If you see me trying to buy another Waves product, slap me

[Kevin Walsh]

Damn them and their stupid license management scheme. It's tied to your NIC and if you foolishly forget and disable a NIC for some reason, goodbye Waves plugin licenses until you can recover them sometime NEXT YEAR.

Seriously, just slap me.

Edited November 9, 2020 by Kevin Walsh

[abacab]

1 hour ago, Kevin Walsh said:

Damn them and their stupid license management scheme. It's tied to your NIC and if you foolishly forget and disable a NIC for some reason, goodbye Waves plugin licenses until you can recover them sometime NEXT YEAR.

Seriously, just slap me.

Well if you still have the NIC, just re-enable it and access to the licenses is restored.

[Kevin Walsh]

41 minutes ago, abacab said:

Well if you still have the NIC, just re-enable it and access to the licenses is restored.

Just like the documents say to do, right. Did it work? No. Why? I don't know. I've contacted support. This is the third time this has happened in the last year. 

 

[abacab]

1 minute ago, Kevin Walsh said:

Just like the documents say to do, right. Did it work? No. Why? I don't know. I've contacted support. This is the third time this has happened in the last year. 

 

I dunno, it worked for me.

If you haven't used the license recovery within the last 12 months, that should also work. I've had to use that before. But I would wait for support to respond first, as they might be able to avoid recovery.

And you can always move your licenses to a USB connected drive. It doesn't have to be a flash drive. I've even moved them to a connected spinner USB.

[Kevin Walsh]

Yeah, I wish it would work. It shows a new "connected drive" with no licenses and a "disconnected drive" with all of my licenses. I was  able to select and move three licenses to the cloud but the other four defy every attempt to correct things.  I never thought I'd pine for an ilok solution. ?

[Matthew Sorrels]

It's a tough lesson, but the only safe way to activate Waves plugins is to a USB thumb drive.  Yes it's a dongle you have to buy and keep track of yourself.  But it can save you so much pain and suffering.

[bitflipper]

I've had to recover Waves licenses twice.

Although aggravating, it really wasn't a big deal. Still, given that most of Waves' competitors will never hassle you like that, why on earth would you put up with any aggravation at all?

[Kevin Walsh]

4 hours ago, bitflipper said:

I've had to recover Waves licenses twice.

Although aggravating, it really wasn't a big deal. Still, given that most of Waves' competitors will never hassle you like that, why on earth would you put up with any aggravation at all?

Exactly my point! I do like the CLA2A quite a bit but I've found Kush's AR-1 to sound pretty great. 

[Kevin Walsh]

5 hours ago, Matthew Sorrels said:

It's a tough lesson, but the only safe way to activate Waves plugins is to a USB thumb drive.  Yes it's a dongle you have to buy and keep track of yourself.  But it can save you so much pain and suffering.

You're right, but I lose stuff on a pretty regular basis, and thumb drives are right at the top of the list of most frequent things that get lost. 

[bitflipper]

7 hours ago, Kevin Walsh said:

Exactly my point! I do like the CLA2A quite a bit but I've found Kush's AR-1 to sound pretty great. 

I have never criticized the quality of Waves plugins. They are among the best there are. RBass remains a personal favorite. It's just their unhealthy obsession with copy protection that makes the brand undesirable.

Their LA2A is indeed quite good, but there are many LA2A clone alternatives that are equally good, including Cakewalk's own CA2A. Once upon a time, Waves offered products that were truly unique and available nowhere else. Fortunately for consumers, that is no longer the case. Name any Waves product and I can suggest a comparable alternative from a vendor that won't treat you like a criminal. 

[Starship Krupa]

It's odd, I have 15 Waves plug-ins and they are all the result of some giveaway or other, starting with TrueVerb on Black Friday a few years ago. Magazineware, whatever.

The original licenses didn't cost a cent, but I think I dropped about $12 updating my v.9 plug-ins to v.10. I might do that again to bring the v.11 ones up to v.12, 'cause of the resizable GUI's.

