The short version: Waves is an audio repair and editing application for macOS and Windows, and this is where you write to us about it — william@mirroredgeai.com, which reaches the person who wrote it. Everything in Waves is free to use, with no trial clock and no watermark; a subscription covers keeping what you make — exporting, lifting a selection out as its own file, saving a Music Studio mix. Most of the mail we get is somebody who paid and is still looking at a padlock, so that answer is first.
That is the only route in. There is no phone line, no live chat and no ticket system, and MirrorEdge AI is one person — so we are not going to print a response time we cannot keep. What is true instead is that every email is read by the person who wrote the code and can look your licence up directly, that a paying customer locked out of what they paid for is answered before anything else, and that nothing here is a robot that will ask you to try turning it off and on again.
None of this is a form and nothing is required. It is simply what we would otherwise have to write back and ask for:
mirroredgeai.com;Waves has no About box and does not print its own version in any of its windows, so do not hunt through the menus for it. On macOS, select Waves in Applications in the Finder and press ⌘I; on Windows it is listed under Settings ▸ Apps. If you cannot find it, send the rest — it is rarely the thing standing between you and an answer.
There are two roads, and which one you take depends on where the money went, not on which computer you are sitting at. The app keeps both open on purpose, so that somebody who bought Waves on the web years ago is not stranded when they install the Mac build.
Bought inside the Mac App Store. Open Help ▸ Unlock Waves… and press Restore purchases. Apple holds that purchase and Waves asks Apple for it. Do not type your Apple ID into the Activate box on that build — that box is for a purchase made somewhere else, which is what the line above it (Bought Waves somewhere else?) means. An Apple ID typed there will correctly report that no licence was found, because there is not one: your receipt lives with Apple, not with us.
Bought from mirroredgeai.com. Open Help ▸ Unlock
Waves…, or simply press the paid button you wanted in the first place — the
same window opens either way, and if you unlock right there the export you asked
for carries straight on without you re-clicking anything. Type the email address
on your payment receipt into the Activate box and press Activate. Waves
sends that address and your computer's name to mirroredgeai.com once,
gets back a signed licence, writes it to ~/.waves/license.json, and
never needs the internet again. From a terminal, waves activate
you@example.com does exactly the same thing.
If you installed from the Microsoft Store, the Store gave you the application, not the subscription — your licence is the mirroredgeai.com one, so use the Activate box as above.
Waves shows you the licence service's own words. These are the three you are most likely to see.
“No license was found for that email.” Almost always a different address from the one you paid with — an alias, a work mailbox, a second account. Use the address exactly as printed on your receipt. If you paid a moment ago, give it a minute and press Activate again.
“That subscription isn't active right now.” The subscription has lapsed or was cancelled. If you renewed in the last few minutes, try again shortly; otherwise restart it at mirroredgeai.com/waves. Your licence wakes back up on the same email address, with nothing to reinstall.
“This license has been activated on quite a few computers already.” Licences carry a machine limit so one purchase is not shared endlessly. If you have changed computers, or reinstalled a few times, write to us and we will clear the old machines off your licence.
Everything about using Waves is free, permanently. Nothing is time-limited and nothing is watermarked. Opening files, drawing boxes, every repair and editing tool, playing back, previewing a repair before you commit to it, undo and redo, and saving a session and reopening it later — all free, for as long as you like, whether you ever pay or not.
The subscription covers keeping what you make: every place where Waves would write a new file out of your work. There are eight of them — exporting audio; exporting a video with the cleaned sound; lifting a selection out as its own file; merging boxes into a new file; saving separated speaker tracks; bringing a file into the Music Studio; keeping a Music Studio mixdown; and exporting a Music Studio arrangement. That is the whole rule, and it is easier to remember than the list: free to use, paid to keep.
On the Mac App Store the plans are $34.99 a month and
$349.99 a year, bought inside the app. Those are the United
States figures; Apple bills in your own currency and includes your own tax, and
the Unlock window shows you Apple's exact price on the buttons before you commit
to anything — that price, not ours, is the one you will be charged. Bought
directly from mirroredgeai.com — which is how Windows customers buy,
and how everyone bought before there was a Mac App Store listing — a subscription
is $29 a month or $290 a year in US dollars.
A Founding Lifetime licence is no longer sold, by Apple or by us; the ones
already issued keep working and never need renewing.
A subscription bought in the Mac App Store belongs to Apple end to end. Cancel
it or ask for a refund through your Apple account — Settings ▸ your name ▸
Subscriptions on the device, or reportaproblem.apple.com — not
through us, because we cannot see that transaction and have no way to touch it.
A subscription bought from mirroredgeai.com is ours: email us from, or quoting,
the receipt address, say what you want done, and it gets done.
If you stop paying, Waves does not stop working. You lose the ability to write new files out of it, and nothing else. Sessions you saved still open, the files you already exported are yours, and picking the subscription up again later unlocks the same installation on the same email address.
Some of what people write in for is already in the app, under Help: How Waves works for the shape of the thing, Feature explanations… for what an individual control does, and Works with Claude… if you would rather describe an edit than perform it. Unlock Waves… (plans and activation) is the window described further up this page.
Waves draws the file you open as a spectrogram — time running across, frequency running up — and lets you draw a box around a region of both at once. So you can put a box over the hum sitting underneath a voice, between 4 and 9 seconds and 50 and 120 Hz, and heal only what is inside it. The voice above the box is untouched, because it was never inside the box.
Waves opens files. It does not capture sound. There is no microphone path in the application at all — no input stream, no capture button, and no preference that reveals one. If you need to capture audio, capture it in whatever application does that for you, save the file, and open that file in Waves.
Waves processes your audio and video on your own machine, has no account and no sign-in, and never uploads what you work on. It touches the network in exactly two places — activating a licence, and File ▸ Open from link — and both are set out, with the precise contents of each request, on the privacy policy. That page also covers what is held against your email address and how to have it deleted.