Reaper has take fx, which let you add effects plugins to individual items rather than to an entire track. You can automate the parameters.
The problem is, automating the parameters causes weird audio artifacts in every third-party plugin I've tried it with. I asked about it on the Reaper forum four years ago and it fizzled out.
Anyway, I'm wondering if it would be possible for Patchwork to somehow solve this problem, since it's a plugin wrapper. It sounds like there's a common bug in many plugins involving plugin reset and parameter smoothing... I don't know if Patchwork could be a sort of global workaround (I've contacted a couple developers who claimed to fix it but didn't, and others who said they weren't going to address it).
Here's a short response from Justin @ Cockos:
and seemingly quite a technical response from Oli @ DMG Audio:ReaEQ, on each parameter change, smooths the parameter changes over the block (which is normally desired). After the first block following a reset it is not desired and is a bug
Again I don't know if it's possible for Patchwork to workaround these common plugin bugs, but thought I'd throw it out there just in case it could be supported (I loaded a plugin into patchwork, automated it, and got the same bad behavior).As mentioned in
the thread, we don't skip EQ coefficient interpolation after a call to
resume(), so that's one thing that can help. Also we throttle EQ
curve recalculation to save on CPU burn, but I have added a mechanism
which forces it the first time each parameter is set after a call to
resume(), which should help the case when using take FX parameter
automation. I've also added a mechanism to make sure coefficients for
both channels get updated at exactly at the same time, at the start of
a process block, to avoid any clicks/spikes in just one channel.
Here's a video demonstration of the issue:
