Automation is the function which enables the sound engineer to record his or her movements on the mixing desk.
While this was once reserved for mixing consoles that cost in excess of £250,000, it is now a standard feature on most digital audio workstations.
Movements of many settings can be recorded, including fader level, pan position, mute/cut status, auxiliary sends and even settings from within plugins such as compressor thresholds, EQ frequencies, filter cutoffs and so many others.
On a hardware mixer, the advantage of using automation was that the sound engineer only had two hands and could therefore only adjust two things at a time. With automation they could record the movements on faders 1 & 2, then move on to adjusting the pan settings on channel 15.
In the digital audio workstation, the sound engineer is even more limited, in that their mouse can only operate one thing at a time. This means that even fading out two faders at the same time is impossible without automation.
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