VCA Groups
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A VCA group is a fader that drives other faders. Assign five channels to a group and one strip moves all five — proportionally, keeping their balance intact, without rerouting a single signal.
VCA groups are part of Premium — the Free version doesn't include them. See Accounts & Premium.
The name comes from hardware consoles, where a Voltage-Controlled Amplifier let one fader steer many channel levels remotely. The audio never passes through the VCA itself — and that's still true here: a VCA group carries no audio, it's pure remote control.
Why not just route channels to a bus?
A bus sums audio and processes the result; a VCA scales individual channels before any summing. The practical difference:
- VCA members keep their individual routing — one member can feed your stream while another doesn't, yet both ride the same group fader.
- Mute/solo on the group acts on the members, so the channels fall silent in every mix they feed — not just on one bus.
Classic setup: Game, Music, Browser in one MEDIA group. Discord call starts → one fader pulls all entertainment down 10 dB; your mic, untouched, keeps feeding everything.
Creating a group
- Channels (menu bar) → 🎚 VCA GROUPS tab → name it (optional) → + Add.
- The group appears as a strip in the middle of the mixer, badge
VCA, with a member counter (3 ch). - SELECT the group → MBR tab → click channels under ADD CHANNEL to enrol them; × removes.
The group's tabs
| Tab | Contents |
|---|---|
| HOME | A VCA TRIM knob (−20…+20 dB), big MUTE/SOLO buttons, and a live member list showing each channel's current level and mute/solo state. |
| MBR | Member management — who's in, who's out. |
| SETUP | Identity: name, icon, colour. |
How the math behaves
- Moving the group fader shifts every member by the same amount — relative balance is preserved.
- Moving a member's own fader afterwards re-anchors that channel: the new position becomes its reference point within the group.
- M / S on the group strip mute or solo all members at once.
A channel belongs to one VCA group at most. Two groups can't both steer the same fader — whichever you moved last would win and the channel would jump when you touched the other — so adding a channel that is already in a group moves it: in the ADD CHANNEL list it's tagged in <group> and offers Move here. If you need one fader to ride channels from two different sets, put them in a single group.