Studio Tools: Waves Plug-ins – A Drama in Two Acts

The end of March was a wild week for Waves. The audio plug-in company had announced a drastic change in how their effects were to be distributed – changing to a blanket subscription model for all users. Then within days, Waves abruptly walked that decision back and reinstituted “perpetual” licenses for their products. That’s a win for voice actors and small home studios that might only need one or two key tools for their workflow.

Here’s how it played out –

Act 1 – March 27, 2023
Waves Announces Annual Subscription-only Pricing

On Monday, March 27, I received an email from the fine folks at Waves announcing they were implementing “Waves Creative Access”. The ubiquitous audio plug-in company has shifted their business model to a subscription-based service. This effectively ends the ability to purchase individual Effects plug-ins and replaces single item purchases with enrollment in an annual plan. You’ll have the choice of two price points, either ~110 preselected plug-ins for $150 (US) per year, or everything they make (more than 220 plug-ins) for $250 (US) per year. 

This might be great news if you own a studio or provide full audio production services, but how many voice actors are using more than a few of the many Waves products? Where does that leave us?

As some have observed, buying individual plug-ins can be “death from a hundred $29 cuts…” It can also be a pain to keep track of updates or versions. Effect plug-ins tend not to let you know until they crash your recording software. A benefit of paying a monthly or annual subscription is that you’ll always have the most current version without scrambling to find your credit card against a production deadline. I also feel that a well run subscription-based business model lets a software company provide more consistent improvements, rather than having to wait until the next big “version” update. We certainly see Avid (Pro Tools) and Adobe (Audition) supplying regular refinements and features to their recording software through this method. 

Both Pro Tools and Audition are fully functional recording platforms (each with their own highly usable Effects, I might add). There’s a clear cost/benefit there. However, does it make financial sense to pay for access to a huge set of tools if you will hardly use any of them? That doesn’t seem so compelling. Waves’ new program just strikes me as an unnecessary exclusion to anyone who only uses 1 or 2 key Effects in their voiceover processing chain.

Waves Creative Access does not “break” any of the plug-ins you own. Anything that works now should continue to do so for a while. While there’s no reason to worry today, I’ve already heard from other voice actors who will be moving away from Waves in the long term. I am hoping Waves will realize that they just lopped off a large enough chunk of their customer base to make them come up with a solution. 

Over the years, I’ve collected a number of Waves plug-ins. While the Sibilance tool user interface is sublime, the only tool which I might miss is Waves Clarity Vx. As good and reliable as Izotope Voice Denoise and Spectral Denoise Effects are, Clarity Vx proved to be demonstrably better in a lot of cases. With Clarity, Waves took a different approach to the problem of background noise removal and achieved better results for many real world situations.

I have to believe that after a collective raising of the eyebrows and reaction of “Oh…<expletive>!”, the very clever people at Izotope started working the problem. Which means that when the next generation Izotope noise reduction tool is rolled out, I’ll be ready to pay $150 or so for the full RX version update, which provides it and all the other Izotope tools. Waves should know that I would have been happy to throw down another thirty or forty bucks every couple of years to keep Clarity current. 

Now, when working with a voice actor to set up a pro quality processing chain, it’s tough to make a pitch for spending $150 every year to keep Waves running on an ongoing basis. It will be interesting to see if Waves will reassess this model moving forward. 

…let’s just say we didn’t have to wait too long

Act 2 – March 30, 2023
Waves Walks It Back…

Waves Audio must have received a significant pushback to the planned subscription service they announced this week. They pulled one of the quickest 180’s on a major decision that I’ve ever seen. On Wednesday, everyone with Waves active licenses received the following email from Waves Audio CTO and Co-Founder Meir Shashoua – 

“Over the past few days, many of you have expressed concerns about our decision to discontinue perpetual plugin licenses and our move to an exclusive plugin subscription model. I would like to start by apologizing for the frustration we have caused many of you, our loyal customers. 

We understand that our move was sudden and disruptive, and did not sufficiently take into consideration your needs, wishes, and preferences. We are genuinely sorry for the distress it has caused.   After respectfully listening to your concerns, I want to share with you that we are bringing back the perpetual plugin license model, side-by-side with the new subscriptions. You will again be able to get plugins as perpetual licenses, just as before.

In addition, those of you who already own perpetual licenses will once again be able to update your plugins and receive a second license via the Waves Update Plan—again, just as before. This option, too, will be available alongside and independently of the subscription program.   

We are currently putting all our efforts into making perpetual licenses available to you again, as quickly as possible. In the meantime, you can keep up-to-date on our news page, where we will post the latest updates on perpetual license availability. 

I would like you to know that we are committed to you, our users. We listened to your feedback, and we will continue to listen to you. Waves is a company filled with users and creators, just like you, and we are all as passionate about the products as you are. 

With this in mind, we will strive to find the way to make things right by you, and hopefully regain your trust.”

– Waves Audio CTO and Co-Founder Meir Shashoua

Link to the Waves news page –
https://www.waves.com/news/perpetual-waves-licenses-are-back

For voice actors, who make up a relatively small segment of the Waves user base, this is good news. It also serves as a reminder as to where we sit in the scheme of things. Most of the tools we use – both hardware and software – were developed for the general music recording and post production markets. Trends and workflows in those areas will dictate the decisions which are made by those who manufacture or develop those tools. 

This gets back to one of the tenets of running your own production studio: Think in terms of “two”. Having redundancy in terms of hardware – a backup microphone and interface with a spare cable, for example – lets us continue getting work out the door when things fail. The same idea applies to software. If Twisted Wave had an issue, lateraling to Adobe Audition or another recording platform is a solid backup. If Loudmax suddenly stops working, the native Apple Limiter can replace it. While it would mean extra steps to revise some workflows, it wouldn’t prevent the completion of projects. 

Situations like this are a good opportunity to think through contingency plans. Which mission-critical tools exist in your workflow? And what would happen if those were not available.

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