My goal is to "abuse" the autoEQ so it rebalances everything into a pink noise frequency curve, with the slightest dip around 4k and a subtle boost below 80hz, and with my like 50th revision of the preset or so I actually am starting to get desired results
I've given up on the daisychain of plugins, I want this to work in one go in winamp with transcoding too. And it works now. A really strong CPU, lots of RAM, and using all cores in the ST settings, and disabling all possible cpu shortcuts and maxing every aspect works really well. Transcoding in approx 10x playtime now.
The treble was a pain to get right. Some material lacks a lot of treble, but still have a lot of tape hiss, and some material lacks dynamics or are warped and partly destroyed. Some material is already hard compressed radioshows on tape, made to 128kbps mp3, and has nothing above 15k, some are 16bit wav rips of my own and my late dad's tapes.
It had to fix all those to make them listenable and interesting from just one preset.
Then I have some tapes made on a really crappy recorder with a constant motorhum peaking at exactly 97 and 188hz, and after many hours I found out how to make the dehummer ONLY remove exactly those two frequencies in the perfect amount, and no artifacts at all, so in all I now have two golden tape restore presets, one for standard crap, and one for hummy crap
The results are just fantastic to my ears, and now I can crank it up in the car so everything rattles and it's so sweet to have all my childhood music with me.
I will post examples of before and after, when I've done a few hundred batches, and really is sure this is the final one.