The Waves Clownery

More and more I understand that Waves is a clown plugin provider. Today I wanted to uninstall some Waves plugins on my studio PC. You know, they have this terrible monolithic installer program called "Waves Central". So first I opened this slow chaotic software to get rid of the plugins. But I couldn't find an uninstall feature, there was only the install! When I looked up on their site, I couldn't believe it! They say sincerely that there is only a way to uninstall all plugins at once. If you want to keep some, then you have to reinstall them afterwards??? Well, this can't be a professional plugin provider at all!

This combined with their terrible plugin shell solution, their awful licensing methods (unusable on any laptop) makes my decision absolutly clear: No more Waves plugins!

Their shell solution makes it utterly impossible to organize the plugins. For some programs this is a must when you have more than 20 plugins. Furthermore the shell makes plugin recognition needlessly slow. E.g. Samplitude has a great feature to scan only for new plugins (min. 10 times faster). But the Waves shell has to be scanned each time and steals your time, even if there are no new Waves plugins.

But I hate plugin installers anyway (independant whether it's a provider installer program or a Windows installer):

• Very often they are very heavy, slow programs and bad designed (maybe made by a junior programmer).
• Each time you use them there is a new version, i.e. first you have to wait for download and install of the new installer.
• Most of the time it is not transparent where they do install their plugin DLLs (with or without Company folder?) or other contents (like presets), i.e. you have to check and copy afterwards. E.g. presets stored in the current user's document folder, so if you use an administrator user to install and use then a common user, you have no presets available.
• Sometimes you can even not define that you do not want any 32-bit or AAX versions ...
• Installing multiple plugins you have to select all the time the VST2 plugin folder.

So in the end i must admit that I like those simple packages in a zip with a readme file (like many free ones). IMHO this is the easiest and fastest way for installation. The update on my studio computer confirmed this obviously!

I like Waves new version of WC. The old one when I first got Waves plugins was a dud.
 
But even the new one leaves a lot to be desired. At least on Windows. I don't know how that stuff works on Macs.
 
I don't want 32 bit plugins installed. But there they are. In fact, all Waves Shells are located in the x86 Program folder. They need to fix that.
 
Also, you can install what you want, but you have to uninstall everything. Makes no sense. Gotta fix that too.
 
Not allowing me to decide where I want the installation to be. This is the biggie. Need to fix that soon.
 
But like Jeff says, they sound great. And I will not do without Abbey Road Plates. Ever!! : )
 
I have looked for a feature request form on their site but found none. Only a Contact Us form.

I have lots of Waves plugins. The waves central thing works fine for me. I am a sucker for those $29 deals and every month or so I have to deal with installing something. It's no big deal to me. YMMV

I agree that the Waves Central thing leaves a lot to be desired. It's very confusing to try to figure out the whole "what's the cloud? What's local" thing. I do hate the idea of having to uninstall all plugins to get rid of one. 
 
The last time I installed the updated Waves Central program, all of my "local" licenses on my PC disappeared. I had to use the "reinstall licenses one time only" thing and that bugged me. 
 
But on Sonar at least it can organize the Waves plugins into its own folder, so I don't have to look for them on a huge list of plugins. 
 
As for the Waves plugsins themselves, I find some of them useful, and some okay. None of them are better than the UAD plugins I use, but, then again, the UAD solution is VERY expensive. 

I agree parts of using Waves plug ins can be cumbersome. Once everything is lined up though it works like a charm. I have had more issues with another company that uses a shell type of experience to use their plug ins. Some are probably aware of who it is I speak of.......anyways enough of this clownery!!!!! ( I love that word BTW) 

I have all the Waves plugins. I’ve had the occasional problem with Waves Central but generally as a product I’m still to find better. As for UAD being better because they are more expensive, it’s only been a recent decision by Waves to have continuing plugin specials. U til then I’d sa6 that the pricing of waves and UAD were pretty similar. I started with a UAD Quad Card but found it far too expensive for plugins.

I use waves along with the Digigrid system so I can offload fx processing to a DSP Server. An excellent Ethernet solution to using plugins and moving audio around.

"Doctor, Doctor, I was at the Cakewalk Forum and I got  hyphenated." "OK, drop your pants and say ah."

...and turning our heads and coughing.

The Waves licenses deal had a bad rap in the beginning and Istayed away from them for a while. But I got one plugin and worked with it and ......well.... you know the rest of that story!
 
IT has it's advantages for sure, no doubt. Still has some room for improvement.

I am installing my plugins on the 2nd PC. And again I am fighting with those stupid installers (they cost me a lot of my lifetime). This time it is not the Waves one, but it is always the same, many of those programmers simply miss common sense.
 
 
A lot of those installers:

• download the whole crap again when you want to install on a 2nd computer. They give you no opportunity to copy from the 1st computer (here is Cakewalk much better than others, because you can copy the downloaded files to the Command Center!).
• must first update themselves (I wait, I wait, ...).
• do not let you remove single components.
• do not clearly define where they install the plugs and the resources (some things they even don't let you define).

So boys don't tell me about this super cool Waves Central and other fairytales!
 

Starise
The best part of the setup Waves has is this: Imagine your computer dies. Have your licenses on a usb drive? No problem. Download the shell on another computer, plug in the usb drive and you're good to go.
The alternative is to hunt down every single company you bought plugs from, attempt to remember the login info you set up like 5 years ago. Get the serial numbers or the auth file or whatever for each and every plugin you own. Ouch.
 
Now off with ya...enough of this clownery :)

No, the best part of the USB stick is, if you lose it, because you always have to carry it around. Or if it's not your computer that dies, but your USB stick!

batsbrew
just installed waves platinum bundle on a brand new PC DAw build this last weekend..
 
the straight up installer would never load,
so i did the 'off-line' installer, put it to USB, loaded that up, worked like a charm.
downloaded the files, installed in about 10 minutes.
 
has been working perfectly,
i've already trial-mastered an entire album using the plugs.
 
dig it.

I always use the offline installer. Works every time.
 
Dan

Starise
The best part of the setup Waves has is this: Imagine your computer dies. Have your licenses on a usb drive? No problem. Download the shell on another computer, plug in the usb drive and you're good to go.
The alternative is to hunt down every single company you bought plugs from, attempt to remember the login info you set up like 5 years ago. Get the serial numbers or the auth file or whatever for each and every plugin you own. Ouch.
 
Now off with ya...enough of this clownery :)

Not sure this is true. On my Waves Central, you can only have the licenses in one place--either on your local computer on the "Waves Cloud"...not both. When I got a new computer, and reinstalled Waves, I couldn't authorize them because the licenses were still "installed" on the old computer. I had to drag the old computer out of storage, fire it up, "unauthorize the licenses" to transfer them to the Waves cloud, and only then could I download them to the new PC.
 
I also had a problem when a new version of Waves Central suddenly invalidated all of the "local" license on my new computer. I had to use the "once a year re-authorize licenses" option to get the licenses. I sure as hell hope this doesn't happen again, because I really don't want to have to get into a fight with the Waves people to get lost licenses back.