New Music Gear Monday: Sonible smart:chain Intelligent Channel Strip Plugin

If you’ve ever mixed a session with a dozen or more instruments, you know what happens. Every channel gets its own EQ, its own compressor, maybe a gate on some of the drums and a de-esser for the vocal, and none of those plugins have any idea what the others are doing. You end up building a mix around isolated decisions, then spending half the session just getting a rough balance that sounds like a group of instruments playing together instead of fighting for space. Sonible has been working on that problem for years with its smart series of AI-assisted plugins, and now the company has combined several of them into a single, connected tool.

That new plugin is smart:chain from Sonible, and it’s built around the idea that mixing tools should actually talk to each other.

One Chain, Shared Intelligence

Instead of stacking separate plugins that each analyze the audio on their own, smart:chain runs eight intelligent processors, including input level riding, EQ, compression, gating, de-harshing, and saturation inside one unified channel strip.

A single pass of analysis gives every module an informed starting point, so the EQ isn’t fighting the compressor and the gate isn’t reacting to something the de-harsher already handled.

It should be noted that you still get full access to every parameter, so the AI gets you to a smart starting point and you take it from there with normal hands-on control.

Mix-Wide Intelligence And Auto Leveling

The bigger idea is that smart:chain doesn’t stop at the channel.

Multiple instances communicate across the session, so tracks can be placed in Front, Middle, and Back depth layers and the processing adapts to support that separation automatically.

There’s also session-wide Auto Leveling, which studies the relationships between your learned tracks and builds a genre-aware rough balance across the whole mix rather than leaving you to eyeball every fader from scratch.

Trim controls let you adjust that balance without losing the relationships the plugin established, and a centralized control window gives you access to every instance, along with track groups and navigation, in one place.

This is a very different approach to a channel strip, as it treats the mix as a connected system instead of a stack of isolated tools, while still leaving all the creative calls in your hands.

smart:chain runs on Mac and PC in VST3, AU, and AAX formats, and works with sample rates up to 192kHz. It’s currently priced at an introductory $99 (regular price $179), with an even better price if you’ve been a Sonible user before. You can find out more here, or watch the video below for more details.

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