There have been a number of people concerned that with the release of Waves Creative Access, it is no longer possible to upgrade your Waves plugins to the latest version. It is possible, and in this article, we show you how.

Update

As of 15:45 BST on Wednesday, March 29th 2023, Waves has announced the reinstatement of perpetual licenses and Waves upgrade plans alongside their Creative Access Subscription Plans.

As part of deciding what to do in response to Waves moving to a subscription-only business module, I realised that some of my Waves perpetual licenses had not been updated to the latest version, currently v14).

I opened Waves Central, and found a number of products with crosshatch lines through them with no apparent way to upgrade them to the latest version.

Before I started, I had a lot more products looking like this. But the good news is that it is fixable, even now that Waves has announced their Creative Access subscription switch, as long as you have a current Waves Upgrade Plan (WUP).

The important piece of information is that there is one step in the process that cannot be done from Waves Central. Instead, to start the ball rolling, you have to log into your account on the Waves website and make a change there.

Click on the Sign in button and enter your username and password, the same one that you use for Waves Central. Once you are logged into your account, select ‘Get Latest Version’.

If you have out-of-date products, then you will be presented with a list of products, with the option alongside each one to ‘Get Latest Version’. Click on all the products you want to update. I would recommend all of them. Then click on the main Get Latest Version button.

Once you have agreed, you will be advised that you have successfully
updated your out-of-date Waves products.

Now you can go back and reopen Waves Central, and any products that were greyed out should now be upgradable from the Install Products tab.

Go ahead and install and activate them onto the machine you want them to be on and you will have the latest versions of all your perpetual licensed Waves products.

We hope this will help some people who want to protect their investment in Waves plugins.