Anyone have any experience with both of these? Any thoughts on them? The Meld plugin has the price advantage, but Waves is having a sale currently, so it's not a huge difference.
Is one better, or are they pretty comparable?
*sale is over so it doesn't matter any more*
Last edited by Panic; 07-01-2013 at 07:55 AM.
Reason: spelling, update
This is an incorrect generalized statement. Waves plug-ins
that do not require VST3 standard features work in Reaper
without issues.
Vocal Rider is a VST3 plug-in. Reaper currently supports
only VST2.4 standard, so there is no way to route 'sidechain'
input to the plug-in inside Reaper in order for it to work
properly (basing decision on a reference material).
I found the audio always needs some manual editing afterwards. Didn't bother with WUP to update the Waves one from 32bit version just for this.
I since used Hornet Autogain Pro which is only 11 euro at the moment and while it wasn't as immediate as the Waves it's results didn't seem any worse.
Honestly having used them a bit I'm not that bothered any more and prefer to spend a bit of time doing it manually for typical music projects.
For sure if you're doing long dialogue or something they could be a big time saver.
I'm on the fence on which to buy. Any experience with the two?
I've tried several and have found they do some good but are not a replacement for good leveling manually. It's like any tool, it works great when the problems are tiny, and progressively worse the more they have to fix.
__________________ Music is what feelings sound like.
I just discovered based on the TRILEVELER plugin by Sonic Anomaly that the best way to get to perfection is to use auto volume plugins in series.
I find that MAutoVolume can do anything and sounds awesome. You can set it as slow medium or extra fast and adjust anything exvept maybe the exact behavior of the gate.
Waves is a bit on the medium speed side of things and cannot be tweeked as much.
Following this, I found that MAutoVolume 1st and then Vocal Rider 2nd can complement very well.
Or you can use TriLeveler.
Or set two instances of MAutoVolume/ vocal rider one after the other each with their specific settings
I may be biased, but I:d say go with MAutovolume. It has more options and can be used for things besides just vocals. Waves split their plugins into vocal rider and bass rider, but MAutovolume can do both if you change the speed and sidechain settings. Here is a quick vid I did of how to I use it.
I compared the vocal rider output with just a regular ReaComp (Vocal Preset that says "aim for 8dB GR") and have to say that the output is really quite the same... Vocal Rider is just a little overhyped... as far as I'm concerned it's something that you don't actually need and ReaComp does the main job really, really well..
If I remember correctly there is a fx chain that you can get in the stash, that is mimicing a vocal rider also... but not too sure on that..