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

Of course that's what it's there to protect. These are huge industries that are very important to our country and provide large numbers of very high quality jobs, great tools that we use to make music and many other types of art and commerce, lots of good investment opporunities for all our 401Ks, and so forth (at least for those of you who have 401Ks.) The agreement is, you pay for it, and we'll keep making it, and you'll have a wide selection of lots of cool music, movies, and software. You stop paying for it, and why would we bother?

"gourmet palette"

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

ORIGINAL: What?
the presets were poor, some lacked the proper control adjustment functionality, and others were just useless designed for some esoteric quirky purpose that i would never want.

My experience with Waves plugs is quite the opposite. The presets are usually well though-out and I'm hard-pressed to
think of a control that I would consider "quirky." By some standards, they are rather spartan. There are some reasons why
the Waves plugs have various flavors .. like the Q1, Q4, Q7, Q10, etc. That reason is the Digi TDM hardware. You have to
say how much DSP you're going to use max when you load onto the hardware .. can't change your mind later. So, they came
up with the various incarnations. Other TDM plugs are similar, like McDSP or the Digi EQ III and Dynamics III.

I do agree that there are some plugs (like Voxengo) which are very good and the gap is closing on some of the older
Waves plugs. But, I still reach for the Waves stuff a heck of a lot when mixing.

I think we all have a love/hate relationship with Waves. But, one must consider that without Waves, the transition from
large format consoles to mixing in the box may not have ever occurred; the credibility that tools like Sonar now
garner in the industry is built upon the successes that Waves made possible as an early vanguard in software mixing.
Have they ridden this success a little too long? Yes. But, they've also come out with some absolutely stellar products
as of late in the API, V and SSL plugs .. plus the L3-LL and L3-L16 limiters are very respectable in what they're attempting
to accomplish.

You may not choose to use them, but trashing their plugs as poor quality or ill-conceived makes me question ones credbility
as an audio engineer.

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.

... and while they investigate, their kids play dowloaded games on their bootchipped Xbox.

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

The Waves RComp is my goto compressor, i have atleast 20 instances of that compressor in any given project and who cares about pre-sets. you should not rely on pre-sets for your music. They werent programmed specificly for your song, thats impossible. my goto limiter is the L2 / L3 ultra. My goto EQ is the Q10 or the Ren6. most of my projects are mostly all waves plugins. I forgot, my goto verb is the IRL series.
Cj

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.

It is of course illegal to use pirate software, at least in the US. Unhappily for Waves, they are in my opinion a difficult company to love. It really annoyed me when they switched from the traditional PC business model of "pay for new versions" to "pay annual support fees" unilaterally, giving existing customers (i.e., me) no choice in the matter. I can understand why they might prefer it, and I can understand why professional clients might prefer it, but for amateur hobbists like me, it was simply a case of being forced to "pay more for less".