Keep Waves from nagging when your iLok is elsewhere

Make Final Cut, Logic, etc. ignore Waves plugins when your iLok is not plugged in

If you are one of the many Waves users to have your plugins installed on both a desktop and a laptop computer, you probably know the pain I am about to describe.

It happened to me the other day at work. I hadn’t used Final Cut since I before I had bought the Waves Gold bundle. I had played with all the plugins on my laptop, but since moved the iLok and thus the authorization to the Mac Pro in my studio.

I carry the Macbook Pro all the time, but I don’t usually need the plugins so I won’t hassle with moving the iLok USB Dongle back and forth all the time.

I launch Final Cut and immediately start getting authorization failures one at a time, for each plugin in the suite, with a long, annoying companion delay to make sure I know I am not doing what I am supposed to do.

Well my friends and fellow music creation nerds, I have a solution for you. There is a single component that makes all of the Waves plugins visible.

If you look at the hard disk all of your applications are installed on, you be able to navigate to “/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components” and see a file that is named something similar to “WaveShell-AU 8.0 component” like you see pictured above.

This single component determines if all of your Waves plugins will be available to your applications or not. I found a tip saying just copy the file out of this folder to another before you run your applications when your iLok is not present. When you have it available the next time, simply copy it back.

That works for sure, but we can make it much easier for ourselves.

Automator

If you have not used the Automator for OS X before, this will be your introduction and let me tell you that it’s a very weak one at that. Automator is incredibly powerful and this use of it is almost like using a semi truck to haul a case of toilet paper.

Automator let’s you either record what you are doing, like a macro, or create chains of components to accomplish specific tasks. I decided to create two Automator Applications. The first, pictured below, simply selects the file I mentioned above, and copies it to a folder I created in my Documents folder.

Since this application removes the plugin component, I called it “Disable Waves” and saved the application in the same document folder I am copying the component to. If you look at the screenshot above, there are only two modules. The first explicitly selects the Waves Component file, the second moves whatever file the first module selected to a specific location. In this case I specified a folder I created called “Waves” in my “/Users/jason/Documents” folder.

By simply saving this Automator setup as an application, I have created an actual application I can run like any other program in OS X.

I also created the exact inverse of this application. I called the second one “Enable Waves” and stored it in the same location as the other.

As you can see, it’s the exact opposite of the other. Any time I run this application, it will move the file back.

Quick Keys

If you are a keyboard shortcut nut like I am, you probably know about command-space. Command-space launches OSX’s Spotlight search feature.

With the combination of Spotlight and Automator, before I run Final Cut I use command-space to bring up the Spotlight search box, type “Disable” and it automatically selects the application, press return and the file is moved quietly.

I can now launch Final Cut and not be nagged by Waves. When you want it back, do the same but type “Enable” instead.

Awesome, right?