Opinions on Waves Vocal Rider?

This looks like a fantastic plug in, almost too good to be true.  Worth the current $99 dollar price tag?
 
Normally I spend a huge amount of time manually automating vocals before adding compression or other effects, this sounds like it could be a big time saver.

Bapu - Does it take away the need to meticulously control your vocal automation?  Or are my hopes too high for this thing?

I have it and it works great..

Only thing is...in Sonar you lose the Side Chain ability, as it
requires VST 3 support, which Sonar does not yet support.

An alternative to Vocal Rider is MeldaProduction's MAutoVolume, which does the same kind of thing, and includes a sidechain function that works in Sonar:
 
http://www.meldaproduction.com/plugins/product.php?id=MAutoVolume
 
Less expensive, too.  Demo both and choose the one you like!
 
Cheers,
Eddie
 

i usally don't use it a lot but when i do , it does the work great ..usually before compression to help compressor to do just a little work ....try it on all , not only vocals ....somtime it works ...sometime crap .....depends on the type of sound of course ....

Jerry,

It works just fine for auto-leveling...

Waves plugins require VST 3 support for their Side Chain abilities.

With the Side Chain feature you can:

With a few programs (Pro Tools, Nuendo, Cubase, and Studio One), you can even feed a mix of the music into Vocal Rider’s sidechain. This insures that the vocal is not only consistent with itself, but can change if the music changes— louder during loud parts, neutral (no boost) during softer passages.

If you create a buss for the mix, then feed that mix buss to the Side Chain of the Vocal Rider, it will
insure that the Vocal "stays out front" based on the mix content...so to speak...

Hope that helps!

Thanks for the explanation ccLarry!  I may have to get this now.

>With a few programs (Pro Tools, Nuendo, Cubase, and Studio One), you can even feed a mix of the music into Vocal Rider’s sidechain. This insures that the vocal is not only consistent with itself, but can change if the music changes— louder during loud parts, neutral (no boost) during softer passages. <

I wonder how close you could come to this by taking the automation from the Vocal Rider track, copying and "inverting the phase" then onto the music mix bus--maybe tweaking it a little...?