How to get your missing Waves VST3 plugins back

Guest post by Brandon S. Hire of The Noise Floor. Brandon recently went hell with getting his Waves VST3 plugins all into REAPER. He got through it and I asked him to share the experience to help others in the same situation. Any clues to solving problems like this are gold.

Waves recently announced a new subscription plan which allows users to subscribe to their Silver and Mercury bundles. I decided to give this a try and download the Mercury Bundle. As a long time REAPER user and long time Waves user, I didn’t anticipate any problems.

To put it bluntly, I had problems. But the problems were neither the fault of Waves or of Cockos. The folks at Waves’ tech support team were awesome at helping me figure out the problem, and I want to document the issue here in case any of you are experiencing something similar.

Note that I’m not advising you to take these steps yourselves. If you’re having issues, there may be other factors that are causing your issues. Your best bet is to contact support at Waves or Cockos and see if you can get assistance with the issue. With that being said, here’s what happened:

To make a long story short, I noticed that about half of the Mercury bundle plugins weren’t showing up in VST3 format in REAPER. The same plugs would show up in VST and AU formats, which indicated that the plugins were in fact installed on the system. So I decided to clear the cache in the plugins preferences and rescan the plugins folder.

As it scanned the VST3 plugins from Waves, it stalled at Greg Wells MixCentric. Then REAPER flat out crashed. When I re-launched REAPER, there was still no sign of the missing VST3 plugins, and MixCentric was one of them.

So I contacted Waves support. After trying a couple of things, we were able to remedy the problem with a clean install. This required that I go through a few steps to uninstall everything Waves related on my system, and then allow only the newest versions of everything to be installed by Waves Central. The whole process took a couple of hours, but by the end of it all I was back up and running. When I loaded REAPER again, I cleared the cache and re-scanned again. This time there was no crash, and at the end of the scan I had all of the missing plugins.

Waves Tech Support Representative

Uninstall the latest v9.6 of your Waves plug-ins for the system:

1. Quit all audio related software.
2. Launch Waves Central and login. Choose: Install->Uninstall Products (at the top).
3. Choose All Waves plugins V9 click ‘Uninstall‘.
4. Once the uninstall is finished – quit Waves Central.

 Clean any Waves versions you may have installed:

1. Quit all the audio related software on your Mac.
2. Please use the Waves uninstaller to remove all the Waves software from your computer, located in Applications > Waves > Utilities > Waves uninstaller and check “Remove All” to remove also the old versions. (If not available skip to the next step)
3. Delete “Waves” folder located in your Applications folder
4. Go to the following locations and  delete any WaveShell file/s of any version number found:
   1. HD > Library > Audio > Plug-ins > Components
   2. HD > Library > Audio > Plug-ins > VST
   3. HD > Library > Audio > Plug-ins > VST3
   4. HD > Library > Application Support > Avid > Audio > Plug-Ins*
   5. HD > Library > Application Support > Digidesign > Plug-ins*
      * This location is only present if Protools is installed
5. Delete the “Waves Preferences” folder located at HD > Users > Current user > Library > Preferences (this folder is accessed by going to the Go menu and holding down the Alt\option key. This will reveal the Library option)
6. Delete the folder “Waves” located at HD > Current User > Library > Caches (this folder is accessed by opening  the Go menu and holding down the [Alt/Option] key. This will reveal the Library option)
7. Go to Mac HD > Library > Application Support and delete the “Waves” and “Waves Audio” folders.

To reinstall Waves Central and your Waves V9 products –

• Download the latest version of Waves Central from this direct link and install it on your computer.
• Follow the instructions on the Installing your Waves products and demos article on our support page in order to reinstall your activated products.

Afterwards, please launch REAPER and re scan again for the plug-ins.

As a long-time waves user, I’ve been slowly accumulating a collection of plugs prior to this subscription being available. That means I’ve been installing them intermittently over the last two years on this machine, and there have been updates since then. Those updates most likely were conflicting with previous files I’d installed, causing some to go missing and others to trigger a system crash. That’s why performing a clean install of everything worked. There was no longer old stuff mucking up the works and conflicting with the new stuff.

As mentioned above, if you’re having an issue with the new subscription working properly in REAPER, you should be certain that you’re using the VST3 version of the plugin in question. If it didn’t show up, a clean install may be the answer. I would do this with Waves tech support, as there may be further issues. Now that I’m up and running with the supported VST3 plugins, everything is running exactly as it should. I couldn’t be happier.

Thanks to Brandon for writing this up and sharing the info.

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