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Waves Rant! Sorry!


Keni

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I think Bapu is missing out on a huge income stream.  Imagine if he were to demo then contrast and compare all of the plug-ins that he owns!  Hundreds of videos worth of potential there!

Of course, we all know that, even if he did that and was making six-digits a month, he'd just spend it all on more plug-ins... 🤣🤣🤣

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1 hour ago, Bapu said:

Watch Warren Huart (Produce Like a Pro), he's almost exclusively Waves in ProTools. He's a fan of Massenburg EQ.

The one plugin he constantly uses is Abbey Road Chambers.

The saddest one of those is Andrew Scheps. He doesn't even use his own plugin afaik. The only places where he does so is when he has to talk about it or teach something about it.

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7 hours ago, Grem said:

Really? I find that a stretch....

Everything is subjective I guess. 

Well, yes, de gustibus. Look at my favorite plug-in house, MeldaProduction, and you'll see quite a difference in approach to Waves'. That "get under the hood" thing where I can see exactly what the plug-in is doing is attractive to me. And heaven knows there are plenty of people who wouldn't touch a Melda plug-in with a ten foot pole due to the clinical UI's.

It's not as if I've tried the entire Waves line, just the freebies I've snagged, which do include Hybrid Comp, RVox and RBass. Also a Chris Alge reverb thingie. An assortment of One Knob FX I'll never use.

I'm newer to this than most of the people who post here, I think. I started working with a DAW again about 9 years ago. I was using Mixcraft, which comes with a load of plug-ins, and I got the MFreeFX bundle, IKM T-Racks freebies, UltraChannel, Ozone Elements and the CM suite pretty early, before I got most of the Waves stuff. So I'd already been exposed to some good processors and developed a workflow with them by the time I experienced most of the Waves things, most of which are much older than the other ones I'd been working with. They just don't do anything that other plug-ins I have don't do as well or better.

Add to that the janky (and single seat; I always run at least 2 active systems, sometimes 3) licensing, and they've never made it into my rotation. MetaFilter is pretty cool, and I found a very useful novelty patch in Elements 2. But Elements is a resource hog. And if a synth is a resource hog, it better sound as good as Chromaphone. 😄

So I have a more limited experience with them. It might be that the ones that would blow my mind are ones that I've never tried. At this point, I many more mixing FX than I could possibly learn how to make full use of. I'm only in the market for sound design-y FX and I don't think that's really Waves' strong suit (aside from the aforementioned MetaFilter).

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Just this morning I was thinking that it would be cool to add a delay to a spikey Rhodes track that would only affect high frequencies, and wondering if I had something like that in my collection. Hmm, maybe check the Melda folder...sure enough, there it is: MTurboDelayMB. Wait, there's two of them - there's an MDelayMB, too. Pretty much any effect that comes to mind is probably in there.

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I've been weaning myself off Waves plugins for a while now - the biggest reason being the license seat restrictions.  At one point, I was buying two licenses for each plugin but of course that pretty much waved goodbye to the WUP cap.  The cap is still there, but it's per machine - so the cap is essentially twice the normal amount.

For analog emulations, I mostly now use Analog Obsession; for more clinical/creative work, I use MeldaProduction.  I'd bought enough Melda plugins over the years to get the complete bundle for a fraction of the price.  To be honest though, 99% of the time, the stock ProChannel EQ and compressors work fine for me.  I've also started using the Sonitus plugins more - they may not look great, but they're very good at what they do, and the CPU usage is very low.

One set of plugins I do find very useful, albeit as a temporary solution, is the CLA Drums/Guitars/Vocals/Bass etc bundle of effects.

If you've just done a tracking session, and want a very quick rough mix, slapping appropriate plugins on the appropriate tracks can give a pretty good approximation to a finished mix.  Very useful if you've just tracked a local band and want to give them something to take home with them.  It's far from perfect, but sounds orders of magnitude better than just a balance of the raw tracks.

 

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5 hours ago, msmcleod said:

I've been weaning myself off Waves plugins for a while now - the biggest reason being the license seat restrictions.  At one point, I was buying two licenses for each plugin but of course that pretty much waved goodbye to the WUP cap.  The cap is still there, but it's per machine - so the cap is essentially twice the normal amount.

For analog emulations, I mostly now use Analog Obsession; for more clinical/creative work, I use MeldaProduction.  I'd bought enough Melda plugins over the years to get the complete bundle for a fraction of the price.  To be honest though, 99% of the time, the stock ProChannel EQ and compressors work fine for me.  I've also started using the Sonitus plugins more - they may not look great, but they're very good at what they do, and the CPU usage is very low.

One set of plugins I do find very useful, albeit as a temporary solution, is the CLA Drums/Guitars/Vocals/Bass etc bundle of effects.

If you've just done a tracking session, and want a very quick rough mix, slapping appropriate plugins on the appropriate tracks can give a pretty good approximation to a finished mix.  Very useful if you've just tracked a local band and want to give them something to take home with them.  It's far from perfect, but sounds orders of magnitude better than just a balance of the raw tracks.

 

I mostly stayed away because of their' policies. But the Abbey Road Studio 3 plugin was too much to resist. I still rely on it as I’m currently forced to working in cans (apartment living). The combination of the gorgeous sounding room and stunning Quested monitors has me! I see other companies with similar (?) programs of other rooms, but no one else has this!

 

other than that I use the puigchild 660/670 a lot but see alternatives if needed. Everything else I have of theirs I like but could live without.

