Waves V12 is here, now with resizable GUIs

[Reefius]

The worse thing is that even their new plugins look blurry when scaled over 100%. CLA Epic for example.
To me this means they just don't care as long as people keep buying their plugins.

[martinjuenke]

Just for the records: the GUI is scalable without quality loss on Mac machines.
Sometimes it pays off to pay a bit more...

[soulone82]

I finally bought some Waves plugins late last year and they advertised "retina" graphics, except when I put in support tickets for the plugins having horrendous resolution, they said it was only the number readouts that were "retina".

OH

MY

WORD

!

These clowns are a fvcking joke!

[Reefius]

Just for the records: the GUI is scalable without quality loss on Mac machines.
Sometimes it pays off to pay a bit more...

I don't know how your eyesight is, but to me this looks blurry:

blurry.jpg

This is a screenshot from a Youtube video. You can clearly see that Logic in the background looks sharp, while the CLA Epic GUI is blurry. (Open the screenshot in a new browser tab and make sure it's scaled 100%, because the forum scales down big images). Direct link to screenshot: download/file.php?id=35423

So NO, it does not pay off to pay A LOT more

[martinjuenke]

Just for the records: the GUI is scalable without quality loss on Mac machines.
Sometimes it pays off to pay a bit more...

I don't know how your eyesight is, but to me this looks blurry:

blurry.jpg

This is a screenshot from a Youtube video. You can clearly see that Logic in the background looks sharp, while the CLA Epic GUI is blurry. (Open the screenshot in a new browser tab and make sure it's scaled 100%, because the forum scales down big images). Direct link to screenshot: download/file.php?id=35423

So NO, it does not pay off to pay A LOT more

I have more trust in my own computer screen than some Youtube videos.
I stay with my statement. Sorry, Windows guys...
Nothing personal, just for the records.

[Reefius]

I have more trust in my own computer screen than some Youtube videos.
I stay with my statement. Sorry, Windows guys...
Nothing personal, just for the records.

Can you post a screenshot from your super awesome Mac with a Waves plugin at 200%?

[fmr]

Just for the records: the GUI is scalable without quality loss on Mac machines.
Sometimes it pays off to pay a bit more...

I don't know how your eyesight is, but to me this looks blurry:

blurry.jpg

This is a screenshot from a Youtube video. You can clearly see that Logic in the background looks sharp, while the CLA Epic GUI is blurry. (Open the screenshot in a new browser tab and make sure it's scaled 100%, because the forum scales down big images). Direct link to screenshot: download/file.php?id=35423

So NO, it does not pay off to pay A LOT more

I have more trust in my own computer screen than some Youtube videos.
I stay with my statement. Sorry, Windows guys...
Nothing personal, just for the records.

He posted an image with LOGIC. What does that have to do with Windows?

[Synthient Sound]

I have a late 2019 16" Macbook Pro and the plugins (even new Waves) look horrendously blocky, even at just 100%. Retina Macs came out...what, like 9-10 years ago? The Apple marketing of "retina" meant you wouldn't be able to see pixels. Waves using the very well known Apple marketing as a blanket statement in their advertising and then saying it doesn't apply to every aspect (as it did with Apple) is pretty poor. That is not being kind to your customer.

And to be clear (ha ha), Logic looks fantastically clear, while the Waves plugins look blocky and out of focus even on lower sizes.

This is NOT a Mac vs. PC issue...pretty sure it looks bad all the way around.

[dreamvoid]

Just for the records: the GUI is scalable without quality loss on Mac machines.
Sometimes it pays off to pay a bit more...

I payed "a bit more" and here on my MacPro some V12 plug ins by Waves look horrible scaled up. I emailed them especially for the DTS plug in, which has unreadable text at 150%. The answer from Waves was helpless in this regard.
I work daily with Waves plug ins and have many licences (for three machines) and don't see myself as one of the Waves bashers. But this is not ok by Waves.

[Captain]

I finally bought some Waves plugins late last year and they advertised "retina" graphics, except when I put in support tickets for the plugins having horrendous resolution, they said it was only the number readouts that were "retina".

That's pretty rich from them. Well, of course the numeric readouts are "retina" since they are rendered with system fonts, not with Waves' own bitmaps.

Just for the records: the GUI is scalable without quality loss on Mac machines.
Sometimes it pays off to pay a bit more...

