Hey guys,

I just recently got a small SSD upgrade for my laptop as a portable workstation, now every single MB of storage is very precious, so I decide to minimized my installed plugin collection to free up available space for projects.

My problem is that only about a dozen of the Waves plugins are ever to be used by me. I never used their synth at all, or the IR1, or those signature series and others. How can I safely uninstall some of their plugins while keeping the others? Or how can I just install a selected few of them in the beginning? The Waves installation is very confusing to me, since I see that there's only one WaveShells-vst stuff, and there's tons of plugin folders, and probably some other folders hiding somewhere in system directory, I don't know... I'm using the latest copy got on the sister site on Windows 7 64bit.

I've been searching a solution for a while but not found any useful info yet. ;(

This is my first post here, if I posted it in the wrong place, please tell me ;)

 

Well, it's not like all Waves' clients purchased all Waves plugins and you're forced to install everything. Use the Waves Central installer and select the components you want to install. It's quite straight forward.

 

Thanks for the reply, I don't know if I understood you right, but I have used the previous Waves Central release from VR and I also didn't see a way to purge plugins from the Mercury bundle.

Or is it what you mean to download the official installer and select the single plugins to install from there, then apply the patch? Does it work for the R2R version without Waves Central? I really need the Nx plugin included in the latest release, but currently having no budget to become legit client of Waves...

 

The latest Waves Central, including Nx works great with the patch. Select what you want, install, then apply patch. Everything works great, the only thing I haven't tried is X-FDBK, but I suppose it should work, too.

 

What @Qrchack said.

 

Thank you, but which patch are you referring to? The VR one or the R2R one?

 

Uhm. It's "Waves_Complete_9.6.44_patch.exe". It's like a setup, in russian. Maybe someone who kept the original installers knows what exact release it is?

 

It's the VR one with the patch. The latest from VR on the sister site is "Waves.Complete.v9.6.2016.05.09.WiN".
And use the waveshell tool from R2R to have separate plugins and not the horrible waves system. That part is optional if you like to have all the waves plugin on one page in your daw.

 

Last edited: May 16, 2016

The method I used (Waves Central, then patch) gives you all the standard Waves stuff - Mono, Mono-to-Stereo and Stereo versions. I actually kind of like it, especially for Pro Tools since on mono tracks you don't really need stereo processing. Also, since I'm using FL I just saved stereo versions into plugin picker.

 

If it makes you feel any better instantkarma, I've had the same issues. I didn't need/want every single weird plug in the entire collection either. Also, the installer confuses the hell out of me too.

Ya' got to admit though. It's a pretty cool problem to have. Ha! Good luck.

 

Thanks guys for all the replies!

At the end of the day I uninstalled and deleted everything that has a "Waves" in its file name, wiped the RegKeys hinted in R2R's txt file in their release, then I grabbed the latest official Waves Central and prepared an offline installer from it. Then I applied the installation from Waves Central with it blocked through firewall. Finally I applied the russian patch that I found in the february VR release. Everything works like a charm at least by now! Considering that the patch was released a while ago, I was surprised that it still works universally!

I also found out that you can simply select all the plugins in Waves Central for preparing an offline installer, just don't worry about the redundancies. After that you will later be able to select from both bundles and single plugins at the same time!

@Talmi Sorry I didn't fully understand the Waveshells part in your reply! Do you mean that we can also just use the Waves Central to install selected plugins, then uninstall Waves Central, then copy the WaveShells V9 folder from R2R's release to overwrite the official installation, then everything will work great?

The con of VR method is that we will have to keep the Waves Central madness... I haven't tried if the plugins still would work when I uninstall Waves Central though, don't want to start over installing again. But if some one uninstalled Waves Central and the plugins still have no problem, please tell me!

For future readers who has the same headaches like me and don't want to go online directly to Waves' own server to get the installer, and for that since we are not legit users, and saving them GB's of bandwidth per user is the only decent thing we can currently do for them, I uploaded the latest complete offline package to mega.nz. I haven't included the VR patch so that I won't break any rules here nor that I will break Waves' EULA. You'll just need that little patch as @Qrchack said on the sister site. Here is the link: https://mega.nz/#!cE4wSRCZ!tSOjyd25Cjo1ugz-xPF_Mxzw1GBYJW_xvXu8_EvDenw

 

No sorry I didn't want to confuse anything. if you don't want waves central use the R2R release, both works, but not having the central is a plus. If it's already installed and it works with the central, then it's fine you shouldn't go crazy with that.
The R2R waveshell tool is an additional tool which is usually inside their releases and allow you to not have the waves plugins in one shell (the one file that you get after applying VR patch).
But it's usefull if you install the hundreds of waves plugins and you want to order them, and in your case since you didn't install all of them, I doubt it's worth the trouble.
I hope it made things clearer, sorry about the confusion. Don't mess with your installation if it works.

EDIT : with VR release you have to keep the Central installed, don't remove it or it won't work anymore.

 

Thank you for clearing up and your tips! Yes I'll just stick with the Waves Central now, heavily blocked with Firewall on every executable. Also I won't bother to update for at least a while now until they added another must-have, so that I won't mess up with the installation or authorisation! Actually there's no need to update any more since I've ready got all what I need and all what I can imagine!

 

tbh I never bothered with any firewalling, it works no problem, even when logging in with a legit account with registered plugins

 

Well updating waves central is problematic because it can includes in the futur fixes against VR patch. So I leave it blocked (and I edit my host file too) and I patiently wait for team releases just to be safe.

 

Haha! I just prefer an extra layer of security!