Hey Dean, don't get me wrong. It's not the attempt to protect their intellectual property that bothers me, but only the manner in which Waves is going about it.

They paid to come into the studio. THere's no such thing as false pretenses. If they want to pay to come into the studio and stand on their head the whole time, that's their business. They paid for it. As I said above, if you went into a studio and said you wanted to film your session so that you could improve later, do you think that a legimate studio would stop you from doing so? If not, then how is it any different that Waves went in an filmed something?

I don't know what the circumstances of the undercover investigation were. The word undercover does imply that these investigators went into studios posing to be something other than investigators. If they were paying for studio time, or even inquiring about the facilities, equipment, and services under the pretext of contracting services, then they did so under false pretenses. There is such a thing as representing yourself honestly, or misrepresenting yourself and lying about your reasons for contacting the studio.

Well, that's an obvious idea. The problem is that there's no answer. There are already laws on the books, people just ignore them because they can. Can you come up with law that would make the people stealing the stuff stop?

Perhaps working on the enforcement side would suffice since the law clearly states what uses are legal and what are not. I think Studio24's idea of a "good studio rating" is an option. Or perhaps something even more effective such as an industry funded enforcement agency to police the use of licensed software in affiliation with whatever law enforcement agency has jurisdiction.

Again, an obvious thought, but how do you do it?

Sorry to state the obvious. I really think that operating under the suspicion that many studios are stealing and to target specific, or even worse, all studios, leaves them open to legal action. All that has to happen is for a legit studio to get pissed off that Waves sent undercover investigators to sniff them out.

The analogy of the drug war refers to a physical commodity and not intellectual property. The solution is obvious, but I guess it hasn't occured to the DEA yet. All they have to do is buy the stuff from the manufacturers no questions asked and destroy it. The manufacturers make their money, the supply dissapears, and it ultimately costs the taxpayers much less than trying to interdict, arrest, try, imprison, rehabilitate, educate, etc. The policy of criminalizing all aspects of the trade prevents the powers that be from effective solutions. I know they would never condone throwing federal money at drug cartels, so instead we throw away billions of dollars to fight a losing battle. And then there are drugs manufactured or grown on home turf that might become the resort of users denied their favorite high.

These issues are complex, but there are other options available to Waves. In fact if they had hired private investigators to check out studios for illegal usage of proprietary software, and the investigators were not working undercover, but identified themselves, I would have little reason to be bothered about it. They would probably not find many wrongdoers this way, but they would discover that many operators are honest and willing to cooperate, and those that don't might find that they are in violation of a EULA if a clause were introduced that stated that such investigations were ongoing.

Paul

ORIGINAL: droddey

I'm no fan of the dongle, but it does actually provide a very important advantage that, for instance, SONAR doesn't have. And that's that you can install your Waves plugs on multiple machines and just move the dongle around to whichever one you want to work on. That's a real world benefit that a lot of supposedly less tight fisted companies don't allow for.

It's not inconvenient at all really, so I don't have any problem with it on that front. I plugged it in and it's just plugged in and that's all there is to it. I had problems with getting some of their plugs to work, and I had suspicions that the dongle might have been at the root of the problem, but in the end it doesn't look like it was. It was just some wierdness with their installer vs. the security settings on my machine.

The only flat out down side to it is that if SONAR glitches, I can't get a stack dump in the debugger to send to the SONAR folks because the iLok driver will shut down the app if it's connected to by a debugger.

I'd say there could be more of a downside than that...I've heard some real horror stories from people who's dongles have broken or gotten lost. Maybe if they let you back up the dongle's data somehow, so that you could restore it to a new dongle if something happened...

As to Waves, I don't know how prevalent it is now, but I had heard that people would buy the software and then use the cracked version because they didn't want to deal with the inconvenience of the copy protection. So much for that idea....

Duck, you are right that people should pay for the software they use. But the pirates always find a way to crack whatever system is used.

Anyway, I'm very glad that Sonar doesn't use a dongle, and I hope it stays that way!

I haven't followed the whole thread here but Waves is doing a PR ploy (real to the few caught, but they are hardly going to check out every studio). It is cost effective if they hit half a dozen studios and then announce it to the world (look for more such items coming to music news near you!). It will make slackers pay attention. So I wouldn't worry about Big Wave Brother coming to visit you.

If you do have a problem with intellectual copy right protection, let me know so I can put my name on your songs and try to sell them. Think about it in those terms. I don't use any Wave products and prefer to use plugs that cost less than the yearly upgrade Waves charges.

ORIGINAL: What?

let's face it, who uses waves stuff any more? they're average at best

Oh, they're way above average. Just listen to them.

ORIGINAL: studio24

ORIGINAL: What?

let's face it, who uses waves stuff any more? they're average at best

Oh, they're way above average. Just listen to them.

listen to them? i've used them for YEARS!!! maybe you should listen to them, and compare them against the NEW crop of plugins out there instead of the junky ones you have laying around from 1998 era. the new versions of waves plugins still sound exactly the same as they did back in 1998, they haven't improved at all. i could load v1.0 and the latest, and the only difference is new lipstick on the same old pig. it seems the only reason they have different version numbers is so force people to upgrade.

why don't you give me an example of one waves plugin that you consider outstanding, and i'll give you names of 5 other brands that kick the living snot out of it, and i might even have a free one laying around that i can include on that list. waves sucks that much.

ORIGINAL: cryophonik
OK, I'm sorry, there's no way I can be nice about this - it's got to be the Darwin Award winner for stupid posts

no, i think your post is way more stupid than mine. are you intentionally trying to misrepresent what i said by elevating the strawman principle to a new art or are you so f-ing stupid that you honestly don't understand it? i'm guess a little of both, but mostly the later, and that your mom still ties your shoelaces. "mommy, mommy, someone disagreed with me on an online forum, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah"

Troll alert. Why are they always so brainless?