As already mentioned, this is just not true (I'm on a Mac too), and everyone can easily check it by themselves. (Also, would be helpful to mention some specific plugins, just in case, since Waves has like a billion of them.)

As I already explained in my earlier post (which is probably TL;DR for many), all the PNG bitmaps that the plugins use are easily accessible if you just dig around a little. If you go and check, the bitmaps are really small, and unless you do some cool AI-based on-the-fly resizing voodoo (which Waves certainly doesn't), they are just not going to magically look sharp or even near good when scaled bigger.

I have about a dozen Waves plugins, some very old with a recently revamped GUI (like RDeEsser) and some newer ones (like Scheps Omni Channel). All of them have a similar crappy resolution. For example Omni Channel's main background image is 840 pixels wide. My monitor has 5120 horizontal pixels, so at 1:1 (=sharp) resolution, the plugin is about 16% of my monitor's width. To make the plugin window size comfortable, I have to scale it at least three times bigger, which just looks horrible.

For reference, here's a detail from the RDeEsser plugin window scaled at 400% (to be fair, a little smaller would be fine too, but I'm trying to make a point here...). "Thresh" and "Range" are Waves bitmaps, the numbers are system fonts. Shouldn't be hard to see the difference.

Screenshot 2021-01-06 at 0.15.17.png

[cprompt]

I have more trust in my own computer screen than some Youtube videos.
I stay with my statement. Sorry, Windows guys...
Nothing personal, just for the records.

Hey, fair enough, you see what you see and fair play to you. I don't know, maybe your Mac has some scaling thing, or the driver has some anti-aliasing thing, I don't know at all.

All I do know is this: Waves plugins ship with a bunch of bitmaps (typically in a file called PNG_.zip, at least here on Windows). You can view them directly and you can see that they are the 100% bitmaps (ie the default/original size). That's all there is, nothing else. If you resize the plugin, all the plugin does is resize the bitmap (badly).

What Waves should've done from the get-go is what other people have done - you include the bitmaps at different sizes. That way, you can render the bitmaps at various sizes in Photoshop or whatever tool so you get crisp graphics, and then the plugin loads the correct ones, simple as that. Klanghelm, for example, does this, so his plugins include the graphics at 75%, 100%, 125% and 150% (or whatever they have, I can't remember). IK, by the looks of it, is a little more clever - it seems they have multiple sizes of their bitmaps, but allows infinite resizing (100%, 101%, 124% and so on), so it picks the closest bitmap and resizes that, so if you drag the plugin window to, say, 129%, it'll pick the 125% and scale the extra 4%, probably using a very high quality scaling algorithm. I can see it when I drag a window to be bigger - for a tenth or so of a second it's blurry and then it sharpens right up.

Waves could've employed a similar scaling algorithm if they didn't want to, or couldn't, render the bitmaps at various sizes. There are a number of them about and they are very good - someone on this thread I think ran some of the Waves bitmaps through one at 200% and they were pin sharp.

Anyhoo, enough rambling. I don't doubt what you are seeing, and maybe there is some Mac voodoo here, but at a plugin level, Waves have done a very shoddy job with their resizing.

[dreamvoid]

This is how the DTS plug in looks on my Mac Pro with Metal AMD GPU under Mojave at 150%.
There are certain plug ins which look worse than others scaled up.
The number readouts under the channels are not usable.

[Ah_Dziz]

Anyone running this stuff on windows7? They seem to have cut the support pretty heavily so I'm guessing no. Figured I'd axe anyway.

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

I am scared to try V12. My V 11 works on my win 7 machine....for now. Last time I updated Waves Central... It was a mess and took my a while to get it straight. I wont even do freebies at this point. Bummer there are some great second hand deals out there but.... I just wont.
When system, win 7 or Waves Central failure happens...It will be the end of my relationship.....I do like their plugins though

[babiuk]

The price of WUP per plugin is also not an issue. It's very reasonable considering that majority of developers ask 19-29$ per plugin for most upgrades.

False.
Waves is who charges for that.
Acustica Audio upgrades are free forever and they add more new plugins included on the upgrades for free, every time they upgrade them, which is often. And they do a great upgrading work, quality increases more and more.
Fuse Audio Labs does not charge for upgrades.
BlackRooster does not charge for upgrades.
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