This morning, I updated to the new Waves V15 and vMix began crashing immediately when opening my project file, without even popping up with an error or ability to report. The entire program just vanishes.

Rolling back to Waves V14 fixes the issue. They might just need a bit more time to fix some glitches.

If you already updated Waves, here's how I fixed it:

In Waves Central, click Settings → go to Maintenance → Uninstall → V15 Plugins
Then follow these instructions: https://www.waves.com/support/how-to-roll-back-to-waves-v14

These are the specific Waves plugins I'm using (not all at the same time) so any of these could be causing the error:

• L3-LL Multi
  
• WLM Plus
  
• Vocal Rider Live Stereo
  
• F6
  
• C6
  
• Silk Vocal Live
  
• NS1

If you use ANY Waves audio plugins, and this week your vMix is...

Suddenly crashing on open...
Vanishing when opening a (previously working) project...
Showing a vMix error about trying to access corrupted or protected memory and then closing...

It's likely that someone updated your Waves plugins to the latest version but because your vMix project is still looking for the old plugin versions, everything falls apart.

To avoid this, manually remove ALL Waves plugins from your vMix project BEFORE updating Waves. You can save your settings as presets before removing the plugins, so it's faster to manually add them back after.

If you didn't do this before updating, follow these steps:
• From the Waves Central program, uninstall ALL Waves plugins (of every version)
• Reboot PC
• Open your vMix project. All of the Waves plugins should be gone.
• Close vMix. From Waves Central, install the latest versions of your plugins.
• Manually add the new Waves plugins back to each input.

Hope this saves someone from a headache.

I think Waves or vMix might have fixed this. Today I was able to update Waves plugins to their latest versions, and my vMix project opened with no issues while retaining my Waves settings. This time, I didn't need to remove all of the plugins before the Waves update.

But the bug might still be there. It appears the issue is related to Waves plugin updates when they use a new WaveShell version, and the vMix project tries to load an older VST driver that no longer exists (or a Waves plugin that now uses a different driver after the updates). So if that's the case, my project didn't break today because my plugins are still using the WaveShell1-VST3 16.0 driver. When Waves updates this driver to V17 in the future, the bug might return.

To be safe, I still recommend removing all Waves plugins from your entire vMix project before updating Waves -- every input, every output. Keep your original and save a separate project as a "no plugins" copy. Then you can see if you're lucky and everything works, but you'll have a backup just in case.