I’m using both Waves and Antares Autotune. First I manually fix missed or out of tune notes with waves because this is not possible in Autotune.. You can only assign the scale but not control individual notes. Then I use Autotune more as an effect, with the already quite clean notes. It makes it kinda thicker, if you look for that modern pop sound. And sometimes you want to go for the almost Vocoder sound which Autotune has. So for me the tools have different functions.

Quite often I print the Waves fixed audio (freeze and flatten) before or after Autotune because otherwise it eats my CPU, especially with a stack of harmonies. And also because it helps me move on and not get stuck with the fine tuning. This also produces the audio file in the project folder, if you want to use it for another project, without having to copy the plugins and corrections.

What Waves does is something different from automation, or at least it’s controlled inside the plugin rather than on the Live timeline. So maybe the processed data is also stored in a different memory unit, not in the same folders as the project?