Just received this message today from waves.
I own a ton of waves plugins and some I use regularly
So what are the Native options.
F6 = Frequency 2, Its not a complete replacement as Frequency dynamics sometimes does not catch the Frequency you want the dynamics to respond, also its can sound a little dark. MaxVolume/MV2 = Squasher, It also a little dark, that is not as transparent as MV2 and not as intuitive as MaxVolume Kramertape LoAir Neve CS SSL CS Waves H-Delay MaxxBass L3 Multimaximizer VocalRider WLM Plus Etc.etc.
Dear Waves customer,
Since we started Waves, our goal has been to give all music and audio creators full, affordable access to the largest, most diverse set of top-quality audio tools.
Today, we take the next step. Whatever you are inspired to create, we want you to have everything you need—instantly at your fingertips, always.
To make this a reality, today we launch a full-scale Waves plugin subscription, Waves Creative Access which is now the exclusive way to get Waves plugins. All Waves plugins, always up to date, with new releases as well as updates added at no extra cost—all available to you in a simple subscription—the easiest, most affordable way to get Waves plugins, ever.
Can I still buy individual Waves plugins?
Starting today, Waves Creative Access will be the exclusive way to get Waves plugins. We wish to provide you a seamless way to use our massive plugin catalog, with instant updates, new plugins added as they’re released, and new AI-powered tools to enhance your creative process. To enable this, Waves Creative Access will be the way to get Waves plugins going forward.
What about the plugins I already own?
No worries. You continue to own your plugins, at the latest version you bought or to which you updated.
What about new plugins released in the future?
New plugins will be available as part of Waves Creative Access. Once you have a Waves Creative Access subscription, new plugins included in your subscription will be added at no extra cost.
What about plugin updates?
Waves Creative Access keeps all your plugins updated, always. You will get all updates for the plugins in your subscription, at no extra cost: no need for the Waves Update Plan. However, If you still have a valid Waves Update Plan, you will continue to enjoy all its benefits until it expires.
They don’t have 1:1 options, of course, because everyone does their stuff a little different but there are plenty that will do the same general thing. The ones I can advise on:
WLM PLus: Supervision. It is better than WLM when it comes to metering in my opinion.
L3: Brickwall limiter. Not precisely the same, but it’ll get the job done.
Kramertape: Magneto II may get you what you want. It isn’t full tape simulation but is a tape saturation simulator and the saturation is usually the sound you are after with tape.
H-Delay: The MonoDelay or StereoDelay plugins get you most of the way there.
For the more analog simulation stuff, you’ll probably have to look to another vendor. The included DAW plugs tend to lean to more towards the clean, linear, variety.
If you want some really good plugins, Fabfilter is worth checking out. Pricey, but I really like them. Interface looks a bit odd at first but is really a pleasure to use.
For surround reverbs I’m a huge fan of Liquidsonics. Again pricey, but again good.
My Waves update was already $240, sometimes more, and it was massively confusing, since I own not only the Mercury bundle, but also plugins I have bought over the years with their specials. Hopefully, this makes it less of a confusing mess.
I do not like it. I need the waves plugins on 3 computers at the same time and also have 3 licenses.
For ZNoise, X-Hum, Clarity VX Pro etc. there are no comparable alternatives. I’m not paying for 3 subscription models 75$ per month. You can only license one computer at a time with the new Creative Access.
Even the Equalizer Q10 cannot be exchanged for Nuendo frequency or Fabfilter. Because we use the Q10 for digitization. You can adjust the values ​​using the arrow keys. The handling is better.
Waves fools all buyers. Because there are no more updates for the purchased plugins.
($250 x 3) / 12 = $62.50 a month. They have the cheaper bundle, which would be for you ($150 x 3) / 12 = $37.50, which does contain the Q10 eq that you need.
To me, paying the $250 a year makes more sense than what I was doing before, which was $240 for the Mercury bundle, plus a few individual plugins on top of that. the most I paid one year was well over $300 USD. So, it is cheaper for me now to stay totally current.
See what they can offer you for three licenses, they do also have some sort of “Enterprise” solution, but I do not know the minimum licenses for that.
