Gate, downward expander and ducker in one plugin, with a keyed trance gate built in. The display draws what was kept, what was removed and what the detector heard on one decibel scale, the threshold is a line you drag straight on it, and one button lets you hear everything the gate is taking out before you commit to it.
The top of the window is a level history in decibels. What passes through fills in teal, what the gate takes out sits above it in red, the gold line is what the detector hears, and the grey line is the gain the gate is applying, so a close, a hold and a release all have a shape you can read. Every line uses the same scale on the left, so the pink threshold line means what it says: anything the detector puts above it opens the gate. Drag the line to set it; grabbing it never makes it jump. Choose eight, four or two seconds of history, and read input, output, reduction and detector level at the side.
GATE turns everything below the threshold down by RANGE, from a gentle 10 dB tidy-up to a full 80 dB cut. EXPANDER lowers quiet material in proportion: at 2:1, a sound 6 dB under the threshold comes out 12 dB under, which keeps the ends of words and the tails of notes natural while room noise and headphone spill drop away. DUCK works the other way round: while the detector is above the threshold the track turns down by RANGE, and it comes back when the detector falls. HYSTERESIS sets a lower closing level so a signal hovering at the threshold cannot chatter, and HOLD keeps the gate open for a set time after the signal drops.
Turn on EXT SIDECHAIN and route any track into the plugin's sidechain input: a kick can open a bass, a voice-over can duck the music, or a short 1/8-note hat or click pattern can chop a pad into a trance gate. A readout beside the button says whether the key is arriving, silent, or not connected, and if you load a keyed preset without routing anything, the display tells you why the track has gone quiet instead of leaving you guessing. A mono track keyed from a stereo source listens to both channels of the key.
The main view is RANGE, ATTACK, HOLD, RELEASE and MIX, each labelled with what it does in the current mode, and the threshold lives on the display. ADVANCED adds a numeric threshold, ratio, hysteresis, lookahead and the two sidechain focus frequencies, and the plugin remembers which view you prefer. Every control explains itself on hover, and values can be typed the way they read: 8k, 1.5 s or 30 dB.
Nothing here is named after gear it imitates, and nothing is hidden behind a single amount knob. Each control does one thing, and the display shows it doing that thing.
Two handles set the band the detector listens to, with 12 dB per octave slopes, so a snare gate can ignore the kick or a kick trigger can ignore the cymbals. It changes what opens the gate, never the tone of what comes out. LISTEN DETECTOR plays exactly what the detector hears.
Hear only what the gate is taking out, at the current MIX. If you hear bleed and room, the settings are right. If you hear the start or the tail of the note itself, they are not.
Zero to 20 ms, 2 ms by default. The detector reads ahead, so the gate is already open on the first sample of a hit instead of clipping its attack. The delay is reported to your DAW to the sample and shown in the meter panel.
BYPASS crossfades to the input delayed by the same lookahead, so switching it in and out never clicks and never shifts timing. The display keeps drawing what the gate would do.
Linked, one detector drives both channels, so the image stays put. Unlinked, each side gates on its own, for stereo sources that are really two separate microphones.
Sixteen factory starting points in three groups, gate, expander and duck, from drum and guitar cleanup to podcast room tidying, keyed ducking and trance gating. Each one is described in the menu, and the keyed ones say what to route to the sidechain.
64 steps of undo and redo over every sound setting, including preset loads and RESET, from the keyboard or the presets menu.
A single detector and a gain stage, with no oversampling to pay for, so it can sit on every drum microphone in a session.