Waldorf Nave Now Available As A Plugin (VST, AU & AAX)

waldorf-nave

Waldorf has announced that Nave Advanced Wavetable Synthesizer, originally available for iOS, is now available as a plugin to use in your DAW.

Here’s what they have to say about it:

Nave, our award winning next generation wavetable synthesizer, is now available as VST/AU/AAX plugin for easy integration into your favourite DAW. It comes pre-packed with superb sounds, ranging from spatial pads to vivid wavetable scans and cutting leads to solid basses, but, above and beyond that, also an abundance of incredibly imaginative sound worlds – many of them professionally produced by some of the top sound designers around.

As a synthesizer thoroughbred at heart, Nave really represents a phenomenal playground for sound creation creativity. Its oscillators offer expanded wavetable functionality with elaborate editing facilities and an extremely effective speech synthesizer.

Waldorf has not updated their site with info specific to the plugin version of Nave yet, but here’s an audio demo of the iOS version:

Nave is available now for 149.00 €. See the Waldorf site for details.

If you’ve used Nave, leave a comment and let us know what you think of it!

27 thoughts on “Waldorf Nave Now Available As A Plugin (VST, AU & AAX)

    1. it is hopefully not as buggy as serum? I’ve had many crashes and CPU spikes while using 2-3 serum instances at once. which is unacceptable if your workstation has an i7 8 core cpu and 32GB of RAM.

      also, nave can talk.

  1. It’s a great Synthesizer from Waldorf.

    The wavetable synthesis is different to Serum. You can travel through the wavetable what is very nice.
    What is brillant at Nave, it cost you very very low CPU Power. If you run 20 Nave in a DAW, it doesn’t take a lot of CPU.

    But if you want to know the sound difference, download the evaluation demo from the website. You can play with it without noise 100 Days or 100 hours. Download it 😉

    Later this year, I will release some videos about it on my blog and video channel Synth Anatomy

    1. its especially weird since its waldorf delivering something on time. anybody who was a user of their hardware back in the 90s knows the joke about “S.O.O.N…..” from their mail lists making fun of their own consistently missed deadlines

  2. so the question i have to ask about this is… how about that pricing?

    to my knowledge, this is the first time a softsynth’s development has gone in reverse. that is, developed for the iPad first, before the plugin version. while there is obviously a good amount of development involved in porting something from the Apple ecosystem to PC, I would have to argue that a majority of the code was already developed for the ipad version, (that is, the characteristics of its sound, the UI aesthetic and behavior, etc) it would mostly just be a port job at that point to the other platforms. And, since the synth was originally designed with an ipad and touch interface in mind, we’re also arguably getting a *less* feature capable synth than it was designed as. So, we’re getting a less featured softsynth, albeit one whereby we can have instances limited only by our CPU power, and its costing 7.5 times as much. While i get that obviously the economies of scale affect the price points of these things when comparing the Mac/PC world to the iPad App Store ecosystem, my ultimate question is that since this is probably not the last iOS->Plugin port we will see hit the market, what’s the appropriate pricing for these kinds of products? Is the pricing appropriate, or should it be lower? how much lower? comparable to its iOS counterpoint, or some point in between? Does selling them at a lower price incite a “race to the bottom” in softsynths, as happens frequently in mobile ecosystems? so many questions.

    1. ahh, i see that Nave is in fact not the first, Sunrizer has also been made into a VST/AU… and it is available for $60 introduction pricing… $80 normally. which is 8x the cost of the iPad version. interesting.

    2. A company will never sell a product at value, they will sell it at what the market can stand. It is priced at what the people using that setup would expect to pay. The iPad market is still app based, so it is priced accordingly, and as we have seen that technology advance, the features within apps have increased, and the cost of those apps has also increased. So what do we expect to happen here, in 5 years will PC/Mac softsynths sell for the price that an app softsynth does today, or will softsynth apps sell for the price of PC/Mac softsynths? I think the latter will be true. You also have an issue of professionalism and professional setups, which isn’t the iPad market. Sure it is a powerful tool that can give professional results, but how many current chart songs were producer exclusively on an iPad, maybe none? Maybe we could find an exception or two? Today, professional music is made on studio hardware and within PC/Mac DAWS, and an iPad may, or more likely may not, play a small part within that – but it is irrelevant to today’s professional productions. I am not trying to diminish what an iPad is in terms of music production, today it is a powerful production tool. But the world doesn’t function on facts and reality, it functions on perceptions, and the perception of an iPad as a music production tool is that it is a twee little toy that may be useful to some.

      1. How is an app’s ‘value’ different than what people will pay for it?

        Everybody likes to dog developers over pricing, but how many are actually getting rich?

      2. Agree with this 100%. Right now IOS is marketing to different end users, but that is likely to change. I think the real long-term development will move towards IOS as the tablets advance. Can you imagine what a larger IPad could bring alone for virtual instruments?

    3. It’s a complete new development. The code of the iPad Nave was not really involved. The only thing which is use it the audio engine by Waldorf.
      Tempo Rubato (Rolf Wöhrmann) doesn’t port the Ipad Synth to Windows/Mac but it’s a complete new development. He has developed 1 year on this wavetable beast and 6 months of Beta Testing for eliminating the bugs and problems.
      Why the price is so huge? Easy because they oriented on the market price actually. Serum cost you 189 USD, Massive (199 USD) … and other the same. The IOS Domain is another market where are different rules and prices. Here you can load 20 Nave in on Project without any problems because is extreme low on CPU Power. If you want to do this with an Ipad, you need 20 Ipads or you must record each track separately. And what I can say already and it is already confirmed by the developer. The Plugin will be more big in features and new things than the Ipad Version won’t get. Cheers Tom (Synth Anatomy)

      1. If they are not similar under the hood, why make a softsynth called Nave when you already have an app version that people understand as the “Nave” sound? Not trying to be difficult, but that doesn’t make much sense to me other than the obvious quest for more $$. I guess they share the same Nave design concept? I personally really like the sound and design of the app version and am not a fan of making these synths overly complicated, but I guess others use differently.

        1. exactly my point. obviously, you cannot directly port code from iOS to mac or windows, there’s work involved there. but the “heavy lifting” is already done- the synth engine is designed, the sound characteristic is established, at that point the “heavy lifting” is already done – all you have to do is make it behave the same way on a different OS. is that a lot of work? potentially. is it enough work to justify the price difference? i dont know.

          personally, i dont think its worth a 7-8 factor price increase, but I also dont think they should go uncompensated for their work, or for the potential features that might be added. I think 3-5x is a fairer factor of increase. but ive always been a proponent of the lower-price-leads-to-more-sales model. Will I pay $150 for this? probably not. Would I pay $100? i probably would.

    4. the main issue here is probably not the price of the desktop plugin version, but the one of the iPad app.
      Apple has done great in dumping prices on apps, forcing everybody to lower their prices way below what would be reasonable. The point is: something like $20 is perceived as being “expensive” in the iOS ecosystem, while it’s probably still not enough to make for a reasonable income if you’re a small developer (not talking about Waldorf here, but more about the majority of iOS developers). Now, if this perverted logic get’s applies to desktop software as well, it might be the end of music software as we know it, since nobody will be able to invest in proper R&D anymore.
      The fact that there is still a lot of innovation going on on iOS is because all the developers have day jobs to pay their rent and buy food.

    5. it isn’t first time when ios->plugin coversion was done.. beep street with famous Sunrizer did it before :-))

      regarding price – i understand it.. there is lot more piracy in desktop segment than on iOS and it has nothing to do with price.. people on desktop are simply lazy to buy stuff, they ratner download it from warez.. it is fact that on desktop they will sell at least 10x less than on iOS so the price have to by 10x more… it’s sad, but true…

    1. If you’re serious I’d highly suggest not getting an iPad 2. there’s far to much latency for midi control and audio transfer via usb/wifi. I took an ipad 3 back 1 day of using it to control ableton. Ended up getting an ipad4 a year later and couldn’t be any happier. Load up Nave on your ipad, run Midimux, Audio Mux, and Audio Bus and you’re able to treat the Nave as an external hardware instrument in your Daw along with assigning midi controllers/automation to the synth.

      Actually I’m not sure what kinda of midi support or mapping is available for Nave as I don’t have it, but I’m sure it’s pretty full featured.

    2. yeah you really dont want to get an iPad 2 at this point. its 4 years old and will most certainly not be able to keep up long-term. it will get one more OS update, at best.

  3. i rather would like to see this vsti as a hardware-synth …. let’s say a Microwave III

    at Messe i talked to some guy from Waldorf but there are no plans at the moment…. given the todays powerfull dsp-chips it would be possible

  4. I’ve had it for about a week. It has the harsh, metallic, digital tone of Blofeld which is a good thing to me (but probably not for everyone). I really like to use it for lead sounds in industrial and drum n bass tracks. It tends to crash when scrolling through patches while a sequence is playing and it is receiving MIDI (in Ableton 9 Suite on OSX, is this happening to anyone else?). It is nowhere near as capable or user friendly as Serum, but it sounds completely different and is a neat little synth on it’s own merits. If you want the sound of Blofeld for cheap, here it is. I think it sounds great, it sounds so different from the rest of my synths and that is really useful to me.

    1. “If you want something similar to the Blofeld, with a very different feature set, here it is”
      Fixed it for ya….

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