I installed Waves plugins in Audacity… they were installed without error messages and they appear as activated in the plugin management screen, however, when I use one, it does nothing, the plugin interface appears on the screen, but it is not acting on the song!?
Some (regular-old) VST plug-ins work in Audacity and some don’t. 32-bit and 64-bit plug-ins are not interchangeable so 64-bit plug-ins will NEVER work in 32-bit Audacity and and 32-bit plug-ins will NEVER work in 64-bit Audacity.
It’s up to the plug-in developer to make it work with a particular host (if they want it to).
If you check the above WAVES link you’ll see that Audacity is not officially supported. Sometimes a plug-in will work in a host that’s not officially supported but if it doesn’t “you can’t complain.”
Most commercial plug-ins don’t officially support Audacity. I assume this is because Audacity is free and most Audacity users probably won’t pay for plug-ns. With free plug-ins it’s usually hit-or-miss because the developer doesn’t have the time or budget to test & debug with every audio editor and DAW.
I understood what you said…
…but now the plugins are working in Audacity, I can’t tell if it was because of a reboot or because the Waves Plugins need to be reloaded to really work in Audacity right after installation?!.. what happens is now we’re all working, including the iZotope that I also added right after the Waves ones. Mystery!!!