VST2 plugins not appearing after setting up licenses on a new device

Support
1

Hi everyone!

I have recently swapped to a mac and wanted to port all my V14 licenses to this new device. I downloaded Waves Central and activated the licenses on this new device. The VST3 plugins are all showing in Ableton which is great. However, my existing projects have used VST2 plugins. So I downloaded the offline installer and installed the V14 versions. I started with a handful of plugins to see if they worked, the shell file appears in the VST folder but I cannot see the VST2 versions in Ableton. This is strange because plugins I have purchased from other companies where VST2 and VST3 are installed together are all showing. Has anyone faced a similar problem before? Any guidance would be much appreciated!

2

Hey @ldstmusic,

Welcome to the Waves Forum.

Only VST3 is supported using Waves in Ableton.

Although VST2 might have worked for you previously it was qualified to run and creates various issues.

I suggest replacing those Waves VST2 instances with supported VST3 ones and making sure you use only the supported VST3 format in future sessions to avoid issues as you reported.

3

VST2 was deprecated by Steinberg a number of years ago now. Many developers have dropped support for it in recent years. You’d have to of all the way back to Waves Version 11/Live 10.1 which was released in 2020.