Hi - I usually manually smooth out vocals (adjusting the clip gain) before routing to a comp.
Demoing Melda MAutovolume, very nice. With minimum fuss it writes automation data to smooth out volume changes in your vocal track, and the end result is good! The aggressiveness of the automation is configurable. Though you can bounce the automation through the plug-in, if someone has concerns about audio quality you can just copy the automation to the track’s"Volume" automation line and bounce from there to bypass the plug (though I didn’t hear the plug-in color the audio, including no phasing, I did that anyway).
I have to slide the automation data a bit to match the audio for some reason, but besides that it seems to work as advertised.
There’s usually some iterative tweaking of the settings needed, and then some touch up editing involved, which I’m fine with given the incredible amount of time it takes to do this by hand. $59, compared to $200-300 for Waves Vocal Rider, which is the product I’ve been watching for years.
I’ve been manually adjusting the clip gains to do this vocal leveling, but I think I’ll probably buy this plug and kiss the old way good-bye.
Anyone here use it, or something like it? … How are you leveling before routing to a comp?
And I need to add info. Just discussed with the developer (KVR forum). He recommends using the plug-in without automation, as he found it was inconsistently written.
To see what he was talking about, I exported and compared to the automated output (same settings) - there were indeed differences (it barely didn’t null), but no phasing.
Then to test that the plug-in didn’t color the sound as an insert on the way to exporting the audio, I played the processed audio simultaneous with the unprocessed - no phasing at all. (It sounded fine also!).
The end result, exporting/rendering through the plug-in without using automation: nicely leveled vocals on a new track, with a little but not much tweaking needed … huge timesaver.
Plugins are great, don’t get me wrong, but don’t forget there’s humaneness in someone’s vocal performance. If you have a dynamic singer, the music sometimes should follow that.
I’m very scared with this new-found power . Only saving grace is that I have some reference tracks that I did where the vocals were “hand-leveled” that turned out OK. So hopefully I can save a lot of time, but still “keep it real” with dynamics. This plug-in is programmable in terms of how much leveling it does, so hopefully I won’t develop a sudden liking for “sausage” shapes for the vocal waveforms … spiky is good to some degree, right?
Hi Tom - asking out of respect for your great experience, musical, bovine , and otherwise …
I’ve noticed in songs like Adelle’s … the dynamics seem to be just about gone completely … whisper vs. scream, it all seems (unscientifically, not measured by me of course) to be at about the same volume. Still there is lots of emotion in her songs.
I agree that it is too easy in too many ways for overprocessing to suck the life and emotion out of songs … but there are songs like hers that seem to be immune from that despite squashed vocals.
Is it just a matter that those engineers and producers are superhuman/immortal in their skills? Or is there something else going on too? (Is all this just udder nonsense? ).
Maybe you’re right. Still, the thought of letting a plugin auto-pilot the most important (IMO) feature of a song gives me the heebie jeebies. Then again, I may be old in my ways.
I have HoRNet’s Auto-gain Pro but I haven’t used it much and haven’t compared it to Mautovolume so I can’t be of any help there… http://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/hornet-autogain-pro/
HorNEt seems to have ~40% discount fairly often (similar to Melda’s 50% deals) so the total price for Auto-Gain Pro after discount was lower than Melda’s with a discount. If I was dealing with dialogue work a lot I probably would have spent more time comparing the two before making a decision but the hornet plug seems to work well from what I’ve seen (it wasn’t extremely intuitive straight way IMO).
I own quite a few Melda plugs and consider him to be a talented and creative coder so it wouldn’t surprise me if MAuto is very well made.
. Only saving grace is that I have some reference tracks that I did where the vocals were “hand-leveled” that turned out OK. So hopefully I can save a lot of time, but still “keep it real” with dynamics. This plug-in is programmable in terms of how much leveling it does, so hopefully I won’t develop a sudden liking for “sausage” shapes for the vocal waveforms … spiky is good to some degree, right? 
time to get me one of these: