Long-time users will remember the horror of the early Waves Central updates. V9.6 existed in a sweet spot where installation still felt relatively "old school." You could install your bundle, point your DAW to the folder, and go . There were fewer background services eating up your CPU.
V9.6 represented the tail end of the USB flash drive era. While Waves was pushing hard for Cloud Licensing, V9.6 allowed for a relatively painless transfer between machines. For engineers who moved between a studio console and a laptop, this was peak reliability. Waves Complete V9.6 -2016.08.08- OS X
If you are lucky enough to have an old Mac booting El Capitan with V9.6 loaded—hold onto it. You aren't behind the times; you are preserving a workflow. Long-time users will remember the horror of the
Furthermore, Waves has ended support for V9 entirely. You cannot re-download this installer from their site anymore unless you have it backed up on a hard drive somewhere. If you have the .dmg file sitting in your "Old Software" folder, cherish it like gold dust. Waves Complete V9.6 for OS X is a time capsule. It represents a moment when the industry was stable enough to be creative but not yet bogged down by subscription models and dongle-less cloud anxiety. If you are lucky enough to have an