Waves - Poor User Experience

I'm feeling really frustrated after trying out some Waves plugins. Here's a copy of the email I sent to waves about it all:

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Dear Sales team at Waves.

I am extremely disappointed with the process of trying the waves SSL plugins. Here's a quick score card for you:

9 out of 10 for sound quality.
0 out of 10 for ease of installation.

My 7 day authorisation has expired after 2 days. I have 5 days left to recover the 10 hours of work already done, which I cannot. Not to mention lost studio time.

If the process of trying waves plugins is this complex, I can assure you right now that I will not ever try another waves plugin. You can correctly infer that I would not buy a new plugin if I never try it.

Here is my story:

Two days ago (coming up 48 hours) I downloaded the SSL plugins to try them out for a client who had "heard" that they sounded good and wanted to use them.

After about 10 hours of pre-production with my client n Wednesday afternoon and Thursday day (at my home studio, running Pro Tools LE), we took our mix into a big studio to finish (Pro Tools HD playback into analog console with lots of nice outboard gear, TC|Electronic reverbs, etc).

We discovered that the SSL plugin installer was only for Intel mac. (Whatever happened to Universal binaries?)

We downloaded the SSL plugins again for the PPC mac, only to find that my iLok had a "Waves 5.9 Enabler Intel" authorisation on it which was not recognised.

The waves website absolutely sucks. I ended up with about 7 windows open, because every link opens another window. The new window is not logged in, so I have to log in again. Then a link opens a new window, and those pages have messages like "you must be logged in to use this link" (download). And so on.

The process of requesting authorisations, and how it works with the plugins, back and forth between separate authorisers for enablers and plugins and architectures is completely too complex. I consider myself to be extremely computer literate (I do software and web development as well as being a professional sound engineer) and it took 2 hours to get the PPC SSL plugins installed.

After all this time (2 hours in the big studio, which we're paying for) the PPC mac said that there was "0" days remaining on the waves enabler, and the SSL plugins would not load.

I returned to the ilok website and synchronised my ilok (the only one being used, the same one that was authorised with a 7 day demo less than 48 hours ago) and it clearly shows to licenses from waves: Waves 5.9 Enabler for Intel Macs, and SSL plugins, both expiring 27 June 2007.

We even tried downloading a PPC demo of another plugin in the hope that it would come with a PPC Waves enabler trial that would let the SSL plugins work.

So we gave up on trying to use the waves plugins on the PPC PT HD rig, and hooked up my MacBookPro to an LE system to bounce out the individual tracks.

This time, the intel mac, which was working perfectly earlier yesterday also reported that there was "0" days remaining on the Waves Enabler and the SSL plugins would not load.

So now I have no access to the SSL plugins. All of 10 hours of work I have done with them, at my client's request, is now wasted. 2 hours of studio time has also been wasted.

This experience has been bad for me.
This experience has been bad for my client.
This experience has been bad for the studio we took the mix to.
This experience has been bad for Waves, because I'm not prepared to go through this again. I'm sure many other users feel the same way.

I expect that installing and using a bought waves plugin would involve the same amount of mucking around. If this is indeed the case, I hope to god that I never have to buy anything from waves, because this is ridiculous.

What is wrong with doing a 7 day demo straight of the ilok like every other manufacturer? It seems that there is a completely sufficient copy protection and authorisation. If this is a money saving activity by not involved the guys at PACE, think about how much you've lost in unhappy customers.

I would consider hiring the plugins for a short time (week) if a client requested them but I didn't want to purchase them outright. Especially if this was less hassle than this demo stuff. Refer to the digidesign site where you can hire plugins for 2 / 14 / 31 day periods, for an example of how this might work.

Surely you'd rather a few dollars in the bank for people to try and use the plug-in than lose customers over a crappy trial authorisation system?


Your plug-ins sound great. The user experience is absolutely terrible. For your own sake, I hope you do something about this quickly.



Yours sincerely,

Matt Connolly
(frustrated) Sound Engineer.