How well is 'Waves Licence centre' working?

[JFreak]

Hi again.

I have not yet been able to get my Waves licenses not working. No matter which network interface I use for license download, having cables connected or disconnected, with or without wifi... Always working configuration.

I'm sure I could break it by changing MAC addresses but I don't want to go into that hack.

[James Drake]

When you lose an authorisation, or a usb stick dies or something, you can 'recover it'.

I have tried it, it works fine. No need for WUP.

But the deal is you can only do one recovery per year.

If you find the USB stick, or fix your computer, or whatever, you can log back into the WLC and it will see the license which was marked as 'lost'. It is then removed from the device and the 'one recover per year' thing is reset.

Here's a way to test it:

- Install your Waves bundle on two computers.
- On one computer, authorise the bundle to an empty USB stick.
- Test the waves plugins on that machine.
- Quit your app and move to the second computer.
- Move your USB stick to the second computer and run your software. The waves plugins should work without having to log into WLC or anything.
- Go back to the first computer, log into WLC. You should see your USB stick as 'disconnected device' or something. You can recover the licenses from this back to the cloud.
- On the first computer you can now authorise the same bundle to the local machine.
- Test that your waves plugins work on BOTH machines at the same time.
- If you were to have a THIRD machine, and logged into WLC and recovered the license registered to computer number one, then it should NOT let you. I have never tried this. In theory, if you waited a year, you COULD recover the license from computer number one.
- Now on the second computer, if you log into WLC, it will notice your 'lost' USB stick and remove the license from it. Now your license is in the one 'correct' place, the local machine number one. And you will be able to recover your license again.

As an aside, you can also FORMAT the USB stick containing your license. Logging into WLC with that USB stick attached will recover the license. Meaning the WLC must register a unique number burnt into the USB stick or something.

Also, reformatting and installing a computer system. Then doing a fresh install of waves will restore any licenses authorised to that machine. So they store some identifying data, like mac address or HDD serial etc. But I have not tested exactly how far you can push it (replacing hard drive for example).

Overall I think it works very well. Is the right compromise between security for waves and ease of use for us. They know that they are essentially allowing everyone to run two copies of each license, but that's the compromise they made. In the long run they make more money because they don't have to pay PACE.

[YYR123]

I wonder how much money ? Just cause I'm nosey mostly

After recently losing my ilokv2 for the first time - I can attest to the benefits of the cloud route/ it didn't set me back at all with waves a nice option for sure