Dry/wet fader for plugins

It still is an important feature as ardour isnt only used to simulate the mixing style of old consoles, but adds up on this. Of course you couldn’t easiliy select the type of metering, chop up regions, change speed or pitch and so many more features that ardour offers, with these analog mixing consoles. Having a dry/wet knob, like in carla, is often times the better alternative than to always create a new bus for it. Otherwise, why would plugins include this feature at all? It does make sense to make it available system wide, as to allow a more free and creative workflow. For this simple feature, that a lot of daws offer, in ardour you have to get out of your way to achieve this. Does it really make sense to stay focused on that one very specific way of using ardour? Like a ‘best practice’ enforced on all creative workflows. Of course, this daw can be used in so many different ways.
Imagine, none of the plugins offer a dry/wet. Creating a send bus every time you only want a slight hint of a plugin is a massive overkill.
It doesnt really feel that it would be hard to implement or that a tiny knob in the top left corner on a plugin would make UI look bloated. There is some space between latency compensation and pin connections. It is a reasonable feature which’s existence is justified. So if there are some people that prefer doing it that way. What does really speak against it? other than its not the way you’d normally do it analog style.
Would it do any bad? My answer would be no, if you dont use it just ignore it (maybe im missing smthng though)
Would it be good? For some people (me included, obviously) it feels like a useful feature

Hoping I could add to the discussion with my comment

There are only a few cases where a cross-fade is correct for a given DSP. There are also cases where it fails completely. Plugins with latency are an example (the dry paths will have to be delayed accordingly).

If it makes sense to have a dry/wet control it should be provided by the plugin.

In any case you can do this in Ardour on a per-plugin basis using Pin Connections, using an A/B cross-fade plugin:

The bypassed signal (dashed lines) are also delay compensated in case the plugin introduces latency.

And in addition to this, since the cross-fade is done by a plugin, it can also be automated or remote-controlled.

Thanks for pointing this out! It seems like a much more flexible fix, than creation of a bus. And it does make sense to include an extra step of work to do things that one shouldn’t do without being absolutely sure (like in rust, when you want a null)

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For good measure, we’ve just bundled two plugins A-B Switch and a Cross Fade to make this easier. Available since Ardour 6.2-20.

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Awesome! Thanks so much :slight_smile:

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