or even plugin chains. Everyone wants it

I’m sure there are a hundred other Feature Requests like this one. IDK how hard this would be to implement, but since some third party companies have solutions (of varying quality), surely there is a way to implement it into the daw. Just a setting that automatically adjusts the volume coming out of a plugin to match the volume going in. Seriously, some people would switch to Cubase just for that simple feature.

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I don’t want it. I don’t care about it.

To the technical part of it: it would be very hard to build this feature reliably for chains of third party plugins. Not all of them report the resulting gain changes to the host. Some don’t even calculate them.

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So you could disable it :slight_smile: But having it as a way of quickly optimizing gainstaging would be terrific.

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Well, as you yourself wrote, the solutions that exist are of varying quality…
If you do a one time calculation and a static setting, that is just an approximation from that one part of the audio that got measured.
If you mean a permanent adjustment, that opens a whole other can of worms. Apart from that it’s not easy to implement properly for all kind of different material (especially highly dynamic material like drums) and could introduce artifacts if the level changes too fast, my guess is that it would be rather demanding on the CPU.

What I think would be rather easy to implement and not very taxing on the processor are additional input/output control (say in the plugin toolbar) per plugin, maybe even optionally linkable. There are sadly still plugins out there that don’t have clean gain input and output controls even for nonlinear processes.

It doesn’t have to be that smart or ride levels. Could just be a button that compensates the instance you press it. So you tweak a few knobs on your plugin, you hit the level match button and it matches the level coming out to what the level was before the plugin. Dare to dream…

“Everyone wants it”?

YOU are dreaming.