Working around the Waves Update Plan

One day the waves plugin sale will end………... on that same day, satan will be arriving to work in a snow plough and spotify will start paying artists a fairer share.  Waves have long been an industry standard for plugins, they used to cost well over 100s of pounds or dollars to purchase and bundles could well be in excess of thousands.

 These days you’ll probably notice that waves will be offering their plugins and bundles for a ridiculously low amount of money. I think this has partly come about from realising they can make more sales at a lower value and increase their customer base than having a lower amount of the higher sales. 

There are some plugins I’ll use on every session as they are great time savers (vocal rider, bass rider, vitamin & sibilence) and there are a few I’ve been able to pick up for free (CLA echosphere, supertap). 

One of the ways waves seem to catch people out is through the update plan, you buy the plugin for 30 dollars and have access to any update for about a year. After that you’d have to pay an upgrade fee to bring any outdated plugins back up to the latest version. 

This pales in comparison with the likes of Plugin Alliance, Slate, SSL and Softube who both offer free updates to their customers if you’ve bought the plugin.  With that in mind, waves plugins have never caused an issue on the operating system, I’ve been happy with the plugins I’ve used and I’ve never paid for an update so far. Most of my plugins are on v9 and I’m in no rush to update them.  Especially when it’ll cost $240 for no real improvement in functionality. 

With V12 the main thing that could tempt me into updating would be having a second license available to use the plugin on 2 machines. I could also search plugin presets and the GUI’s could be resized for larger monitors and some of the older plugs have had an appearance update.

None of these are deal breakers for me as they don’t really affect the sound and they’re working fine for me on my system. The main problem I’ve heard about with waves is when people move systems or upgrade waves central to the latest version and can no longer install older plugins that they actually own. They do this to try and force updates on people who’ve not been keeping track of external installers for products.  

So are there any workarounds for the update path

One way  would be to look at upgrade paths available for some of your plugins and expanding your arsenal. Since I’ve not really bought any bundles, there are some options that could interest me and work out at approximately $5 a plugin. To date none of the updates have really bothered me and it would still mean paying an update fee and wouldn’t bring all my plugins up to date. 

So lets talk about waves central and licensing instead. 

 The cloud licensing system is also an option and I could  place the licence on my system drive.  If you go this route, just be aware that removing this drive from your computer and taking it to a new location (such as a third party studio) causes a conflict with the licenses as you’re not in the same physical machine as before and so the licences don’t work. 

In order to reauthorise them, you have to take your drive back to your ORIGINAL machine, remove the plugin licenses from the drive, put them back onto the cloud in order to re-authorise it on same drive in the new system. It’s an absolute pain in the arse and it’s even worse if you forget to do this at a commercial studio and have to work out a time when they’re free in order to take your drive back to resolve it.  

 This is why I stay with the USB drive. I have all my licence keys on a removable USB stick, I can remove my drive from the studio system, take it home and carry on using the plugins without any issues.   Whenever I install new waves plugins on my system I also take an extra step o0f downloading the installer onto my USB stick at the same time. This way the license key has installers for the plugins I need and use all the time and I can install them wherever I am and carry on like before. 

 When it comes to upgrading my system I’ll be able to download waves central onto the system, insert my usb stick and choose the OFFLINE Installer tab and then select the plugins I’m using on a regular basis that I want to install onto my system. 

This gets around the issue of the waves update plan and lets me carry on installing the versions that work for my plan, the new features are effectively useless for what I need and if you are someone who moves from different locations and system this little workaround might save you the headache in the future. 

If you find yourself in a position where you haven’t got access to the installer you need from the latest version of waves central. There is an option to download and install the legacy installer from waves’ website and I’ll leave a link in the description

 You might find you need to download different versions of the installer (v9,v10 v11) for everything to be compatible, this is why choosing an option to install the plugin you need will be worthwhile in the long run.   

When you run this program make sure you’re disconnected from the internet as I think it’ll check to see if there are any updates to waves central. Install the plugins and he  presto you should have access to your plugins again.

When making this video, to bring all my outdated plugins up to the most current version, it would cost me $240 for another year of updates. In this video I talk about how I install offline installers onto a usb stick so I don't have to rely on their online installers.