One of the most commonly used effects in the studio is none other than the gate. A gate is simply a filter that has a threshold, which must be crossed before it allows audio to pass through it. the advantage to this type of effect is when you have a noisy input, or a live mic, where there's a large amount of ambient noise that comes in when the input isn't actually in use. With a gate, you can make the input completely silent until something triggers it, allowing the audio to pass through... Gate's also have a variety of parameters to ensure that you get as much of the signal as possible; they are:

    Non-gated Gain: This is how much to reduce the gain of the signal before it's gated (normally this should be set to 0)

    Attack: This is the duration (in MS) it takes for audio to go from 0% (gated) to 100% (ungated).

    Sustain: This is the duration (in MS) that a threshold must occur in, for the gate to remain active.

    Release: This is the duration (in MS) it takes for audio to go from 100% (ungated) to 0% (gated).

    Attack Threshold: The audio signal must pass this point in order to activate the gate, and cause it to enter it's Attack phase.

    Release Threshold: The audio signal must be below this point, for at least Sustains length before it enters it's Release phase (this is also called 'hysteresis').

In order to use this plugin, you must have DirectX 6 or greater installed, as well as DirectX Media. You must also have a DirectX audio-compatible music application (like Paris, WaveLab, Cakewalk, etc) installed in order to use the plugin. It works with either a mono (1 channel) or stereo (2 channel) audio stream, at either 16bit or 32bit.

This plugin should be used BEFORE any other plugins, to minimize the amount of noise passed into other effects, and thus increasing their cleanliness. You should also always save copies of the pre-gated audio, in case you need to go back and salvage a piece at a later date.

For quick and convenient tuning, simply click on the slider, and then use the left/right arrow keys to move the sample value -/+ 1, or the PageUp or PageDown keys to move at a larger step size.

I'd like to thank Mark McCurdy for giving me the idea for this plugin in the bigger context, which you'll see soon enough; but sufficive to save, there's a reason you can save the settings into an external file... And mega mega thanks to Sakis Anastopoulos for helping me (he actually did all the work) test this plugin, and make it as high-quality as it is!