Waves Plugin Update

[Tijuana Strauhal]

HiIve just recently bought a new PC and had to reinstall all my VST plugins, none of them have had any problems except for my plugins from waves central. I cant find the in my DAW (Ableton 11 Suite).

If you made sure to deactivate the licenses from the old computer and have them properly activated and installed, I suggest performing the following steps to perform a hard rescan and ensure you have the correct folders pointed out for Ableton to rescan Waves.

Hello,

This is May 2024, I downgraded my sup to essential, and when I opened my daw a couple weeks later, no waves plugin present.

I installed the new essential, no.

I tried to use my owned plugins, no

nothing is there, nothing happenes.

Waves totally disappeared, I should keep it as ultimate all the time I guess.

So maybe a better option is to copy the Waveshell vst and the Waves plugin files to the USB drive, then dump the plugins to the standard Waves plugin files folder, and the WaveShell to the host vst folder. Then run Waves Central to get the licence.

WavesLocalServer is a background process that is used to facilitate cross plugin communications, preset scanning, advanced plugin features and licensing abilities.

This service does not collect or transmit any personal user information or usage data.

The reason this service stays open in the background is to optimize loading and scanning times. We are working to minimize the resources it requires.

There is no problem if the service is terminated, but it will be relaunched by the plugin once it is needed.

I saw that deleting the exe (or even the whole folder WavesLocalServer ) will fully get ride of it, but like funk said, it will also remove the new preset loading menu (which is kind of useless anyway)

hello i have same problem we want solution

waveswatchdog.exe

waveslocalserver.exe

( 20% RAM USAGE )

No recording no plugins i watch youtube only for now

why those always running in the background .?

Seriously thinking of uninstalling any and all waves products because of this. It really grinds my gears that for some reason Waves needs to have these processes running in the background, when no other plugin I have requires such a thing. Shady af.

Hi, Just saw this. I am having trouble with waves plugins in Reaper with windows 11. I saw your fix but have a question. I saw on the waves website that you cannot install your plugins more than once a year, In fact I tried directly uninstalling the plugins through maintenance on the app and the option is not there. Am I correct in assuming if I follow your fix I can then re-install the plugins?

Thanks,

Rich

This should fix the problem, personally I skipped step 5, which still works but it takes longer because Reaper is still having to struggle with the previously installed problem plugins, but it seems to figure itself out once it sees the reverted versions. Hope this helps!

I run Studio One 5.x with 100+ plugins on Windows 10. Mainly use Waves, SoundToys, Plugin Alliance, and Fab Filter EQ. Everything was working great and then one day it all stops. Loading projects that normally took seconds to load started taking 20+ minutes always getting stuck at loading the plugins. Each plugin took minutes. Waves plugins seemed to be the worst but Plugin Alliance was also slow.

Simplified explanation: Waves and other plugin manufactures use your hardware configuration to build a unique key for your computer to keep track of the license. Every time you use the plugin they take a hardware inventory to makes sure the license is on the right computer. My guess is this SD card reader issue was causing that hardware inventory process to fail. This is not an issue with the DAW so this issue/solution is not unique to Studio One and should work on other DAWs.

I should also note that if you are having the slow loading plugins issue, because of the hardware inventory process, it could be another piece of USB or other hardware and if it is not the SD reader you should systematically remove/add other hardware to see if that is the issue.

I am having the same problems with Waves plugins and multiple DAWs. I am not using an SD card. I have the latest version of Studio One and Reason and Pro Tools. FOr example RVERB took over 21 seconds to load. Waves please help us with this.

Thats a good tip that tends to help with some issues that are related to upgraded plugins trying to read older data. Additionally, a cache delete & rebuild is sometimes handy in the case of AudioUnit issues.

After delete the Waves server and restart my PC, i have the same problem. The plugins from waves load for so much time. Some times it will be good and sometimes it load and load and load.

I work with Sequoia 15 and Cubase 11 - the same problem.

Same with CLA EchoSphere V12 and Abbey Road Studio 3 in Ardour 6.5 on Mac OS X High Sierra.

The problem resides either in the way the PNGs in PNG_.zip in the .bundle are stored, or how they are read by the plugin (wrong graphics lib?).

