Slow Offline Startup Because of Waves Plugins

When I startup my new rig, it takes forever as it hangs for about a minute on the Waves plugins. I have to do this 4x for 4 instances. I assume it is trying to validate license or something. Is there a way to make this faster? I submitted a ticket with Waves and am expecting to hear that they dont support Gig Performer… I also just started a lengthy rescan of all my plugins in Gig Performer… I will start looking for alternatives if there is no way around!

(I currently use their Loudness Meter, CLA Vocals, and Vocal Rider in the rig but also have several compressors and other meters)

(I am using the AU versions, not VST, on my Mac Mini and MacBook)

… and after a couple more measurements:

30s pause at the first Waves plugin when starting online

30s pause at the first Waves plugin when starting while offline

On Windows, its the WavesLocalServer.exe that causes the slowdown, which needs to run before any Waves plugins can be loaded. I schedule that file to automatically run on machine startup so that when I insert Waves plugins in GP there’s no delay.

I don’t know what the equivalent process would be in Mac OS.

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A few more data points experimenting with starting Waves Central before GP

  1. While online, I started Waves Central and then GP started with no delay….

  2. Turned off wifi, rebooted and started with wifi turned off. Started Waves Central. GP started with no delay.

  3. Wifi still off, rebooted and started without Waves Central. GP started with no delay…

  4. Shutdown machine. Started up again without Waves Central. GP started again with no delay….

    OK now my head hurts!

I don’t know anything about that server - but it may be that it wants to connect to something at Waves for license validation – depending on how well (or not) Waves implemented that mechanism, you could end up with long delays while that program tries to connect to some licensing server.

Once it has done so, then it may not need to do it again for some period of time (again, depends how it was implemented) and in that case, it would start up immediately.

Oh boy. I wonder if I should look for alternatives…

For our 2 guitar rigs, I use a Waves compressor before the tuner to get better signal and the Waves Loudness meter off to the side for leveling loudness across my patches. I could easily use someone else’s compressor (UA?) and only insert the loudness meter when creating new patches. In the past I had used YouLean’s loudness meter but it uses significantly more CPU than Waves.

For my vocal rigs, I have Waves VocalRider, CLA Vocals and their Harmonizer. Would need alternatives to get the compression, a EQ, reverb, delay and harmonizer. That’s a bit more research and work to set back up.

I am very careful about what plugins I use for my live performance machines – I’ll say no more!

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I actually would be interested in hearing, @dhj!!! I think I need to find some alternatives!

I use Equilibrium for EQ. I use THU from Overloud for most of my effects. I don’t sing so I don’t use a harmonizer

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