Software Police on Patrol...

[Free The Bee]

Does anyone know of any studio that has gone to court with this yet???

[FLRS]

Good question. I know of a studio that settled out of court. But I don't know of anyone who's taken it all the way to court...

Is there any record of someone having gone to court over this?

[psycho_monkey]

Originally Posted by FLRS

Good question. I know of a studio that settled out of court. But I don't know of anyone who's taken it all the way to court...

Is there any record of someone having gone to court over this?

I've heard of a few settling too.....but again no court cases. Can't say I have too much sympathy with those caught redhanded.

[Alphatrax]

Yea, there were suits filed in LA and NY, and recently they're discontinuing the state suits in NY and re-filing in Federal Court.

[Harris Johns]

Originally Posted by Alphatrax

Yea, there were suits filed in LA and NY, and recently they're discontinuing the state suits in NY and re-filing in Federal Court.

They tried to blackmail us, even we owned a small bundle. We proved that they used methods illegal in Germany. After that they seemed to leave the other studios alone. But we still had to pay our lawyer 7000 EUR to get them off our backs. Lot of cash for a small business. Right now, we try to get that money back from them. Now 4 years later the german justiz ordered a house search against us. How ridicilous is this? No more Waves Plugins in the future in my studio for sure. There is enough other software on the market.

[systematika]

This makes me want to take my waves diamond bundle box and burn it, uninstall all of my plugins, and make a public video just for the lulz... It's not like I even use Waves crap much these days, the box just sits there on the shelf. :P

There are far better plugs and DSP platforms than waves. They're a bit behind now as far DSP technique is concerned since all of their plugs have the same basic math and design they have used since the 90s and the only thing they've changed for the most part is bit/sample rate. The only thing that sucks is they work nice in 'Tools.

If Avid released their SDK like Apple and Steinberg did to the public, I don't even think WAVES would be around today. They should of did that before they went native, never killed turbosynth, improved on it, brought it to the real time TDM platform, and all would be well. Lack of developer contributions because of strict interface framework and SDK licenses hampered the RTAS and TDM platforms and it's a better business move IMO. Logic, Cubendo, Live, and the rest all is winning simply because there is more content available signal processing wise while Avid has maybe 25 entities making plugins for it's system in total.

If you were a developer, which would you choose first in the hopes your stuff will get sold/used on a professional release and talked about? PT, or the rest? Imagine the JACK plugin working in PT and routing audio/timecode from multiple DAWs on multiple OSes on multiple computers all over a high speed ethernet network or the entire collection of free stuff you can get on kvr all right in PT!

[Mikey MTC]

Originally Posted by systematika

There are far better plugs and DSP platforms than waves.

Which plugs would they be? I find Waves plugs to be easily among the best out there already so would love to know what's better.

[systematika]

Originally Posted by Mikey MTC

Which plugs would they be? I find Waves plugs to be easily among the best out there already so would love to know what's better.

If you're looking for emulation, UAD. Sonnox, some of the voxengo stuff, chandler, is all very good quality stuff without hopping on the waves train. If you want surgical transparency, DAW stock plugins do just fine. There's only so many ways you can do DSP math, especially when you want to be accurate.

Don't get me wrong, there are a few cool waves gems out there that have had quite a bit of care put into them. Especially some of the models. It's not to say you could create the same thing though with some technique know how on how convolution, phase, FFTs, distortion, etc works and what those methods sound like under different parameters.

The thing is, many algorithms for plugs originally get designed at universities/institutes such as Stanford, MIT, and IRCAM, the white papers get published, and they get put into software. It's sold very "magic box" like when in fact it isn't. Gear is far different because the components all effect the signal in different ways on different devices resulting in vastly different sound whereas in the computer it's simply a mathematical calculation. (Not news for you I hope.) You can change some trivial stuff, like changing variations in parameters as is used in some of the analog emulations to reflect subtle change in voltage, but the fundamental process ALWAYS remains the same no matter what you do, at least until the folks at IRCAM, Stanford, and MIT come up with a new algorithm and write a new white paper on it. (Which many of those have not even made it into plugins yet due to being far too CPU intensive for RT work in large numbers.)

