Another consideration is that the settings made by Mix Assistant are, of course, static, so you still have to manage any fader rides yourself. This didn’t come as a huge surprise, though, electronic music being far less algorithmically quantifiable than acoustic/electric instrumentation, we assume. However, on a vocal-free house track, featuring a heavily modulated bassline, the nonsense it made of the non-percussive signals weren’t really worth the time spent loading all those Relay plugins. On a well-recorded pop/rock song comprising around 20 tracks with vocal Focus, the suggested levels made for a remarkably solid foundation on which to build – we were pleasantly surprised at the cohesion achieved by the mixing algorithm.
With the right source material, the results can be very impressive. Hitting the Accept button commits to the group levelling and dissolves the group faders – after that, you can only change individual track volumes, pan positions and stereo width using the Visual Mixer’s control pucks. Within each group, the algorithm adjusts the gains of the component tracks to get as close to the level set by that group’s fader as possible. Immediately after analysis, you get the chance to tweak the relative levels of five arbitrary groups – Focus, Voice, Bass, Percussion and Musical – and reassign individual tracks between them if the algorithm has classified anything incorrectly. With that done, simply play your song from start to finish, then marvel as the levels and pans of every plugin are automatically set up to create a mix. The first step in the Mix Assistant’s Balance dialogue is to select tracks for inclusion and set one or more of them to be the Focus for the algorithm to keep front and centre, as it were.
Via the magic of Inter-Plugin Communication, this unifies the level, pan and width controls of all running instances of Neutron (or the included Relay utility plugin), the idea being to load one onto every track, set all tracks to unity gain and centred panning, then adjust their levels and stereo positioning collectively in the Visual Mixer instead of the host DAW’s mixer. The new Mix Assistant uses ‘intelligent’ track analysis to set up the level, pan and width controls in the Visual Mixer introduced with Neutron 2. (Image credit: Future) Performance and verdict
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