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I pay for my Waves plugins, whenever I have the cash and I like the particular promotion - I usually go for the pay 2, get 4 promotion, but, as of late, I have everything on the "free" list that I'm interested in - but I use a cracked version, with no Waves Central - and a lot less drive space, and RAM occupied, no folders erratically written everywhere. 🤫 don't tell anybody...

I'm not a professional Waves basher, like I see some people being, I actually like many of their plugins - some, like the SSL emulations - Mixhub and EV2 - to me are the best available - I haven't tried any UAD stuff - and many more. Plus the prices are great, and I've had a great experience with their support when I suggested a few fixes and improvements for Mixhub - about 15 of them, for those who think my 100 point CW suggestion list is a bit much. But the new subscription only model they just switched to - own nothing and be happy - was too much for me. They're backtracked, but the taste will never go away.

I've always asked myself, in a world where the big software developers only have a few employees each, working full time, how these people maintain permanent offices in America, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, India, and so on. Something doesn't add up for me, there.

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53 minutes ago, Olaf said:

I pay for my Waves plugins, whenever I have the cash and I like the particular promotion - I usually go for the pay 2, get 4 promotion, but, as of late, I have everything on the "free" list that I'm interested in - but I use a cracked version, with no Waves Central - and a lot less drive space, and RAM occupied, no folders erratically written everywhere. 🤫 don't tell anybody...

I'm not a professional Waves basher, like I see some people being, I actually like many of their plugins - some, like the SSL emulations - Mixhub and EV2 - to me are the best available - I haven't tried any UAD stuff - and many more. Plus the prices are great, and I've had a great experience with their support when I suggested a few fixes and improvements for Mixhub - about 15 of them, for those who think my 100 point CW suggestion list is a bit much. But the new subscription only model they just switched to - own nothing and be happy - was too much for me. They're backtracked, but the taste will never go away.

I've always asked myself, in a world where the big software developers only have a few employees each, working full time, how these people maintain permanent offices in America, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, India, and so on. Something doesn't add up for me, there.

I really have not been a waves basher though I'm feeling that way right now. I got @$$%$@@$ in their decision making so I'm not a happy camper and looking at the decisions they've been constantly leaning toward and now followed to a state of ripping off some customers such as myself. I had working software that I paid for. They automatically changed something via their auto update that has now placed me in a position where I can only recover what I already had if I'm willing to shell out more cash to buy a dongle to dedicate to their plugin's need on a port that I don't have to spare is an insult and possibly even something that could pursue legal action which I am not about to do. But I will be very wary of entering into more business with a company that believed they could sell something then decide to re-neg on the deal after the fact. I feel insulted on top of miffed for sure. I don't want to bash them I'd like to praise them for their good work but their' business model as it eveolves seems to be headed worse (for me) not better....

I do like their plugins. It's not a question of that at all. I don't own that many but those I do get used....

A lot of things are changing in the respect of selling things such as software and I get that whether I like the direction of change or not. I will stay with  more conventional solutions as much as I can for as Long as I can... I'm old, that shouldn't be too long!

 

 

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On 4/15/2023 at 4:06 PM, Keni said:

I could buy a Tesla easier

I am moving stuff from a garage area to a temporary location so I can finally build my studio. It's all taking a long time.Sort of been in limbo musically.

.........but I did buy a Tesla. Took about 4 months.

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And I did decide to install some Waves plugins to check a few things and now I see why I vowed to never use them. Not only is the installation process still confusing if you're not upgraded to the latest version of them where everything can be done at a click of a few buttons through Waves Central, simply loading WavesShell and having it running makes Cakewalk behave weird and freeze randoomly, on top of making my whole computer slower.  And it becomes worse if you decide to load some of the older plugins, as they take several seconds to open and may cause Cakewalk to stop responding to the point you can't even end the task.

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14 minutes ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

And I did decide to install some Waves plugins to check a few things and now I see why I vowed to never use them. Not only is the installation process still confusing if you're not upgraded to the latest version of them where everything can be done at a click of a few buttons through Waves Central, simply loading WavesShell and having it running makes Cakewalk behave weird and freeze randoomly, on top of making my whole computer slower.  And it becomes worse if you decide to load some of the older plugins, as they take several seconds to open and may cause Cakewalk to stop responding to the point you can't even end the task.

Interesting... I've not had any such problems. Regardless of my distaste for their business decisions and authorizations etc. their plugins seem to work well here. Waveshell? Yeah, I see the versions scan and always wonder why they take longer than almost my whole scan time for each one, but then they become gone... So I'm thinking there might be some other situation that's adding to the mix?

 

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1 hour ago, Keni said:

Interesting... I've not had any such problems. Regardless of my distaste for their business decisions and authorizations etc. their plugins seem to work well here. Waveshell? Yeah, I see the versions scan and always wonder why they take longer than almost my whole scan time for each one, but then they become gone... So I'm thinking there might be some other situation that's adding to the mix?

 

You have 3 times the amount of cpu threads and 8 times the amount of RAM. There's your reason.

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19 minutes ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

You have 3 times the amount of cpu threads and 8 times the amount of RAM. There's your reason.

Ok. That’s possibly the reason. I too suffer from resource hogs. I love a few of the Cherry Audio  synths and at first, I couldn’t comfortably use them, but they improved enough in a reasonable timespan so that They finally become useable. Ik's Amplitube 5. A great plugin but such a hog it's barely useable even here. I was using 3 as 4 held jo advantages but no my new DAW I can’t get 3 authorized for some reason so I’m using 4...

My point is that this is a development issue, not business issue. While every bit as important or more, not quite the focus of this thread, yes?

 

From the days long before digital descended on us, equipment upgrades, technology changes etc have long driven us to buy better/faster forever!

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