Thanks for the comment, great info!

2. Console4Channel is intended to be at the end of the channel/track, after any other effects (with the exception that subtle effects on a channel/track after Console4Channel can sometimes sound good and enhance the effect that Console makes). Do not hit the input of the plugin hard. Start with levels reading significantly below 0dBfs (check this with Console4Channel bypassed just in case, or before you insert Console4Channel).

3. Console4Buss goes at the start of the buss (before any other processing) into which those channels/tracks feed.

So if you had to process a drumbuss and you are running a LOT of tracks into it that will blend:
Tracks-ConsoleChannel
Drumbuss- ConsoleBuss – FX – ConsoleChannel (‘decode’ the distortion, process, re-‘encode’)
2-buss- ConsoleBuss

That’s two levels. But if you’re doing a drum buss and a lot of the inputs will not be making sound at the same time- especially sequenced stuff, like if you had a separate kick and snare and they didn’t overlap and that was your buss- there’s no point giving each one the Channel because it’d work out to be a slightly degraded version of the dry signal, so you should do

Tracks- (route to drumbuss)
Drumbuss- FX – ConsoleChannel (like it was itself a track)
2-Buss- ConsoleBuss

If you’re not running FX on busses, you can do anything you want with them to make your level adjustments for groups easier:

Tracks- ConsoleChannel
…any crazy combination of busses that only alter the gains of groups of tracks heading to the final 2-buss…
2-Buss- ConsoleBuss

I was assuming people were just grouping, and forgot about the tendency to put processing everywhere (though you might well find that you don’t need to run as much processing to get a mix, with Console)

When in doubt, don’t put ConsoleBuss anywhere except on the 2-buss, and check that every sound is at least running through one instance of ConsoleChannel somewhere. It’s really meant to have ConsoleChannel running directly into ConsoleBuss every time, like two ends of a wire. You can do weird things with grouping without changing that, but anything applied inside that ‘wire’ is going to give unpredictable results in subtle ways.

Nice to see the comment about Variety of Sound – i started out with those and seriously missed them when i went 64bit DAW.

i got the plugin mania bug and have gone through about all non-UAD offerings out there.

but i still pined for my VoS.

so i installed jBridge – works great, and ya know…

the VoS stuff generally kicks EVERYthing else to the curb.

my new favorite channel strip is NastyVCS.

looking forward to Console 4 and donating.

tested it on various material with pre & post analysis… a very interesting console indeed. Reacts differently to different sources, which is nice.

“Here’s hoping that Variety Of Sound will port their old VST plugins to 64-bit as well.”
Agreed!