Actually, this guy reminds me of 'Briankou' or something similar, got himself banned last year - very similar 'style'.

ORIGINAL: DonaldDuck
others should pay for theirs, espeically studios who are making a profit off of stolen software.

Once upon a time this use to be the only focus of these operations. As long as they do their best to keep people honest but generally only prosecute those who use their products in business without paying them most folks will be on their side. But as we've seen over the last decade or so the industries are warning of FBI prosecution even in cases where there is no monetary gain which may be partly to blame for a backlash against IP enforcement.

Richard

ORIGINAL: droddey

For god sakes Waves wants $1000.00 for their SSL bundle on their website. At Sweetwater it's $750.00. That's a lot of money either way! Now if they sold that bundle for $400.00 I would have purchased it a long time ago. I'm hoping to get a Dunede for a reasonble price at some point. Hopefully the price will come down or I wil find a good deal on eBay.

While I agree that they charge too much, you have to put it in perspective. I use Kjaerhus and Voxengo plugs for my core stuff (EQ, compression, limiting), but how many plugs do Kjaerhus and Voxengo have? Why don't they have as many as Waves? Why don't they support ProTools? Well, probably because they can't afford to hire the people required to create a full suite of plugs and maintain them and provide customer service for them and deploy them on multiple (very different) platforms. You can't outfit a whole studio from either of them, but you can from Waves, because they have the resources to hire the programmers to create a full line.

And Kjaerhus and Voxengo are single programmer outfits, AFAIK, and if anything happens to those two guys, everything you've invested in them is a waste because they'll die as products. That's fine for us in a home studio, but it's not for a professional studio. They need to know that the company will remain viable and will continue to expand their offerings. That costs money, and in a fairly low volume business it costs even more money per unit. And the research to create new and powerful new plugs, to gather high quality impulse files, support new platforms, etc... is not cheap. Companies like K and V are able to make a basic living and operate a small company, but they can't expand significantly at those prices as the volumes that these types of products sell at.

I can tell you now why Voxengo don't support pro-tools. Aleksey has tried to get in touch with Digi about supporting protools and they're just not interested.

It's Digis fault these plugs are not on protools, and it's obvious - these plugs would undercut digis own stuff and if folks got used to them they might switch to sonar/reaper/cubase- whatever.

Kind regards

Dave Rich

voxengo is still improving their stuff (almost daily) and so are many other companies, but waves has remained stagnant, focusing on improving their DRM & GUI, not the processing quality.

I like Voxengo's stuff, and I've spent as much with them as with Waves, but to claim that Waves remains stagnant or doesn't sound top notch is fairly silly on the face of it. They've put out a couple new packages in the last month that I can think of, which probably include more plugs than Voxengo's entire lineup. And they are widely used in professional studios, by people who I'm sure have already forgotten more than you'll likely ever know.

like the ones that just add more voices, those could all be one plugin and the number of voices could become a parameter. there's seperate mono & stereo plugs, etc.

It's to save processing power. An EQ pre-compiled to only have X number of filters, can do only X number of filters with maximum efficiency. And one that's set up to do mono, can just do mono only and save processing overhead, instead of having a lot of conditional jumps in the code to deal with variable numbers of components. So this is a good thing, but someone with your many years of experience would know this.

the compressors are poor, the reverbs mediocore,

Their convolution reverb is excellent. I love it and that's all I use now. TrueVerb is good enough for that type of synthetic reverb I guess, but I don't think I'd ever use a non-convolution anymore at this point.

ORIGINAL: droddey

But as we've seen over the last decade or so the industries are warning of FBI prosecution even in cases where there is no monetary gain which may be partly to blame for a backlash against IP enforcement.

It's still illegal, even if there's no monetary gain. If it was basically OK for anyone to steal IP content if they weren't going to use it to make money, then the music and movie industries would be over, and most of the software industry. In actual fact, for most IP content, it's non-monetary gain theft that's the real danger. Waves is more oriented towards pro usage, but most of the music, movie, and software industries depend on end user sales. So yeh, they are very much interested in busting people who steal their stuff for personal use.

Well we are a nation of laws and they should be enforced but the comment I made went more to the notion that without the support of the general public most efforts will be futile or at least very ineffective perhaps akin to what we see in the area of the enforcement of immigration laws. Still, I appreciate you explaining to me what IP laws are there to protect.

Richard

"gourmet palette"

Thanks for that. That's a new & unusual one.

ORIGINAL: droddey

I've made my living off of software for the last three decades, so I take a pretty dim view of piracy. When I think of all the person-hours that go into creating this stuff, a few hundred bucks per copy isn't much to ask.

Me also. But you know that there's this whole mythology out there of the evil corporation and lots of attitudes that verge on the communist really. You see it in any threads where a software manufacturer tries to do something about the widespread theft of their product.

These studios probably don't know that there are cheaper alternatives to waves
That's the part which really bugs me... if you cannot afford waves then there are other affordable options. I don't think you need waves to do good sounding music.

Granted I wasn't considering any waves stuff (too many dongle horror stories) but If i was this story would have talked me out of it.

I have had to reinstall sonar before and thanks to their trust it was UTTERLY painless, this (and a lot of other things) has made me a loyal CW customer


my tuppence

Andy

These studios probably don't know that there are cheaper alternatives to waves

But that's the thing, there really isn't. There are alternatives for individual plugs certainly. But if you want to have a single package from a single company that covers the whole gamut, where else can you go?

That's the part which really bugs me... if you cannot afford waves then there are other affordable options. I don't think you need waves to do good sounding music.

No, clearly you don't. I don't think anyone would question this, so you shouldn't let it bug you.