Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann

I couldn't resist the price...

Installed!

On 4/24/2023 at 3:50 PM, kevin H said:

I upgraded to pro for the vst/AU plug-in support. This way I can use in my DAW.

Speaking of DAWs, Synthesizer V Studio Pro is VSTi only, no AAX, but I was just trying it out in Pro Tools, hosted in the AAX version of PluginGuru Unify and it seems to be working well.

They obscure it by describing it as "hype" and "magic" but it seems to be a narrowband saturator

Free $10 Cymatics gift card, no minimum purchase required

https://cymatics.fm/pages/immortal-walkthrough

I would play the video for at least 30 sec so that YouTube registers the view but, for reference, the code is IMMORTAL10

Fwiw, I use Cymatics coupons primarily for getting a few more samples for my XO library

You may want one of these, for the future

https://www.newegg.com/cyberpower-cp1500pfclcd-nema-5-15r/p/N82E16842102134

I never expected Audrey & Kate (Japanese rocksmith youtubber girls) to be reviewing plugins but...

I've been playing around with it. The workflow is similar to iZotope Ozone and Neutron. You let StudioVerse "listen" to the track and then it comes up with a list of suggested plugin chains that you can tweak.

Some differences with iZotope are:

• Instead of one chain, it presents many possible chains, and you can easily one-click-switch from one chain to another and listen to the difference (but note that this switching can sometimes get very CPU intensive)
• The chains have "macro" knobs, to easily tweak the main parameters instead of having to dig into each plugin to tweak the settings (similar to how presets work e.g., in Analog Lab and many other synths)
• You can refine the "AI Listen" results using tags, name or id. You can also skip the "AI" part and just search in the whole collection.

Sure, if you don't have many Waves licenses and/or have crossed out Waves from your list of plugins to use, this will be of little use to you but, if you have a large collection of their plug-ins (Mercury, etc) this is a really nice freebie.

This is the "AI version" of the "make your mix sound like Chris Lord-Alge/Greg Wells/Tony Maserati/etc" that Waves has been marketing for years

Somewhat lost in the noise of the subscription-only-fiasco, Waves announced the new StudioVerse for using AI techniques for creating plugin chains. After the "both subscription and perpetual" was announced, I've been waiting to see how much they asked for StudioVerse and, pleasant surprise - It's free!

From https://www.waves.com/studioverse/about

Quote

StudioVerse opens from the Waves StudioRack plugin chainer. Get StudioRack as part of a Waves Creative Access subscription (try first 7 days free), or download the demo (including all Waves plugins) from Waves Central. Or, if you already have a StudioRack license, you can simply update it in Waves Central, even without a new subscription or demo.

StudioRack has been a free-of-charge license for quite a while. If you don't have it (or have an older version), it's price still seems to be $0, but the purchase functionality at waves.com seems to be a work-in-progress and not functional yet

Note: Like many other plugin chainers, you need to have licenses for the plugins being chained. If you don't already have a good collection of Waves plugins, StudioVerse will probably be of limited or no use.

14 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

$34 per plugin is more than retail and this assumes each and every plugin added is one you would have bought.  

I personally just don't see it as a value proposition.  

 

Oh, I know and that's why I haven't purchased it at $34/plugin. But, suppose a typical WUP sales at 25% off ($180 cap), and 3 new plugins between now and when that happens. Then it would be $18 per plugin, that's why I'm saying "it's getting close".

My point anyway is - do the numbers instead of flat out dismissing it (as I see people often doing). Price per plugin is just an approximation. When a new Arturia collection comes out, I assign a value to each of the new plugins for how much I'd reasonably like to pay, and then compare the total to the cost of the upgrade. If it's good then I get the upgrade, if it isn't then I wait. For WUP it's the same process, what do I get and how much is it worth to me.

On 3/30/2023 at 3:22 PM, Brian Walton said:

OR....you can simply never WUP as it is a scam no matter how you look at it.

There are 7 plugins that have been added to my bundles and I don't have yet, it's getting close to the point where the $240 will be worth it for me just for the new plugins I'll be getting. It's not that different from e.g., Arturia charging for an upgrade to V collection.