As to “there are no more updates for purchased plugins”, well that is not true. We were paying the “update” plan every year, which is exactly like a subscription model. Except some were paying more than $250 per year. Maybe you mean “free” updates, but they have not had that either for over a decade.
Like China, In India all recurring or subscriptions of online payments were restricted to only Digital, that is an year back all credit-card or debit card including Visa and Mastercard were suspended in favor of UPI, Apple was quick to adapt so was google, Amazon Adobe, Microsoft and others.
What does it mean, it means that Waves has just lost one fourth of the world market. And Indian music and film industry is bigger than US and Europe combined.
I have cubase projects as old as 15 years and I have to find an alternative solution once apple or windows update their OS.
The plugin Clarity Vx Pro is only in $25 Bundle / month.
And the update plan will not be renewed anymore.
That means after the end of your “update plan”, the updates will end. And with that, the second license ends.
Waves:
You will continue to receive updates for V14 plugins for the duration of your current Waves Update Plan coverage.
Once the coverage expires, it will not be possible to renew, but you can continue to use your plugin/bundle licenses on all systems and host applications that are compatible with the versions you own.
Future plugin updates will be available exclusively with Waves Creative Access.
Yes, you change over from the WUP to the new subscription. You will not renew the WUP plan, as that will no longer exist. Instead, you subscribe to the WCA.
You asked about a different plugin, Q10. But sure, move the goalpost. As many times as you want. I took time to find out if the plugin you asked about, Q10 was in the cheaper subscription.
It is inline with general industry trends that they do this. It’s an annoying as h*** transition though. We use the second license and some plugins that are only in the ultimate collection. I like some Waves plugins (like Clarity Pro), but there are a lot, where I prefer alternate choices because they’re just better. For example I have the full plugin collection from SSL themselves for just $150/yr rather than Waves knockoffs.
I’m not against subscriptions per se. And if you look at each individually they make sense. But if you run a business these subscriptions are death by a thousand cuts. I just did my taxes and my combined subscription cost for software and online services was $35K for the year. This is getting really old.
The point is that we need products like “Clarity Vx Pro” on three, sometimes four computers for dialog cleaning. Likewise X-Hum. Both are only in the $25 dollar bundle.
With the “Update Plan” you always got a second license. The purchase of 2 licenses was sufficient for 4 workstations.
Now I would have to pay 3 or 4 subscription bundles. Since then I’ve paid about $200 a year - and now I have to pay about $900 or $1.200. That’s too expensive for me. (I need 2 or 3 plugins from the $25 dollar model.)
Izotope RX or Fabfilter … I can pay once and use it on all 4 computers.
A lot of people also fear that Waves will soon go bankrupt with the change. Precisely because many only need 3 or 4 plugins occasionally, nobody will use the rental model…
Read how the people in the forum at Waves and other forums react. There’s a huge shitstorm going on at the moment. People are demanding that the payment model should remain.
Most subscriptions allow you to use it on two system (not simultaneously or multiple people), but you can install on more than one system. Even Nuendo falls into that camp now.
And subscriptions like this make sense when the majority of your users will use most of your products. But when you have either specialty products like ClarityVX, they should optionally be available separate, or the subscription should allow you to use a set number of plugins by price, so you can put your custom set together. If you only use those 10, pay for 10 on a subscription plan.
But I don’t think they will go bankrupt. That’s just fear mongering. In the end a lot of people will be upset, and 95% of them will get the subscription because people avoid change, and it’s still easier to pay $25/mo than find new plugins. Or worse yet, you have past projects you need to keep alive and don’t want to remix. The noise will die down and life goes on. Except a whole lot of people have a bad taste on Waves. Well, people had a bad taste on Adobe for the last 15 years and they’re still around and kicking, doing better than ever.
While convenient for some plugins, I can’t say that I was a big fan of Waves aggressive sales methods to get you to buy more plugins (buy 2 and get one free, upgrade plans, this that and the other). I mean hopefully the amount of annoying used car sales people like emails from Waves should die down to an annual renewal reminder. That is one plus from this change.