A trivial example of a waves ripoff is something like the vocal rider, which is essentially nothing but an envelope follower keyed from the instrumental mix then modulating the output gain on the vocal chain with a width of how many dB you want to ride above the track. If you got Reaktor, Max, or anything like that on your system you could make the exact same thing front to back in virtually 10 minutes and have the patch forever to call back up. Personally, I'd just rather take the 10 minutes over the 300 bucks but that's just my way of thinking. I guess some don't want to go through that whole thing, but for me it's been very rewarding and I'm also very punk and DIY at heart. :P

[JPeters86]

Of course it's very personal if you want to use Waves plugins or not but I find them to be among the best plugins out there. I think the DSP platform is something from the past and it surprises me to see how many people still use that technology now that we have eight cores of internal power available. I especially like the Waves compressors, the LA2A is simply in a whole different league than the UA version soundwise (which I guess is largely due to DSP constrains UA had to deal with when they developed the LA2A plugin in the first place). When the studio I mix for went from zero Waves plugins to buying the Mercury bundle some while ago, my ITB mixes improved quite a lot. I still use Sonnox and Voxengo every now and then but this seems to be getting less.

There's one other plugin company which comes to mind and really kicks ass as well, it's Airwindows, simply brilliant.

[systematika]

Originally Posted by JPeters86

Of course it's very personal if you want to use Waves plugins or not but I find them to be among the best plugins out there. I think the DSP platform is something from the past and it surprises me to see how many people still use that technology now that we have eight cores of internal power available. I especially like the Waves compressors, the LA2A is simply in a whole different league than the UA version soundwise (which I guess is largely due to DSP constrains UA had to deal with when they developed the LA2A plugin in the first place). When the studio I mix for went from zero Waves plugins to buying the Mercury bundle some while ago, my ITB mixes improved quite a lot. I still use Sonnox and Voxengo every now and then but this seems to be getting less.

There's one other plugin company which comes to mind and really kicks ass as well, it's Airwindows, simply brilliant.

It's still DSP whether it comes from a DSP chip or a CPU and the algorithms are the same just compiled for different instruction sets. Just wanted to make it clear I was talking about the process, rather than the hardware involved. Otherwise, I agree. I've never used a real LA2A so I couldn't compare it to the original, but I've tried both the UAD and waves versions in friends setups and they have their own character but that's all boiled down to how well the model was done, the condition of the source hardware, etc. Models are tricky in that way, and vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.

The mercury bundle does have some interesting stuff, but the diamond bundle makes me want to yawn for it's price point vs the type of processing it does. I think the limiters on many DAWs including built in *digirack* plugins are just as good as say, the waves Lx stuff and you're not as inclined to squash it to heck since you have more control but if you want it does that too.

I'll have to check out this airwindows stuff out.

[henryrobinett]

I think the UAD plugins are fantastic. I haven't used Waves for. Very ing time and have nit missed it. The Metric Halo dsp plugs are among my favorites.

But here I think a lot of people miss the primary point of the UAD DSP card. I really don't think the card has restricted anything. I think it has freed, still, the dsp resources from the computer so UA has to worry less about the users computer. Not everyone is going to have an 8 core machine. But it's mainly a dongle to protect UA from piracy. Therefore they don't need to go the software police route.

Hey, even on a brand new Mac do you know that PT9 still crashes looking for resources? An 8 Core still has to multi task and will, from time to time, trip over it's feet.

[systematika]

Originally Posted by henryrobinett

I think the UAD plugins are fantastic. I haven't used Waves for. Very ing time and have nit missed it. The Metric Halo dsp plugs are among my favorites.

But here I think a lot of people miss the primary point of the UAD DSP card. I really don't think the card has restricted anything. I think it has freed, still, the dsp resources from the computer so UA has to worry less about the users computer. Not everyone is going to have an 8 core machine. But it's mainly a dongle to protect UA from piracy. Therefore they don't need to go the software police route.

