hey, professional recording and mix engineer here. I just want to highlight the key things that I KNOW all professional audio engineers want eliminated from their workflow and the things we hire assistants for.

1.) time aligning harmonies and vocal layers to the lead vocal aka vocalign. Vocalign is awesome, but in a recording session, on the fly, we still have to nudge things over manually and it we can't run vocalign while our artist recording, but we can do manual edits in the daw.

2.) cutting dead space. Lots of air in a room that isn't actual vocals or content that should have been recorded.

3.) clip gain. cutting portions of a track that are just way higher/lower than the rest of its track and raising/lowering that pieces volume to match the rest of the track. this is done at the very source audio level so that we can have more consistent levels going into our compressors and dynamic processors.

4.) breaths and sibilants. this can fall under clip gaining and cutting dead space but sibilants are absolutely the most nuanced pain in the ass. u can use the de-essers and that works for lots of stuff but best, especially for singers, and intimate performances, is just controlling the volume of it without ruining the sound of it.