I have primary licenses for all of them on a thumb drive, then a combination of primary and secondary on the hard drives of my various DAW systems.

I've only had to invoke license recovery once, due to ignorance on my part about needing to move licenses before a major system rebuild, and it went reasonably smoothly, much moreso than with the iLok'd licenses on the same system.

Their way of loading plug-ins via that shell/wrapper thing is a little weird, but since v.10 it's worked just fine. My Waves plug-ins never crash the host and sound fine, although the Element 2 synthesizer is the only one of them I couldn't find an easy substitute for.

People moan about the WUP, but nobody is forcing them to buy it. My Waves plug-ins that are out of WUP and in v.10 and 11 work just as well as they did when those were the current versions, and it's pretty obvious to me that they don't spend a lot of time changing the code in the oldies.

[Kevin Walsh]

Well, much as I hate the licensing technology, you can't really complain about their support desk. They got back to me and after uploading a system information file turns out that the license manager had bound to a built in network connection that I've never used and never had a network cable connected to. I had tried the disable/re-enable thing they tell you to but I didn't really think of the device I never use and which did not have a cable attached. In the end I actually had to connect a cable to it, disable all the other network connections on the box and refresh my licenses in Waves Central. And there they were.

I quickly moved them to the cloud and from there to a USB thumb drive that will henceforth live on the back plane of my PC.

He couldn't explain why it connected to the unused NIC except to speculate that if I disconnected the cable from my main one for some reason it would mess things up. Whatever the case, it's actually the third time this has happened and the first time I was able to get by without waiting for a year to go by before I could recover the licenses. 

I suggested that this licensing scheme is fraught with peril for un-technical people, a comment for which the support guy had no response.  

What a pain.

Edited November 11, 2020 by Kevin Walsh

[steve@baselines.com]

I still like some of my Waves plugins, but there are a TON I never use anymore.  Any new install I've done has been problematic to some degree or another.  Other companies have a smooth process, but Waves for some reason is never really smooth.

[abacab]

I agree that Waves should really improve their licensing process to make it more end-user friendly. It is a pain, but I do like some of their plug-ins.

[chris.r]

On 11/10/2020 at 5:29 PM, bitflipper said:

Name any Waves product and I can suggest a comparable alternative from a vendor that won't treat you like a criminal.

RBass  

[Brian Walton]

On 11/10/2020 at 12:29 PM, bitflipper said:

......... Fortunately for consumers, that is no longer the case. Name any Waves product and I can suggest a comparable alternative from a vendor that won't treat you like a criminal. 

I'm very much in this same boat, but honestly haven't found anything that replaces Omni-Channel at the same price point (i.e. $25 on sale).  Everything else I've found some reasonable alternative for I feel like.

What do you suggest on that one?

[bitflipper]

It's a channel strip. A very good one, but just one of many on the market. Cheap, too, when on sale. [Just checked; it's a bargain right now for $45]

Personally, I'm not a fan of channel strips. Sure, there's the convenience factor. But I prefer to combine my favorite individual effects in any signal chain. 

A couple potential alternatives:

Cakewalk's own VX-64 is comparable but not identical, lacking a gate but adding an expander. Unfortunately, it's not sold separately so you'll need to have SONAR installed to have it.

iZotope's versatile Neutron is fancier than Omni Channel, adding a visual parametric EQ and a transient designer. It's not designed specifically for vocals, but its sibling Nectar is. 

These are just the first two that come to mind. There are a great many more out there, including modular FX racks such as McDSP's 6050 and Slate's VMR that let you basically build your own channel strip.

But I suspect that if you polled serious mixers the consensus would be that they generally don't use channel strips. Some top-tier vendors such as FabFilter don't even make one. Even Meldaproduction, which makes every kind of effect you've ever heard of and a few you haven't, doesn't make a channel strip. However, if you feel the convenience of a channel strip is desirable, there are plenty of options. Just google "channel strips".

 

[abacab]

I bought another Waves plugin today. Well actually it was two...