Hey, even on a brand new Mac do you know that PT9 still crashes looking for resources? An 8 Core still has to multi task and will, from time to time, trip over it's feet.

Also AVX is totally going to rip the crap out of DSPs and may even make them totally obsolete in any application other than dedicated systems. Advanced Vector Extensions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's nice to have that load off for more important stuff though, and you get that functionality for the price of the smallest waves bundle WITH the bundle included as well!

[Dean Roddey]

Originally Posted by systematika

Also AVX is totally going to rip the crap out of DSPs and may even make them totally obsolete in any application other than dedicated systems. Advanced Vector Extensions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's nice to have that load off for more important stuff though, and you get that functionality for the price of the smallest waves bundle WITH the bundle included as well!

I'm not so sure that any SIMD type of scheme is going really whack DSPs. Look at the CUDA system, which is SIMD on a stupid scale. But it's still not really that great for audio processing. Most or much of audio processing requires feeding the previous samples or the results of previous samples forward into subsequent calculations, so they aren't nearly as conducive to SIMD type processing as other types of applications like graphics. They will generally have much more divergence which falls to the application programmer to deal with manually.

I still say that if you want to create the killer audio processing system, then create a board with 256 very simple but very fast DSPs that just handle core DSP functionality, with a queing system in both directions. You queue up your problem packets with input and output buffers, the manager on the board farms the queued packets out as fast as possible to available DSPs and queues back up the output to you. It would have a number of built in higher level algorithms in firmware that the packet can request be used. It would also support chaining, where the resulting data can be turned around on chip and feed back in for another operation with the previous output buffer becoming the input buffer. Some of the higher level algorithms might just be pre-fab chains. And of course you could provide some flags and comparison values to be used in the process, via the info you queue up.

I think that ultimately that would be vastly faster than any vector based system for audio processing. I could be wrong but I think it would be the case due to the nature of audio.

[Mikey MTC]

Originally Posted by systematika

I think the limiters on many DAWs including built in *digirack* plugins are just as good as say, the waves Lx stuff and you're not as inclined to squash it to heck since you have more control but if you want it does that too.

No Digirack plugin can get near the L316. I don't know of any plug that's as functional as the C6. Waves models of the classics are at least on par with the best of the competition if not better. The CLA comps are fantastic. The JJP Fairchild is great.

It's always been fashionable around here to slam Waves - generally for their commerce - but seriously, to claim "there are far better plugs ... than Waves."

[chrisj]

Originally Posted by JPeters86

Of course it's very personal if you want to use Waves plugins or not but I find them to be among the best plugins out there. I think the DSP platform is something from the past and it surprises me to see how many people still use that technology now that we have eight cores of internal power available. I especially like the Waves compressors, the LA2A is simply in a whole different league than the UA version soundwise (which I guess is largely due to DSP constrains UA had to deal with when they developed the LA2A plugin in the first place). When the studio I mix for went from zero Waves plugins to buying the Mercury bundle some while ago, my ITB mixes improved quite a lot. I still use Sonnox and Voxengo every now and then but this seems to be getting less.

There's one other plugin company which comes to mind and really kicks ass as well, it's Airwindows, simply brilliant.

That's because my only defense against software piracy is to earn respect and loyalty. I've got forty-two free plugins out and downloadable right now, just to support people who might otherwise turn to piracy. One of them was recently shot out (without my knowledge- I'd have chosen something I get paid for ) against the latest Steven Slate big-budget console-modeling product and did very well in blind comparison. I'm putting out another incarnation of speaker-modeling stuff today, which is going out as a free update to people who bought the very first, feeble versions of that sort of thing from me in 2007... some of those people have got crossgraded to the latest new thing three or four times because they were among the few that got stuff back when it tried bravely but sucked

None of my stuff has ANY copy protection on it at all. I will not take ANY effort to find or punish people who're copying the stuff that they ought to be paying me for. They are not paying me to do that... it seems like it would be a really silly thing to pay somebody to hunt you down and give you the third degree about whether you're ripping them off. It seems like, to work tirelessly on making your stuff better and taking care of your existing users with presents and free gifts like updates, presents a better claim to deserving to get paid for that work...