If you want to stay under the $240 cap you want to:

1) Unselect products still under WUP (select the "group by expiration" in the dropdown to quickly identify these products)

2) Unselect duplicates, e.g., multiple copies of a freebie (select the "group by product" option in the dropdown to quickly find them)

Note that selecting products still under WUP can be an interesting option when WUP is on sale (or you're expecting prices to rise). E.g., when WUP is on sale for $180 it lets you buy 2 years of WUP for $360

Sina is not a software reviewer, nearly all she posts is music videos, primarily cover versions of classic rock songs. She removes the drums from the original song (e.g., using RipX, as shown) and then makes a video with her own drum playing. She also makes videos with her own songs, multi-tracking herself or collaborating with other musicians (which she is also using in this video, to show the comparison between soloing tracks in the DAW vs. using Ripx). This is the only "technical" video I've seen from her.

25 minutes ago, dumbquestions said:

I’m just waiting for something along the lines of:

“In celebration of welcoming back perpetual licenses, and as our way of saying we’re sorry, we’re pleased to present all of our long-time loyalty users with a record-low discount price of $28.99 across our entire library of plugins!…”

I'm a simple man. Add StudioVerse to Mercury, do a 50% off WUP sale and I'll be a happy camper

Excellent news that they didn't take too long to turn around. Now we can turn the conversation to whether the subscription deal is good or not (I'm not subscribing because I already have Mercury, Abbey road, Nx collection and Inspire but actually, I think they priced it quite right for new users)

The apology in the reinstatement letter was the right thing to do, and hopefully they'll follow it up with some nice surprise.

16 hours ago, smallstonefan said:

I'm guessing I'm the only guy on this board that took a perpetual software company to a subscription model - this is a topic I'm absolutely a subject matter expert on.

To reiterate a point others have made - Not all subscriptions are the same, "taking a perpetual software company to a subscription model" isn't a pattern that you can apply to some random software and expect similar outcomes. E.g., (1) The perception of leases/rental/subscriptions is different depending on your target market, e.g., consumers or businesses  (2) Subscriptions where when you stop paying you lose access to a significant amount of previous work you have created are fundamentally different from the opposite case of subscriptions.

Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc. - There is no creation, once you've watched whatever you want you can stop it and lose nothing you've done

Microsoft Office 365 - You create documents but, if you stop the subscription the documents can still be opened with quite a few compatible packages (and you would typically go through a transitional period to ensure there aren't critical compatibility bugs), and you can go back to a perpetual license Office if you prefer.

Yes, for the above cases there is inconvenience costs of stopping the subscription but it is not comparable to the potential disruption from stopping a waves subscription where, if you have a previous project/session and you want to make some changes even if it is in a plugin that is not waves, that won't be an option if you don't have an active Waves subscription

Adobe CC is probably a more similar example of what Waves is attempting BUT, they were discussing it for at least 6 years before it actually happened,

Waves made the change in one of the worst possible ways: "As of right now and without any warning we are turning back on our previous commitments" (which are still shown on the website, as posted earlier in this thread  but they couldn't care less), "you won't be able to renew your support contracts", "you will no longer be able to renew your rights to a 2nd license as you used to", "you will no longer be able to renew your rights to transfer licenses as you used to",  "if you install the newer version you will lose your right to use the older one", "your only options are to accept our conditions or informing us in writing that you're canceling your license" (but we're not saying that you're getting anything back).

I hope that there is a (class action?) lawsuit where a judge ends up telling Waves that they have to issue a refund, calculated at the latest advertised retail price, to anybody who informs them in writing of the desire to terminate their license agreements because of not agreeing to the new terms.

