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.

Installing Windows XP on a Macbook Pro with Parallels

I installed XP with a friends' license whilst my genuine XP license was on order from the supplier.

I managed to successfully get windows running in bootcamp and parallels (2.5).

My XP cd arrived and I went through the process of changing the key code (using Microsoft's key update tool), but I foolishly did this from within parallels. Windows would run fine under parallels, but as soon as i rebooted natively, it was no longer active and stopped working.

In the mean time, I had upgraded to Parallels 3.0 which seems like it's working fine.

I also upgraded to Bootcamp 1.3

I couldn't figure out how to activate windows using the same license code directly as I had used when running under Parallels.

So I decided to reinstall windows. Here's a list of glitches.

- There's no page down key on a MacBook Pro, so you cannot read the EULA (but who reads it anyway)
- The Win XP Pro installer crashes if you have a mighty mouse plugged in. ( copyright 2004. yay)

I also reformated the win partition as NTFS.

Needless to say, I'm not in a happy place. Some combination of NTFS, Parallels 3.0, and Bootcamp 1.3 means that it's just not working, and I'm installing Windows for the third time today in a last ditch attempt to get it working.

At one stage it all looked good running natively. I installed Bootcamp drivers, windows updates, I got the activation thing sorted out, thanks to Sharon (my name for any non-human voice system.)

But as soon as I tried to boot it under Parallels, hang after hang after hang. Windows wouldn't even do a safe boot. Kept hanging after loading 'MUP.SYS'. Great.

Where to get I-Bench?

Is it I-Bench? or iBench? The answer is "I-Bench".

I was very interested in downloading i-bench myself and having a go at a speed test between Apple's new Safari browser for Windows and Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 (IE7).

Took me ages to find out where to get i-bench.... seems that the product has changed hands a few times recently.

I did find on this Lionbridge page an End User License Agreement, with a link that goes straight to the download.

The link points straight to the files:

ib50.exe
ib40.exe

Anyway, the file is downloading at the moment. I'll post my results as a comment here when I have some....

-matt

Sound Evolution a part of Smart State Innovation

Minister Jon Mickel, Minister for State Development, Employment and Industrial Relations, made a press release this week: "Smart State’s i.lab incubator still has eye for innovation".

Sound Evolution was mentioned alongside other innovative companies at i.lab, including Snowsports Interactive, Locatrix and BioChip Innovations.

See the full article here:

http://www.cabinet.qld.gov.au/MMS/StatementDisplaySingle.aspx?id=52060