Will anyone miss Waves?

Well , looks like another new ear has started .
No more perpetual licences , subs only , the audio industry seems to be one step closer to ‘renting’ everything .
I have used Waves for 20 years but only own about 20 of their plugins ,so i can work around them IF for some reason they stopped working in later versions, but turning a company totally subscripted ?

Big mistake

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I have only one favorite (DPR-402) in the range and use some other plugs sometimes.
Well, the most Waves plugins I will not miss that much.
Maybe the H-Delay and the H-Comp a bit.

I was thinking about to buy an eMotion LV1 system. But now, I’m done with it.

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Agreed.
As an amateur, I will never settle for subscriptions. I did it once and regretted it.

And the question is: Why offering only a subscription option?
My guess: They have reached the limit of updating/upgrading/improving their plug ins. So they cannot lure you into paying for an improved version of a beloved VST.
And offering a scalable UI as an improvement is quite an insult to the customer.
Waves may be popular, but their is a lot of competition out there creating great plug-ins and effects that we can just purchase and own forever.

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Yep , there’s a few i think , i love the sound of the old Trueverb .
I can see there’s going to be a bit of back pedalling by Waves , it’s a big step to turn a business fully subscription

For me ,it just proves a point that any software company has the chance of being the next ‘Camel Audio’ and ditching certain clients for a new model , this is where you have to be sooooooo careful choosing where you buy your tools .

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Their business model of selling cheap plugins and giving away freebies over the past year made me suspicious… You could see they were reeling people in to set something like this up.

I nearly bit a few times, such as the creative sampler and manager that they were pretty much giving away. But i’m glad I didn’t.

Truly the only plugin i’ll actually miss is probably RBass, but that will probably continue to run on my perpetual for a while yet. I had already decided to not buy into the Waves eco system since the update plans have been getting more expensive and I hate that you can only use on two machines IF you have a current update plan.

I think the subscription plan, despite being a cloud service, is limited to one machine at a time unless you carry the single license on a dongle - which is pretty backwards to my mind. You’d think one of the benefits of buying a service as a opposed to a perpetual license would be the flexibility across connected machines.

I’m well and truly out, in fact I was starting to walk away way before this anyway. I’d sooner pick up a stock plug-in Cubase to do a job.

I think Steinberg will go subscription as an option at some point, but I could never see them pissing on the perpetual users like Waves have done… And without warning, too, which is dire.

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Totally agree. I have used Waves since 2005 (RMax & others), updated every three or four years. But not now. There are affordable alternatives out there. I guess my main reason for sticking with Waves has been laziness, got used to the interfaces and how the plugins performed. Well $15 a month for lots of stuff that I will never use sure motivates me now to change.

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Not enough to pay $15 or $25 a month, no.

I guess their bean counters’ number crunching says it’ll work for them. I’d be interested in knowing the assumptions that went into that conclusion! :smile:

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I’ve got a bunch of 'em - can’t remember the last time I reached for one.

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I have a large Waves bundle: Horizon.

The first stunt they pulled was disabling my older version bundle when I purchased and activated a newer plugin. As I found out, you can’t run different waves plugins from different versions at the same time.

Just a few days ago I went to the waves update plan to catch it up to current versions. But I didn’t end up purchasing, since I didn’t need it at that very moment.

If I would have purchased, I would have had early 2023 versions with eternal licenses.

That’s no longer possible, since the Waves update plan has been killed off without notice for almost all products.

As a result, I consider my large Waves bundle to be much like a box with pieces of broken hardware that are not worth fixing.
(UPDATE 2023-04-03: I ended up trying one more time to get V9 and V13 plugins working in parallel, and yes, that’s now possible. It’s a bit convoluted, using 2 different offline installers, but at least it works.) If I’ll ever use Waves plugins for future projects remains to be seen - because there’s just more nuisance in making and keeping things working compared to most other plugins I use these days

Farewell to Waves from me. They were amazing in the early days of in-the-box production. And still sound fine.

But I have plenty of alternatives in my collection, so I will remember, but not miss, Waves. And the formerly fond memory has been scorched beyond recognition.

I kind of expect stunts like this by some other industry players. That’s okay, since there are lots of much more exciting modern music software makers around. And my money will go to them rather than to any old guard that’s just milking a dying cow.

And old software makers who continue to re-invent without taking me hostage will also continue to get my money.

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I’ve been moving further & further into a less is more frame of mind. Seems better to have a handful of say compressors that you know how to use really well rather than 42 of them that you only know superficially.

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@nico5 Not quite sure why you think you can’t run different versions concurrently - I have V9, V10, V11, V12 all running with no issues on the same machine.

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oh really? - I just believed what seemed to be the official surface level statements by Waves when I realized that my V9 Horizon stopped working after I installed a couple of V13 plugins early last year.

So was there anything you recall doing manually or did they change something with V13?

@nico5 I think there was some initial issues when the released Waves Central which did remove older plugin versions but that got patched pretty quickly. Certainly not a recent development though, well before V13.

yeah - so I’m not sure if it’s possible with V13 and V9 side by side.

I’m just not motivated enough to keep fighting with Waves stuff or to give them more money. They’ve moved on - so I’m moving on.

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Just checked and my StudioRack, CR8 and Cosmos are currently V14, so I have versions 9, 11, 12 & 14 on my machine.

I’m pretty sure Waves are going to have to do some form of back tracking over the current situation so I haven’t given up all hope yet but I’ll certainly be looking at alternatives to use before just grabbing my usual Waves go-to’s in a project.

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I’ve never seen so much backlash that Waves is getting right now. Many negative videos on youtube from content creators, seen a petition against waves plugins, and a spreadsheet for plugins to replace the wave plugins with.

Hopefully they do the right thing.

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Exactly how i felt about Camel Audio and till this day after the Camel stunt i refuse to invest heavily in software plugins , this time it’s the Apple users getting the raw deal as im sure the PC versions will last for a few years yet but it’s sad .
STUDIOVERSE , complete ai control on your projects ? where’s the fun in that , what have you accomplished ? someone else’s recommendation ,tone and characteristics ,where’s the adventure and excitement of trying something new and experimenting . Ground breaking tech ? YES , useful for the seasoned pro’s ? Hell no

To late , once bitten …

There was a comment about making mistakes from the CEO but whether this will ring home is another thing but i can certainly say without a doubt the competitors will start recommending their plugins to replace waves

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I don’t think that the pros are the target group for all the new stuff from Waves.
Too much fuzz around new plugins since years.

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That’s my point , they seems to be in some sort of Hiphop state , maybe they have their market right , what with all the free daw’s appearing with built in channel strips and plugins , maybe the future is having your network card clicking and popping audio while downloading someone elses AI loaded preset :upside_down_face: :rofl: :rofl:

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Just V-Comp and V-EQ here. There’s no way I will subscribe.

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