where do you store your Waves plugin licenses

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pcstudios

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I have a desktop where I do all my work, and I have a PT license, a few Steinberg licenses, and tons of plugins from Waves. I like the thought of being mobile with my plugins from Waves, and I always store them on a separate thumb drive. Even though I like the idea of mobile licenses on a thumb drive, I don't know: is it the safest place to store them? I'm not afraid of anyone taking them, I'm talking "safe" as in ever losing them electronically somehow. I avoid putting them on the computer hard drive so that if something ever does go bad with that, I still have them on my thumb drive.

What do you guys do mostly?
 
When you go to the Waves Central, you can assign your licenses to machine or I suppose to mobile. But I think Waves makes it easy for you to transfer your licenses so losing them should not be a big issue. Also, I think they allow you to assign license up to two machines.

But Waves central makes it rather easy to not have to be overly concerned with licensing issues.
 
i found that i had to regularly transfer my license from machine to cloud to machine in order to make them work again. Then after a year they asked for 250 dollars (whether in total or per app) in order to receive updates and I declined. Frankly I've been quite satisfied with the in house Logic Pro X plugins that I haven't even looked at my Waves stuff in a long time.

I've been finding I've been doing more with less
 
bluesfordan said:
i found that i had to regularly transfer my license from machine to cloud to machine in order to make them work again. Then after a year they asked for 250 dollars (whether in total or per app) in order to receive updates and I declined. Frankly I've been quite satisfied with the in house Logic Pro X plugins that I haven't even looked at my Waves stuff in a long time.

I've been finding I've been doing more with less
Click to expand...

But that was probably for a bundle and that was for updates and any new plugin that was added to the bundle. I just did the same thing and got a few plugins but updated the older ones. But I do agree, 90% of the bundle I don't use and the less is more is working pretty good.
 
Gtoboy said:
Thumb drive.
Click to expand...

I am thinking, even if you lose the thumbdrive you can still recover. Probably worse case is call them up and tell them. Each stored license probably has some kind of serial number that they can assign another and help someone recover in case it is lost.
 
DM60 said:
I am thinking, even if you lose the thumbdrive you can still recover. Probably worse case is call them up and tell them. Each stored license probably has some kind of serial number that they can assign another and help someone recover in case it is lost.
Click to expand...

IIRC Waves allows X amount of free license recoveries per x amount of time, then they charge, but your licenses are never "gone" since they (Waves) has them in their storage.
 
pcstudios said:
I avoid putting them on the computer hard drive so that if something ever does go bad with that, I still have them on my thumb drive.

What do you guys do mostly?
Click to expand...

A lot of people don't realise that Waves unique identifier is made up using info from various components in the computer.
Changing out the motherboard, for example, can leave you unable to access your licenses.
Lesson learned - If you're making any computer upgrades and aren't sure, move your licenses to the cloud first.


I had this happen a while back and looked into it. At the time I think I found that you could have one free 'fix it for me' per year but if it happened twice there was a lot of money involved.

Thankfully I was able to restore my computer's original configuration, move the licenses to cloud, then make my hardware changes again.

Pretty sure the rules are the same whether it's broken flash drive or broken computer. It doesn't matter if the computer gets formatted, or the flash drive gets formatted.
As long as Waves recognise it as the authorised device you can always 'put' your licenses back on it.

In the end I made the choice to stick with the on-computer solution.
I might lose a flash drive but I'll never lose my computer.

If you need to be mobile then flash drive (or laptop) is the way forward. Just make sure you don't lose it more than once per year. :D
 
"In the end I made the choice to stick with the on-computer solution.
I might lose a flash drive but I'll never lose my computer."

You can get PCIe USB 3.0 cards that have a fifth USB port actually on the card so you could have a super safe storage place for a stick but in the event of a computer crash the data is but a few turns of a Pozi away?

Dave.
 
I have never had an issue with Waves Central and their cloud or USB device storage.

But I did just try to sign in and forgot my password... LOL!

USB works still. :)
 
Mine are on a Flash drive, that I also use for my Plugin Alliance licenses.
I don't bother with their cloud service (or anyone else's)...DAW is always offline. :)

I also keep a running text list of all my plugs and license keys...but with Waves, when you log in, all that info is there for you.
 
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