Waves Licences go AWOL

[Vernon Barnes]

I had an odd and worrying occurrence earlier, I started Cakewalk and got multiple error messages that no Waves licenses were found. It was all OK yesterday. I rebooted the computer and got the same result. Waves Central showed the plugs were installed but not authorized. After much faffing about I managed to restore the licenses from the license cloud.

Has anyone else encountered such a problem?

[Gary Bradley]

Yes, a few times. ? I just uninstalled, ran CCleaner and reinstalled. Seemed to work.

Gary

 

[abacab]

Waves licenses are tied to your hardware. Certain changes can make them go away, such as deleting that hardware without realizing your licenses are linked to it. I can imagine it would be wise to move them to the license cloud prior to any major system upgrades.

I found that in my case they were tied to a virtual ethernet network loopback adapter. I deleted it, and boom! No more Waves licenses.

I had to use the Waves once-a-year free license recovery to get them all back ( my Waves licenses were all on my local machine, not the cloud). I assume you must have returned yours to the cloud before the big update?

The alternative method for Waves license storage besides the cloud, or your local machine, was mentioned by Waves support is that you can move them to a USB flash drive. That makes it a USB dongle that you can move to any machine where you have installed the Waves plugins, but not yet activated. The plugins will be activated on whatever machine that you have the flash drive plugged into. Solves the problem of only having one license if you regularly move between 2 machines, such as the home and studio, or desktop and laptop.

[Starise]

I use the usb dongle. I had a hardware error message right after a windows update. You would think they would have learned by now. 

I haven't tried my Waves plugins. I only seen the error once. Hopefully it self corrected with that last update. When I went to my dongle it showed everything was there. 

No issues with the dongle but my error message was indicating an issue with the hardware. I'm almost afraid to try it. I don't have an hour to burn looking to re establish my licenses.

The last WUP allows use on two computers without a dongle I think....not sure if this somehow ties in.  

Edited July 21, 2020 by Starise

[abacab]

7 hours ago, Starise said:

The last WUP allows use on two computers without a dongle I think....not sure if this somehow ties in.  

That would be ideal!

But I don't wish to pay for WUP. It's a subscription basically, and I am against that in principle.

Why can't they just be like everyone else and issue you 2 licenses? It's a pain in the rear to move your licenses to the cloud, just so you can move them temporarily to a different computer. I have decided not to buy any more Waves products due to this silly limitation.

[Robert Bone]

I had a recent incident, where all Waves licenses became unusable, because their product protection process decided my desktop had a new Device ID.

Turns out that at least part of their determination what a computer's Device ID is, is dependent on hardware info from the network adapter(s).  About 2 weeks ago, I had some internet issues, and in the process of figuring out what was going on with internet access, I had temporarily disabled and enabled the network adapter drivers, one at a time, to see if there were any issues with those, and this was later determined, by Waves support folks, to have caused their product protection to assign my desktop a new Device ID, for which my licenses were not authorized.

This was resolved by my disabling the network adapters again, one at a time, and enabling them again, one at a time, and then, magically,  the Waves licenses became authorized again, as it changed its mind on the Device ID it generated for my desktop, again matching up with which Device ID the products were authorized to run on.

Bob Bone

 

[Vernon Barnes]

46 minutes ago, Robert Bone said:

I had a recent incident, where all Waves licenses became unusable, because their product protection process decided my desktop had a new Device ID.

Turns out that at least part of their determination what a computer's Device ID is, is dependent on hardware info from the network adapter(s).  About 2 weeks ago, I had some internet issues, and in the process of figuring out what was going on with internet access, I had temporarily disabled and enabled the network adapter drivers, one at a time, to see if there were any issues with those, and this was later determined, by Waves support folks, to have caused their product protection to assign my desktop a new Device ID, for which my licenses were not authorized.

 

Bingo! My case is very similar.  I had recently disabled the ethernet on the computer while chasing some (as yet unresolved) issues with Acronis cloud backup.

