Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[J.J. Blair]

Jay, absolutely.  Prior to UA's TDM plugs, Waves had the best stuff out there, not to mention they had stuff that everybody HAD To have, like L2.  There's some great sounding stuff out there now, for a lot cheaper, and with a better customer experience.  

[Jay Kadis]

We still use the hardware L2 every day.  These days I feel a bit of allegiance to Universal Audio since it kind of started in my office, but mainly because I love their products.  

[Fibes]

Sonalksis and UA are first rate all around.

[J.J. Blair]

I also have to say that the people at UA are unbelievable.  Some of the warmest and most helpful in the business.  

[Jan Folkson]

I gave up on waves a long time ago.  Life is too short to deal with crap like that.

[PookyNMR]

Fibes wrote on Thu, 20 January 2011 20:00

Sonalksis and UA are first rate all around.

Sonalksis are great.  Maybe not as well known, but as far as plug-ins go, I think they're some of the better sounding ones out there.  Certainly worth a demo.

Never had a problem with Waves.  I quite like their emulation plugs as well as some of their newer products like the C6.

[Tomas Danko]

I decided to never purchase Waves software with my personal money. However, at work I've got another colleague who takes care of WUP and all our iLoks (we've probably got Waves licenses worth $40 000 or more, including one license of something that's above Mercury).

But the friggin' software still won't run well under 64-bit Windows which forces me to work on two PC machines at the same time and that kills the workflow.

One reason for us to stick to Waves, is that we need to be highly compatible between studio projects, outsourcing and such. I'd rather go with UAD, Sonnox and such. However, with the next generation audio engines on the newest gaming consoles I've started to process it all in real-time during runtime instead. It doesn't sound as good, but the benefits are wicked.

Due to this, we're seeng a trend where Waves are trying to port their plug-ins to Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in order to try and sell us (very expensive) runtime library licenses.

[Jon Hodgson]

Sean Eldon Qualls wrote on Thu, 20 January 2011 17:39

I've spent some time at Skyline, and it's hard to believe Ron or Jonathan would be directly involved in pirating plugins...if I had to guess, I'd say it was a visiting engineer or an assistant/intern who put the cracks on their machine. But I don't know anything about this situation outside of what the article states. Plenty of hardware in that room, too...

Well their defence was that they didn't know about it.

But the judge instructed the jury that it wasn't a defence in law

“[a] person is liable for copyright infringement by another if the person has a financial interest and the right and ability to supervise the infringing activity, whether or not the person knew of the infringement.”

Basically, it happened on their watch, they benefited financially, they're responsible.

I didn't know that was the letter of the law (at least US law), so I find that interesting.

[0dbfs]

Sounds like it turned out to be the case in this instance.

I can totally see how this happened and it's probably not an isolated thing.

I'll bet that their "employee-agreement" now moves the responsibility to the employees so that it's very clear what is and is-not acceptable regarding unlawful use of licensed property.

Now, if freelancers are doing this in a rented space on rented equipment then the rental-agreement needs to address this as well.

A business should have these protection-mechanisms in place.

Best,
jonathan

[New Orleans Steve]

 As a 'Label' Owner, I am a student of I.P. law, so I follow this with interest. When I was in the production department at a large non- profit, they had a very strong policy against cracked software. They stated they would buy any software we wanted, but installing cracked software was grounds to get fired.  

 I usually don't work in the box, but have been on sessions where they used Waves..... All I can say is IF I was bootleging software, I wouldn't be cracking WAVES.
 Don't know about others, But to me Waves was not really that Good. Is it really on the 'A' list?

[blairl]

New Orleans Steve wrote on Sun, 23 January 2011 09:19

Don't know about others, But to me Waves was not really that Good. Is it really on the 'A' list?

Absolutely on the 'A' list!  Great audio processing tools.  I say that without reservation after nearly 20 years of using their products.

[bigbone]

After only a few month of working with WAVES, ( studio classics collection ). They are on my A list.

JN

[svs95]

I have Waves on several different systems here, and move one ilok between them, depending on what room or DAW I'm using. Never had a problem with tech support when I told them this, so it must be A-OK with them. In fact, it's the main advantage of iloks over system-resident licenses.

Waves are not the only game in town, but they are on the A-List for sure. Linear Phase EQs, C6 with sideband, X-Hum, L3 LL Ultra, the Renaissance stuff, and the S1 stereo tool are on so many projects, it's hard to imagine not having them.

I also like to meter the final buss through their Durrough meter. It makes it easy at a glance to get the levels high enough, but not too high, and to keep peak/average in a good range.

It wouldn't surprise me if their litigators might have been over-zealous in a case or two, but I also wouldn't be too surprised if some of those stories were not quite true as told.

[Fenris Wulf]

There's exactly ONE Waves plug-in that does something nothing else does, the Linear Multiband. Definitely the most capable multi-band tool/linear phase crossover on the market. And possibly the S1 stereo imager and that new phantom center plug. Everything else I can do without. The Linear EQ doesn't even have temporal overlap processing to remove the pre-ring and is incredibly bad sounding.

The UA stuff is great for plug-ins, but since I moved to analog mixing I don't use them at all. If I run out of outboard compressors I'll do without rather than use a plug-in. Yes folks, DSP actually sounds worse that no processing at all.

Copy protection schemes still have a tendency to royally screw up your computer, and people resort to "buy the plug-in and use the crack." Yes folks, the cracked version is actually more stable.

That reminds me, a fellow on another forum was asking advice on the possible legal ramifications of using a "Hackintosh," which he's contemplating just so he can have something without ridiculous hardware limitations.

So now you can get sued for doing what you have to to make your system work. I don't need that kind of crap in my life. So long digital, I can't say it's been nice knowing you.

[Barish]

Jan Folkson wrote on Fri, 21 January 2011 04:37

I gave up on waves a long time ago.  Life is too short to deal with crap like that.

Same here.

By the way, I couldn't help noticing a funny coincidence in the company names there:

Quote:

...New York City-based Reckless Music, LLC, d.b.a. Skyline Recording Studios NYC...

That kinda explains in an ironic way how they made such a mistake.

B.