Waves Black Friday Plugin

0 views

Skip to first unread message

Gaja Starks

unread,

Aug 3, 2024, 4:10:49 PM8/3/24

to fronmembgipet

As every year, a few keen brands have already started discounting their DAWs and VST plugins from the end of October, with some stretching their deals into January. Now whilst you can buy audio software and hardware in a sale at any time of year, we have so far not picked up any that are called Black Friday.

Many brands offer high quality plugins for free all year round. During Black Friday, we see others release plugins for free for a limited time. This year, we found the following free Black Friday plugins:

Some of the best deals on music hardware instruments (like guitars, keyboards, drums), software (like DAW or plugins) and studio hardware (like microphones, speakers, headphones and audio interfaces) offered by retailers, and not the manufacturers directly.

u-he is one of the most respected creator of high quality plugins, including DIVA and Zebra. Yet they rarely offered any discounts in recent years, apart from a rare discount as NKS partner through Native Instruments some years ago.

So we were delighted when to our surprise u-he joined the Black Friday band wagon. And we were even more pleased when we saw their level of discount is more than 50%. We have never seen that level of discount on this quality brand. So this has to be the deal of 2023.

Loopcloud provide a high quality sample library subscription, provided through our 5 star rated Loopcloud sample management software. During Black Friday 2023, you can try Loopcloud for only $1 month for up to 2 months. Normally $7.99 a month, this offer entails 100 sample credits a month, a 1GB sample library, and Loopcloud software with 5GB cloud storage.

Ableton repeats an OK Black Friday deal with 20% off in 2023. However, we discovered you can buy Ableton Live 11 for up to 55% off. Thomann* has been consistently the cheapest official retailer selling Ableton Live, as our extensive research showed over the last years*. We award the Ableton deals at Thomann 5 stars.

Sonnox offer cracking plugins, with the Oxford range Inflator and Limiter home in many studios. With 77% off their most popular plugins, you can get your hands on those crackers from $30, for one month. If you haven't any of them, try them and buy some. 5 stars.

Output have a popular range of powerful effects and Kontakt based instrument plugins, including Substance, Analog Strings and Brass, and Exhale. More recently, Output introduced the Arcade instrument subscription. This plugin offers an ever-growing pool of loop-based samples, phrases, instruments, and loops for a monthly subscription.

Our research showed that Output discounted no more than 35% off from 2019 to 2022 Black Friday. After deepening the discount to 50% across the range, including Arcade, and up to 67% for an instrument bundle, for 2 months, we had to award Output a 5 stars deal rating.

In 2023, FL Studio expanded their Black Friday deals to the whole product range, and increased the discount from 20% to 25%. We wished for a higher discount but compared to historic deal breadth and depth. In addition, you can get $30 (or 37%) off the new FL Cloud annual subscription. Easily a 4 star deal rating for Image Line.

Discounts on individual plugins, such as the excellent Little Plate, Decapitator, EchoBoy, or Little Radiator, have increased to up to 80% off*. This lowers the bar to access those excellent VST plugins, like Soundtoys Little Alterboy, to only $29.

Celemony, the maker of Melodyne, improved their 2022 Black Friday offer from up to 52% to up to 60% in 2023. Together with a 2 weeks sales period, and all Melodyne versions included in the sale, we are happy to award a 4 star deal rating this year.

The popular drum suite Addictivie Drums, the keyboard selection Addictive Keys, the drum sample organiser and groove plugin XO, and the popular vintage character plugin RC-20 Retrocolor, are all half price for two weeks, just like XLN Audio offered in 2022.

Waves are on sale every day but still leave their biggest discounts reserved to Black Friday*. They started their Black Friday sale on 1 November, and will extend deals at an expanding rate until Black Friday itself. Waves Audio shared the following deal schedule with us:

Rhodes Music not only started producing the the hardware keyboard of the famous Rhodes keyboard again. The company also released an official plugin version alongside the extremely expensive hardware. The plugin comes at a premium price but during Black Friday has been reduced by 50%.

LANDR is more than just an online mastering service it originally started as. Nowadays, subsriptions include a wide array of attractive plugins, it offers music distribution services, samples, courses and a lot more. With that in mind, you can save up to 50% for a limited time during Black Friday, with subcriptions starting from $8.27 a month.

