While there are lots of companies offering Black Friday deals – Waves is doing things a little different and giving away a free plugin, OneKnob Louder.
Ideal for individual tracks and full mixes alike, Waves OneKnob Louder uses a powerful combination of low-level compression plus automatic makeup gain and peak limiting to increase RMS volume by up to 24 dB.
Valid email required. See the Waves site for details.
It’s cool of them to offer the free plugin but holy crap that’s the most insanely convoluted and annoying registration/download/licensing procedure I’ve ever gone through in my entire life.
seriously, do we really need to encourage people to make their music louder? y’all gotta chill out and start making some mixes that don’t rely on limiters to make the sounds fit together. dynamic are a good thing.
You’re right on the money there. Dynamics, better mixes, I’m all for those.
Still, I have to say that while the OneKnob Louder may seem like a pointless plugin that just engages people in the loudness war, it’s really up to the user to apply it on their tracks. And as the user we may make the choice of exercising moderation with these sorts of dynamics squashers.
I tried Louder, and while it makes nearly everything sound horrible at higher levels, a more subtle approach actually works pretty well on some material. I found settings of around 0-2.5 rather transparent on the master track of my latest project and I think I’ll use it again if it suits the song I’m working on.
Still, I’m sure this one will get used in the worst possible manner by some producers in the near future. Hold on to your ears, people!
@wi_ngo: IMO Waves WLC is amongst the most transparent and easiest-to-use authorizers available. Even better, you can recover licenses on the fly, when you have e.g. forgotten to take your USB stick with you (something you cannot do with iLok protected plugins). In my opinion, it is one of the coolest cloud-based solutions, besides what Plugin Alliance is offering. I am sure the Waves support team can help you out in case you run into trouble, my experience is that they are very much into solving things as quickly as possible.
I’m glad you’ve had good experiences with their customer support! That’s because I haven’t been able to get my yesterday’s purchase to work and already contacted Waves about it. I guess I’ll have to wait over the weekend, but that’s not a biggie, if I get my new darling to work.
Some great deals on high-end plugins. I guess even a company like Waves can surprise you every once in a while.