Software police is not my job. Maybe it's a polarizing thing, in that you have to either pick one side or the other: become ever more draconian software police, or devote yourself entirely to earning community respect and trusting people to (mostly) do right by you. I don't see anybody pirating (not like you have to crack!) Airwindows plugins, and I'm not going to see any next week either. Why? Because I won't look.

[S.Filpansick]

Originally Posted by chrisj

That's because my only defense against software piracy is to earn respect and loyalty. I've got forty-two free plugins out and downloadable right now, just to support people who might otherwise turn to piracy. One of them was recently shot out (without my knowledge- I'd have chosen something I get paid for ) against the latest Steven Slate big-budget console-modeling product and did very well in blind comparison. I'm putting out another incarnation of speaker-modeling stuff today, which is going out as a free update to people who bought the very first, feeble versions of that sort of thing from me in 2007... some of those people have got crossgraded to the latest new thing three or four times because they were among the few that got stuff back when it tried bravely but sucked

None of my stuff has ANY copy protection on it at all. I will not take ANY effort to find or punish people who're copying the stuff that they ought to be paying me for. They are not paying me to do that... it seems like it would be a really silly thing to pay somebody to hunt you down and give you the third degree about whether you're ripping them off. It seems like, to work tirelessly on making your stuff better and taking care of your existing users with presents and free gifts like updates, presents a better claim to deserving to get paid for that work...

Software police is not my job. Maybe it's a polarizing thing, in that you have to either pick one side or the other: become ever more draconian software police, or devote yourself entirely to earning community respect and trusting people to (mostly) do right by you. I don't see anybody pirating (not like you have to crack!) Airwindows plugins, and I'm not going to see any next week either. Why? Because I won't look.

That's a great philosophy! As soon as I read this, I clicked on your link to check out your stuff! Unfortunately, I'm a VST guy, so I can't use your stuff; but I wish you the best of luck!

[narcoman]

Originally Posted by systematika

Also AVX is totally going to rip the crap out of DSPs and may even make them totally obsolete in any application other than dedicated systems. Advanced Vector Extensions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's nice to have that load off for more important stuff though, and you get that functionality for the price of the smallest waves bundle WITH the bundle included as well!

Technically speaking - the AVX is just a next generation of DSP since DSP is not a specific system but just a general term!

[systematika]

Originally Posted by Mikey MTC

No Digirack plugin can get near the L316. I don't know of any plug that's as functional as the C6. Waves models of the classics are at least on par with the best of the competition if not better. The CLA comps are fantastic. The JJP Fairchild is great.

It's always been fashionable around here to slam Waves - generally for their commerce - but seriously, to claim "there are far better plugs ... than Waves."

Well yeah, because they're models. They change the spectrum while other plugs do not. Only the boutique waves stuff does this, and you're only going to get those if you spend 400+ per plug or over 10 grand for the package. At that point, might as well shell out the extra cash for the hardware and you know you're getting the real deal then.

Otherwise, if the numbers are off, then they're a bad coder because they got the math wrong.

What's so hard about it?



You can split it out into however many channels you want and throw on some bandpass filters and apply the same thing to each channel and you get an instant multi-band. If you want an envelope, then it's all a matter of triggering the envelope if it's greater than the threshold or not if it isn't.

It's only a mild step above digital summing, seriously.

[systematika]

Originally Posted by narcoman

Technically speaking - the AVX is just a next generation of DSP since DSP is not a specific system but just a general term!

Oh yeah i know that, I'm just saying that with the new intel overhaul those calculations will be that much quicker and will push DSP *chips* that much farther away from being useful in real-world applications.

[T_R_S]

Originally Posted by Mikey MTC

No Digirack plugin can get near the L316. I don't know of any plug that's as functional as the C6.

Dynamic Spectrum Mapper is the C6 on Steroids.
I stopped using L316 - Slate's FGX kills all limiters IMO.