A user wrote in the Waves forum (I can’t verify that, of course):
Literally every user in Hollywood communicated with each other today and are discussing options to replace any waves plugins they use. In conversation with engineering at two major studios today, they said this was a deal killer. They will no longer support the use of waves plugins. … They can’t support innovation if everyone leaves. And boy, I’ve never seen a backlash like this in the post community.
Yes, there were some vocal critics on the forum. But that’s a drop in the bucket still. Half of them will eventually just subscribe. And there are tens of thousands if not more less vocal users that don’t think they have any other choice. Some that don’t use these every day will nurse their existing licenses for years to come (we’ve seen this with many such transitions), and the rest will subscribe. In the end I think the actual drain of users will be minor in comparison to the subscription upside. Wave will make more, and more consistent revenue with this change, however much people hate it at first.
Throughout the last decade of everyone moving to subscription instead of perpetual and update are two constants: Companies selling subscription have relatively even subscription incomes each month instead peaks and valleys when new releases drive spikes. And just like people don’t like change, they’re also too lazy to cancel their subscriptions. It’s much easier to benefit from the inertia to cancel, than to chase them every year for a new upgrade plan. It puts the inertia in the company’s favor rather than disadvantage.
The issue is that Waves didn’t even bother announcing this beforehand, and the new “subscription only” plan craps all over existing customers.
They’re pulling from the same playbook as Avid and Adobe, but I think they’ve grossly overestimated how irreplaceable they are. Especially now when there’s hundreds of other plugin manufacturers out there, many of which produce better product and offer perpetual licenses (hello FabFilter).
After all, it’s much easier to swap out an EQ or compressor than an entire DAW. When Pro Tools went subscription only (for new customers anyway), I saw a lot of YouTube videos of studio engineers stating why they were sticking with PT, even if they didn’t like it. I haven’t seen ANY videos saying the same about Waves plugins. In fact, some of the same guys who stuck with PT are flat out saying they’re done with Waves because of this, and that it’s sure gonna suck finding a replacement for RVox, or whatever.
I know I am done. I use Clarity Vx Pro, Waves Tune RT, UM226, Sibilance, WLM Plus, MaxxBass, and Bass Rider all the time. I used to use CLA-2A and CLA-76 as well. I was fine doing the WUP for them because I actually used them. Might not have done it exactly every 12 months, but I did it. Now they won’t get anything further. I’ll miss Clarity Vx Pro and MaxxBass for sure when they stop working, but there’s no way in hell I’m paying $250 a year just for the pleasure of those two plugins.
We’ll see if the loss of people like me are offset by the influx of new subscribers. Many people (myself included) think Waves will backtrack at some point and reinstate WUP for perpetual licenses that were purchased prior to this change, especially if larger studios do follow through and drop Waves support.
Adobe got lucky when they went full subscription, as Photoshop and After Effects were the only real games in town for photo editing and motion graphics, and their stranglehold on those industries was unmatched. Avid though they could do the same with Pro Tools. They found out that they were wrong, and they quickly brought back maintenance plans for perpetual license owners. I think Waves will find out that they are even more expendable in many users’ workflows.
I think Waves will find out that they are even more expendable in many users’ workflow
I think you are right. The pro audio market in general is heavily saturated and plugins are MASSIVELY saturated. Now Waves does have the position of having more variety than a lot of other offerings… but they have very few things that are something only they do. Most things are something that you can find TONS of. Heck Nuendo has a good bit of their plugins pretty well covered. Even when they have something “special” like a model of a hardware compressor, I’d bet you can probably get sound close enough you couldn’t tell in a blind test from something like Pro C2.
I think they may find the same problem that MMOs did: When there are a lot of options, getting subscriptions can be hard. Back in the old days, MMOs were all subscription or nothing. You either paid monthly or you didn’t play. However as the number of options grew, that became something that didn’t work. People were only will to subscribe to so many, usually one, at a time. So they had to move on to hybrid models. Most still offer a subscription, and benefits with it, but they also offer various “free to play” models where you can buy or earn content and keep it.
I suspect Waves is going to hit a similar problem.