Polyverse Music runs its Black Friday sales from 14 November to 4 December 2023, which includes Supermodal, Manipulator, I Wish, and Gatekeeper. You can grab yourself the highest discount on the Polyverse Comet reverb plugin with 80% off. But this top reduction will only be offered during 24h on 14 November. Whilst this is not very customer friendly, discounts are higher than in prior years, which only reached 50%.

If you look at the historic deals from Baby Audio, they kept on steadily increasing from 40% to 50%. As we predicted, Baby Audio did not increase this further. Instead, they introduced an increased discount to their bundles. One month is plenty of time.

Antares started the Early Black Friday with a half price offer across the whole range of Auto-Tune plugins and vocal effects. In addition, the company adds in one year a free subscription with all purchases, with the subscription package (Essentials, Producer or Unlimited), depending on the value of the plugin purchased.

We predicted at least one plugin to reach 70% discount like in prior years, and think that Antares may still increase its discount, given they are calling the offer so far "early". For now, we award Antares a 3 star deal rating.

Korg's classic and modern synth, effect and drum computer emulations have rightly an excellent reputation. During Black Friday, you can grab yourself a piece of virtual history from $24.99, and up to 59% off.

The deal is only 2 weeks long, and for most plugins 50% discount. While this is decent, we have seen Korg offer this plenty of times during the year, so this Black Friday deal is not that special, compared to other brands who go the extra mile during Black Friday.

Ableton brings back their offer from 2022, with two weeks of 20% discount. As a sweetener, they announced the release of Ableton 12 in early 2024. All purchases from now on qualify for a free upgrade to Ableton 12.

Having said that, this deal only earns a 3 star deal rating from musicmanta. Because Thomann, one the biggest European retailers that also sells world-wide, substantially undercuts the Ableton offer. So we recommend you buy Ableton from Thomann instead*.

As we predicted, Cableguys continues to offer a disappointing Black Friday deal. Only the Shaperbox bundle is on offer, with a derisory 10% or $10 off, for one month. At least for 2023 the company added one extra module to the bundle just ahead of Black Friday, with ReverbShaper.

The Protools Black Friday deal AVID continues to disappoint in our view. 20% discount is lower than what AVID offered in 2022 with with 25 to 33% off Protools annual subscriptions. It only applies for the first year as well, and is only offered for 10 days. ?

Black Friday doesn't necessarily mean you have to spend your hard earned cash. Some brands are generous and offer a free plugin. We predict Waves, Plugin Alliance, and Baby Audio to release new free VST plugins, like in the last few years. The good news is that many free plugins from previous Black Friday are still available.

Little Plate is a nifty light plate reverb emulation from the well respected Soundtoys stable. The settings are limited to decay time, mix and low cut. But then, the original EMT 140 plate reverb Little Plate is modelled on, does not have a lot of settings either.

Last Black Friday, Waves Audio released a free plugin called Lil Tube, a tube saturator plugin. Lil Tube is the first in the new MAGMA series of Waves plugins which specialise in analog emulations. The plugin is available as part of the BB Tubes plugin bundle for $39.99.

For this year, we know that Waves Audio will release another new plugin for free. How do we know? Because Waves Audio have told us, and already provided a beta version for us to review. We cannot disclose what plugin this will be, but it will be worth the wait.

From 6 November, the pre release will go live, and you will be able to sign up with Waves to receive the free plugin. And this plugin will only be available to download on Black Friday itself, 24th November 2023.

We predict the Baby Audio with continue to offer a free plugin in 2023, and will include this here as soon as it is released. In the meantime, you can still download the all four free plugins Baby Audio released in prior years.

An simple plugin, based on the Super VHS algorithm, offering random fluctuations in the pitch of the incoming audio signal, for that vintage, tape emulation sound. Using the amount slider, you can choose from subtle variations to extreme fluctuations in pitch.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are when most VST plugin and DAW software developers offer their lowest prices of the year. Some brands, such as Ableton, are on sale for only 5 days. Many others, however, start in early November, or continue to offer deals well into December, into the Holiday or Christmas season.

We analysed the best plugin and DAW deals offered by the most popular brands from Black Friday 2019 to 2021. That information helped us predict what brands are likely to offer Black Friday deals, at what discount, at for how long.