There are certain implicit expectations of what is "normal behavior" (e.g., providing sufficient notice before doing drastic changes like this) and, even if the contract is craftily worded and it's not a breach of contract, when a company breaks those expectations, customers will react quite negatively, e.g., warning every potential new customer that this is a company from which abnormal behavior can be expected. The ill will can also encourage the hacking/cracking of their licensing system (as a software developer I generally try to discourage people from pirating software but now, if I hear that someone is using pirated Waves software, I won't bother to say anything)

I've said in a previous post that people will forget if Waves turns around more or less quickly but, the longer they take the worse it can end. There is a certain deja-vu with how Windows 8 managed to alienate a really large percentage of users. Not long afterwards, Steven Sinofsky was no longer an employee of Microsoft, and Windows 8.1 came out, with the return of the Start button. (Sinofski was the president of the Windows Division at the time, and the highest ranking person who was actively responsible for the decision, against plenty of pushback and warnings that removing the Start button was a bad idea)

even lower now from everyplugin (Larry already posted the overall sale, but mentioning MMM here for reference)

$28.49 https://everyplugin.com/music-maker-2023-premium.html

I'm not saying it was intentionally done, I'm just amazed at how it's evolving, with that "petition to bring WUP back"

And my perspective of human nature is that, if Waves doesn't take too long to reverse course, people will curse and moan but will also forget after one or two new shiny plugins come out and Waves comes out with a few "cut down demo versions" freebies and sales to celebrate that everything is going back to normal

How to reverse the un-love of WUP in 2 steps:

1. Eliminate WUP in the way that is most assured to piss people off
2. Go back and allow WUP again

https://www.martinic.com/aisynth

The 50% off discount code for AX73 will be delivered by email and will expire March 31, 2023. Here is the AX73 page

https://www.martinic.com/en/products/ax73-plus

15 minutes ago, Greg said:

The auto update for waves central doesn't complete (I actually have the same issue with slate).  Not sure why the silent install doesn't finish. Anyone else see this?  I grab the installed from a temp directory or download from site (14.07 last night wasn't posted on waves.com just in the waves central) and run it non silent mode.  

Anyone else see this before?

Also super annoyed about this new model - I have been buying Waves stuff for decades and spent a fortune on this stuff before they went $29 a plugin. 

Waves.com is unresponsive.

• Is it incompetence and a botched website update?
• Is it being hacked by someone annoyed at what they did?
• Is it a mass influx of people rushing to get the trial version of the subscriptions?
• Is it a mass influx of people downloading legacy stuff in case it disappears?

Or... from Magix for $29.99 for the latest version (2023) instead of last year's

https://www.magix.com/us/music-editing/music-maker/

(Available until April 2, 2023)

The key question is - how big is the "Hobbyist market".

Yes, in this forum it is big but seriously, let's get our heads outside the few websites and forums we frequent and ask again - how big is the market?

It used to be the case that as a company you wanted to reach the hobbyist market because of their future influence on decision makers, but the young audio engineers of today have grown up subscribing to "services" like creative cloud, the various access service to college books, xbox, spotify, netflix. YES, I do get that netflix is different because I don't have "netflix projects" that may need to be revisited in the future but I'll I lose access to if I cancel. My point is that being used to subscriptions for whatever you do in your leisure time does lower the resistance to the idea of more subscriptions. And, let's be clear, if you're a kid who wants waves for mixing the music for your band, it's probably easier to convince your dad to pay for your $24 a month subscription than it is to get him to buy you a Mercury license.

Look at the video, it's all young people, they're the target.

The percentage of us who will subscribe is probably in the single-digit range. My guess is that killing the current hobbyist market is no big loss (for Waves)

So, is this a slow kill for license transfers? You cannot transfer a product if it is out of WUP, you cannot renew WUP. Once it expires (or if it has expired already), forget about transfers

In case anybody else is thinking about asking: I emailed Waves and they politely refused to say if the 3/26 changes will result in any changes to WUP

> Will WUP renewals continue to be the same after the changes in the registration system on 3/26?
We do not have information to provide on upcoming promotions or changes. Keep an eye on the Waves newsletter and Waves.com for announcements, promotions and other Waves related news.

What sounds strange in all of this - Why isn't every Waves dealer liquidating their stock of license keys?

Speculation: Could it be that most dealers generate keys when they sell them but Best Service instead accumulated keys when they were on sale and resold them afterwards? Is Waves now "fighting" this practice?