I completed my Abbey Road Collection with an upgrade to the full collection for $20. I was only lacking two.

Are there any comparable plug-ins to these anywhere?

[Brian Walton]

23 hours ago, bitflipper said:

It's a channel strip. A very good one, but just one of many on the market. Cheap, too, when on sale. [Just checked; it's a bargain right now for $45]

Personally, I'm not a fan of channel strips. Sure, there's the convenience factor. But I prefer to combine my favorite individual effects in any signal chain. 

A couple potential alternatives:

Cakewalk's own VX-64 is comparable but not identical, lacking a gate but adding an expander. Unfortunately, it's not sold separately so you'll need to have SONAR installed to have it.

iZotope's versatile Neutron is fancier than Omni Channel, adding a visual parametric EQ and a transient designer. It's not designed specifically for vocals, but its sibling Nectar is. 

These are just the first two that come to mind. There are a great many more out there, including modular FX racks such as McDSP's 6050 and Slate's VMR that let you basically build your own channel strip.

But I suspect that if you polled serious mixers the consensus would be that they generally don't use channel strips. Some top-tier vendors such as FabFilter don't even make one. Even Meldaproduction, which makes every kind of effect you've ever heard of and a few you haven't, doesn't make a channel strip. However, if you feel the convenience of a channel strip is desirable, there are plenty of options. Just google "channel strips".

 

I own a number of channel strips.  And the ones you have mentioned are either not in the ball park in terms of functionality or they are far more expensive than my stated $25 sale price.

I have VX-64 = not even close

Not going into all the details but Omni has multiple compressor types, saturation types, deeper editing, solo functionality, MS processing, advanced routing/reorder of effects,  in addition to all the usual suspects and they were built to sound good with each other on a broad range of sources.   The point being it actually has versatility built in instead of having to go to a bunch of different plugins.  Though yes, I tend to not use Channel strips as my workflow.  However, I know plenty of pros that do and combine them with other things.  The whole point is efficient workflow for professionals and those that come from an actual analog multi-track world are used to using say the same EQ type across the majority of tracks.  When time is actually money, I think you would be surprised how common they are.  Omni-Channel with the right set of ears is really powerful.  

Neutron is great - but the versions with that level of functionality cost many times more than that, McDSP uses ILOK so it is in the same category as WAVES in terms of customer treatment, Slate again many times more expensive (and ilok).

The TBaudio 5501 would be one to mention if it actually went on sale...but as it is...ends up being much more expensive.  And I won't go into detail, but there are also some things it needs to improve on in the sound department.  

A melda channel strip would be so outrageously convoluted that no-one other than a hobbyist that likes to fiddle would use it.

So I'm still looking for reasonable priced alternatives that actually compete with what Omni brings to the table.  I've looked and I don't believe it exists.  There are some good channel strips on the market that simulate consoles but then you are stuck with a compressor type that is only good on some sources and garbage on others.  

I don't think Omni is the best thing since sliced bread...but I don't think there is a good alternative that is in the same price point and meets the requirement of not treating customers like garbage (limited authorizations, etc)

 

People  have been asking FabFilter to make a channel strip for years now.  I think they are afraid of lost revenue for their other plugins that would result.

Edited November 13, 2020 by Brian Walton

[abacab]

1 hour ago, Brian Walton said:

Not going into all the details but Omni has multiple compressor types, saturation types, deeper editing, solo functionality, MS processing, advanced routing/reorder of effects,  in addition to all the usual suspects and they were built to sound good with each other on a broad range of sources.   The point being it actually has versatility built in instead of having to go to a bunch of different plugins. 

Along with the reordering of Scheps effects, you have one "optional" slot to insert another Waves plugin of your choosing into Omni channel.

Then if you drop Omni Channel into Waves StudioRack you can create an effects chain with multiple Waves effects before or after Omni Channel, if desired. And if you are using Cakewalk,  you could insert that StudioRack into a Pro Channel FX chain. Not that you would really need to, but you can if you want to.