Question

Automatic Gain Compensation is a great way to make more accurate decisions on whether you're improving the sound (instead of just turning it up), but sadly a lot of VSTs don't offer it as a built in function.

I found this Max for Live plugin that offers the feature

https://maxforlive.com/library/device/4571/volume-compensator

via this useful video:

Is there any way to replicate this in Studio One? I can do it manually by metering pre/post effect and using a mix tool to manually adjust the gain after I've made changes, but that's not as good as something that automatically compensates whilst you're tweaking the plugin in the middle. Of course I understand that it would probably result in latency added to the plugin chain, and it'd need to be based on some short-term or momentary RMS value, but I think if effectively applied it would be great - and of course if something like this could be built into Studio One, even better!

*** UPDATE ***

I have found this VST which does the job I am looking for:

https://www.tb-software.com/TBProAudio/ab_lm.html

Naturally it would be awesome to see this sort of pre/post insert gain compensation built directly into Studio One, but this plugin looks like it will do the job nicely for now!

Answer 1

Hi alexleonard2, the Transform Tool in Studio One actually allows for really quick gain compensation without any added latency. Please watch my tutorial on this here: 

If you still find that this doesn't work well enough for you, I'll gladly move this question into our Feature Request area.

Answer 2

Thanks to @gregorbeyerle1 for the suggestion. Nice functionality which I wasn't aware of, but doesn't solve the issue - I'm looking for automatic gain compensation so that the perceived level doesn't change when I boost or cut something whilst EQing (or doing anything else).

Quite a few VSTs offer this automatic compensation out of the box (for example FabFilter, SlickEQ, StudioOne ProEQ), but then there are plenty out there that don't offer it. When they don't offer it, I make the changes I want, and then manually adjust the output gain from the VST effect so that when I bypass to A/B the changes I'm not hearing one as louder than the other and skewing my decision.

So having some sort of functionality built right into the insert chain to compensate the post-insert gain to match the pre-insert gain would be awesome. I'd probably only use it whilst auditioning changes, and would then disable and manually adjust my output gain to avoid any added latency or RMS calculation issues, but I do think it would be a very helpful feature.

I couldn't see a way to reply to your answer, so I just added a new answer..!

Answer 3

There's also Perception AB: https://www.meterplugs.com/perception

But again it would be awesome to see a function like this built into the core of Studio One.