V12 plugins are programmed for, tested, qualified and supported on recent the more recent versions of DAW listed here:

-specs/supported-hosts

Older DAW versions are missing certain necessary components and updates to support the current graphics and other aspects of the plugins.

Do to this we cannot fix issues with older DAW versions or add compatibility for DAW versions that are no longer in development.

I come across this kind of problem periodically online. Not necessarily a Studio One problem, but it almost always seems to be PC related, though. My guess is that it has to do with all the possible options you have out there for graphics cards, where a Mac is much more limited.

At the moment because of the upgrade from V11 to V12, I cannot use Abbey Road Saturation, Reverb Plates, Chambers, CLA compressors or Studiorack. Even under V11 some of these plugins do not display in Logic Pro 10.4.8.

In Central there is a View option towards the top right. Clicking on that will allow you to specifically set an older version of the plugin. namely V10 & V11. That should allow you to install an earlier version of your plugins.

Hi am glad to give a solution that worked for me, at first i Uninstalled my waves v11, then the problem was still there, until i updated the version of my DAW - studio one (current v. 6). Guess you can revert to an older version one too but the new one worked for me so, do u.

Though its a good place to start making sure you have the most up to date version Waves that is compatible with the most up to date version of the DAW you use that is compatible with the most up to date version of your OS.

Today I removed both the VST2 Waves shell and the VST3 Waves shell to see if Cubase would still show the Waves plugs. As expected, Cubase did not show any Waves plugs once booted. All Waves plugs are grayed out in the plug-in manager. So I can conclude they are not stored in a cache in Cubase.

Removing the VST2 Waves shell and keeping VST3 Waveshell in place did not make a difference other than the file classification in Wavelab plug-ins. I also tried removing VST3 and keeping VST2 with no luck.

Yes PG, there are 2 Waves entries in the cache list. One for VST2 and the path is C:\Program Files\VSTPlugins\WaveShell1-VST 9.92_x64.dll. Here, in alphabetical order, API through GTR Stomp plug-ins show up in the cache list, and this is exactly what shows up in Wavelab. No Waves plug-ins after the letter G show up. Again, this is EXACTLY a reflection of what is listed in the Wavelab Preferences>plug-ins>waves, and of course I can load these in the master section.

The other for VST3 is at: C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\WaveShell1-VST3 9.92_x64.vst3. Here, only API plug-ins show up, nothing else. I would think the Waves VST3 should be an exact reflection of the VST2, but the plugin cache only shows API plugs, and nothing else. (see attachment)

Honestly, the Waves guy was exasperated after the last solid 2 hour team viewer session, however I felt his conclusion was a bit rushed. And since his help, I have read a bit more about what might be causing this.

I see scanning Waveshells 1,3 and 6. Waveshell 6 is now the only one with plugins. But out of 26 there are only 3 detected. I see them while scanning.

Wavelab 9.5 is still unusable for me with this problem. Still working with WL8.

With all the vitriol Waves is currently receiving, regardless of right or wrong, IMO they have excellent support. I must have spent several hours over several days with Waves doing Team Viewer trying to detect my issue.

I fixed my problem! For my situation all I had to do was disconnect 2 mapped drives that were no longer valid. I had to do it through CMD as administrator, even File Explorer was crashing when I tried to get the right click dialog up on win10. Now my projects are loading with no problem. I am really thankful I found this thread.

So, in windows, I suspect it triggers access to those drives, but they are offline causing a timeout waiting for the network, which pauses it. And come to think of it now I had issues in some cases when just creating a new folder, it was a long pause so this would be why.

Very helpful, amazingly fast, for a little while I thought would need new machine to run them, even though everything else was fine. Could be where we have license on external USB and does a scan for disks on system which cause the freeze. A plug can load pretty much instant now but it was excessive minute.

Thanks to you and REV for this!!! I noticed my Pro Tools sessions started taking FOREVER to load after I opened waves central and it updated itself. Came here, found your solution (HD\Library\ApplicationSupport\Waves\WavesLocalServer -Delete Folder). I just put the folder in the trash, without emptying to be safe in case something terrible happened lol, and bam, sessions loading fast again.

I had this problem with v13 plugins, and got it to go away by doing a Waves cleanup in Waves Central. After installing v14, the problem came back. Deleting the WavesLocalServer folder fixed the problem.

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