hopefully be able to improve them. The process and quality was surprisingly good, but when I was close to finishing them, each song went haywire and became unlistenable with crazy volume levels that were all over the place.

To avoid the burrying the lead: It was the Neutron 4 Visual Mixer, a plugin that can display and help balance the levels of a song's channels. It worked when I had a single song loaded into Studio One, but if I loaded any other songs into Studio One that had the same plugins, each instance of the plugin loaded the channels from all of the other songs.

One thing that made this problem hard to recognize (and perhaps also caused conflicts?) is because it displays the all channels using the Neutron or Relay plugins using the name of the plugin, not the name of the channel. You can manually change the plugin name, but when I did that to help me identify the channels I wanted, I would frequently use consistent names like "vocals" and "guitar". I really hope that's not the case...

I didn't spend much time troubleshooting it further, I just kept to loading one song at a time. I would have liked to see if the same thing happens on other DAWs. I don't know much about the plugin ecosystem, and I know the Relay plugin is newer.

However, I'd appreciate any feedback or chance to learn from this. I couldn't find any similar experience online, just a couple of posts complaining about the channel-plugin-name issue between Studio One and iZotope.