[Robert Bone]

7 minutes ago, Vernon Barnes said:

Bingo! My case is very similar.  I had recently disabled the ethernet on the computer while chasing some (as yet unresolved) issues with Acronis cloud backup.

Here are the steps I followed, which got things working again for me:

1) Disabled all network adapters - after disabling the WiFi adapter, got a message from Windows that a restart was needed

2) Restarted computer

3) Launched Waves Central - could not log in without internet (all adapters were disabled) - closed Waves Central

4) Enabled the first, of two, wired network adapters

5) Launched Waves Central - issue no longer present all licenses again associated with connected device - (this computer, current Device ID)

And, following the succes after the above steps, after asking the Waves support guy who had been responding to my issues, if I could enable my other network adapters, he replied to tell me I could again enable my other network adapters.

And, here are the steps that the Waves support guy had sent me, which translated into the steps I listed above:

"Let's try the following one more time:

Restart the computer, and reconnect to Waves Central, and see if getting the same.

If you do, Disable all network adapters, in Control Panel > Device Manager
In the top right corner of the Waves Central interface, click the Refresh icon next to your login name.

Enable the different adapters one by one, each time until your computer appears in the “Select Source” section.

Once done, you can re-enable all network adapters."

Bob Bone

[abacab]

And if you do lose all of your licenses (even due to their silly product protection hack), you are only entitled to a Waves license recovery once per year free of charge.

[User 905133]

I don't have any Waves products, but the discussion about hardware/IDs/etc. is good to know about in case other products use a similar protection/authorization scheme.  Thanks for raising the issue and for reporting the details of the detective work on this. 

[abacab]

4 hours ago, User 905133 said:

I don't have any Waves products, but the discussion about hardware/IDs/etc. is good to know about in case other products use a similar protection/authorization scheme.  Thanks for raising the issue and for reporting the details of the detective work on this. 

It's a Waves one-of-a-kind as far as I know. I prefer the Pace iLok Software Manager to Waves, and that's also a very unpopular protection scheme. But Pace has never once lost my licenses after an upgrade! But the background Pace License Service always running annoys many folks.

I actually much prefer a simple serial number tied to my email.

Second choice would be the Arturia Software Center, Izotope Product Portal, or Native Instruments Native Access. Those have been trouble free for me. Not intrusive, and they just seem to work. Plus they install my software and product updates for me, as well as keep up with my authorizations. All different and proprietary. All OK by me, and no full-time background service required. Sort of like the BandLab Assistant, but much better!

However, XLN Audio (using the XLN Online Installer) ties your activations to your system software ID. Which by the way always breaks the authorization with every semi-annual Microsoft Windows 10 Feature Update (which is actually a Windows version upgrade, which includes a new ID). Easy to fix by going to your account at the XLN website and removing your old computer ID and authorizing the new ID (funny, it's generally the same computer name). But annoying.

I didn't cover them all here, but hopefully the few examples  show there is no industry standard for license protection. Recommend familiarizing yourself with the license details for the products you own.

[Robert Bone]

10 hours ago, abacab said:

And if you do lose all of your licenses (even due to their silly product protection hack), you are only entitled to a Waves license recovery once per year free of charge.

This is true - and when a similar loss of Waves licenses months earlier, had resulted in my availabing of the Recovery process, when it happened again, a few weeks back, I was not able to run the Recovery Process again - it said I couldn't do that until October 10th, one year from when I had done it before.

So - I had contacted Waves support, and they eventually gave me the steps that I posted above, and which worked, without having to try the Recovery Process.  I mention this, because if folks can get their licenses recognized again by disabling and enabling network adapters, that then preserves the ability to use the Recovery Process for some other occasion, where it might really be needed.  Hopefully, just doing the network adapter disabe/enable steps can assist others with this seemingly onoing problem caused by the Waves determination of a unique Device ID for computers.

Bob Bone