Cheshire Omnimedia

So today I was updating the studio comp to the Waveshell 6.0 and it came time to pay the piper. The studio WUP license update was about $100. Not too bad, you might think. But there’s a few catch-ya’s.

1) You have to re-up everything. Not just the Waves SSL license, but everything has to be 6.0. According to the info when you go to update, anyway.

2) The studio’s fee was in the ball park of $180 as we also had to move our Renn Suite up to 6.0. My personal fee, as I have my own license, is $180. For the SSL alone. Total pain going to Waves for me to go G-Channel: $210.

I had heard that Waves was going to a $200 flat fee maximum for WUP. I was sadly mistaken. It’s $200 per bundle. Too bad that means my Musicians II is separate from the SSL Suite. (Though I shouldn’t complain, as I bought Musicians II for $40 based on apparent fluke pricing direct from Waves.)

Why the difference for the studio and me on the standalone cost? I was an original adopter for the SSL suite. Literally the first week it was out I had it running on my personal rig.

Ahhhh. . . the burden of being the first kid on the block.

I’m not Anti-WUP like many people. The change in Waves pricing strategy recently is very welcome as you used to have to pay quite a bit more for WUP. And I like (relatively) inexpensive upgrade paths.

But I still like to complain when it comes to hard earned $$$.

Forums are buzzing over the Waves recent dropping of their APA product line. A quick look at their website reveals that all evidence of the thing is gone.

What does this mean? Native processing is here in a big way. People have been running native for quite some time, but I think with quad-core processing and multi-gig ram we’ve gotten to the point where we can’t max out our processors.

Literally, the state of the business is such that processing has far outstripped needs for audio production. Of course we’ll have more elaborate algorithms in our plugin’s (TDM Tubetech is quite a beast, for example) but we’ve fallen behind Moore’s law.

At the house of Digi is where things get interesting. For the uninitiated, their HD line uses proprietary pci/pci-e cards and separate rack interfaces for I/O. There’s low-latency processing on the cards using custom chips (TDM). You can use their usual native RTAS plugins like in their LE series.

Digi’s I/O plan will probably stay the same. Dedicated cards will feed I/O boxes, but I suspect the days of TDM might be numbered. It’ll take a few years, and most likely the next Protools HD line (which we’re waaaaay overdue for and will likely ship in the next nine months) will still have TDM processing.

It’s just that it shouldn’t.

Gearslutz bemoan Waves APA