Izotope Announcement that Multiple products will be discontinued

[PavlovsCat]

1 hour ago, Last Call said:

I disagree Pavlov, but ok 🤗

Disagreeing is fine and way underappreciated in the era of culture wars where some demand others to line up in complete agreement with dogmatic views just to remain civil. Life would be boring if we all had the exact same opinions. 

But, I'm not Pavlov,  I'm Pavlov's Cat.  The idea being that while Pavlov could train a dog by ringing a bell, he could never do the same with a cat. Fuggedaboutit! Never gonna happen. So I guess, I could be referred to as "cat". Peter's also good!

Edited October 26, 2022 by PavlovsCat

[Marina]

1 hour ago, Brian Walton said:

Neoverb is basically their flagship reverb under the actual Izotope brand.  I'd expect it to stick around, they basically bought the Exponential Audio brand to make this their product from what I can tell.  Vocal Synth 2 isnt' that old either.

All the ones they are getting rid of while still functional are pretty old.  The exponential verbs are the only real loss here, IMO as I can't think of anything else at the pricepoint that both sounds as good, feature rich and is as CPU efficient.

I don’t know, I just have that odd feeling. With the current release cycle of Francisco Partners - a new major version each 11 months Neoverb looks like long forgotten to me - 2 years since initial release. For the Insight 2 it’s 3 and 1/3 years.

Probably the new investor still sees  opportunities for a few more $39/copy Neoverb sales. Certainly if no major version appears within the next 12 months it will be the next app made obsolete by iZotope. The reverbs market looks no less saturated than the vintage eq/compressor market atm.

They’re obviously reducing their investments in plugins development as seen by removing the Neutron Advanced tier. Who knows, maybe RX Advanced comes next - therefore its reduced (but still unreasonably high) price.

[daveiv]

Quote

This synth is just a waste of space, bandwidth, and carbon emission. I'd better spend that $10 on a dozen of kazoos.

 

🤪

[Brian Walton]

2 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

Not related to our prior discussion...

While I own a few of the Exponential plugins, they are ancient and it seemed obvious that Izotope only bought EA for the technology. An Izotope employee had once told me that Neoverb was based on R2, of course, adding Izotope's AI technology.  

 

R4 was released in 2017, hardly ancient in relevant reverb circles.  

The Lexicon 480L came out on the mid 80s.  Over 35 years ago and is still sought after to use instead of modern reverb plugins despite also being digital.  These EA plugins don't need any updates to stay relevant, they sound great and were already re-sizable to theoretically work on 4K monitor enviornments.  

I agree Izotope bought EA for the technology and beleive the algos are in NeoVerb - plus all the added overhead of NeoVerb.  

[simon]

I know people expect software to be frequently updated - but if it works and does what you paid for why should a developer update it for free ?

In the olden days you bought an external effects unit - or a guitar amp - or mixing console ....and you didn't expect the manufacturer to keep popping round and adding updated ICs or generally fixing things for you....UNLESS you paid extra for a service contract.

I think it might be unreasonable us to keep expecting developers to keep improving things, year upon year, for free (after all the major bugs are ironed out)

Izotope always do discounted upgrade prices for new products so is it reasonable to say that they should keep supporting or updating R4 or any of the other 'legacy' plugins ?

(sorry I know that's not a popular opinion)

[simon]

29 minutes ago, Brian Walton said:

R4 was released in 2017, hardly ancient in relevant reverb circles. 

but fairly old in audio software terms

[PavlovsCat]

2 minutes ago, Brian Walton said:

R4 was released in 2017, hardly ancient in relevant reverb circles.  

The Lexicon 480L came out on the mid 80s.  Over 35 years ago and is still sought after to use instead of modern reverb plugins despite also being digital.  These EA plugins don't need any updates to stay relevant, they sound great and were already re-sizable to theoretically work on 4K monitor enviornments.  

I agree Izotope bought EA for the technology and beleive the algos are in NeoVerb - plus all the added overhead of NeoVerb.  

I own R4 and expect that Izotope will eventually take the technology and use it for an Izotope branded AI plugin (that's just a guess; no doubt, I could be completely wrong and they might have decided they're not going to use anything from R4).  But my perspective may be a lot different than a lot of folks here as I really appreciate Izotope's AI tools, so I've always looked at the idea of Izotope's AI technology with the reverbs pretty favorably. Whereas, I can understand that if you're great with mixing and EQing, you might be perfectly happy with the current iteration of the product. 

And yeah, I didn't realize until your post, Brian, that R4 only came out in 2017. To be completely candid, I think I bought R4 in maybe 2018 and assumed it had been around for a while based on the GUI, which looked/looks pretty dated, IMO,  as do the other EA GUIs. 

[MusicMan]

6 hours ago, Patricio Campos said:

Looks like they are killing Iris, BreakTweaker and Trash for MacOS users, unless they update these for Ventura compatibility.

I wonder how many extra years of support everyone would get if they didn't have to allocate (waste!) resources on supporting Mac versions every single time Apple releases an update and breaks compatibility 🤔

[chris.r]

Major disappointment. They should have decided to keep the Exponential Audio R4 and NIMBUS at least at the compatibility level for future OS' updates. Never buying again from Izotope!

[MusicMan]

41 minutes ago, chris.r said:

Major disappointment. They should have decided to keep the Exponential Audio R4 and NIMBUS at least at the compatibility level for future OS' updates. Never buying again from Izotope!

I'd agree with that, seeing how R2 and Phoenix were earlier releases, so R4 and Nimbus should still have a while left in their supported lifetime in comparison.

Not really surprised from iZotope though.. given they kept pushing them all up to until recently, they should've made this announcement years ago and included it in their official product blurbs, so consumers could make informed decisions regardless of what site they bought them from.

We probably all knew this was coming, but I wonder how many that didn't, bought them recently and now only have support for a year..

[Last Call]

3 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

Disagreeing is fine and way underappreciated in the era of culture wars where some demand others to line up in complete agreement with dogmatic views just to remain civil. Life would be boring if we all had the exact same opinions. 

But, I'm not Pavlov,  I'm Pavlov's Cat.  The idea being that while Pavlov could train a dog by ringing a bell, he could never do the same with a cat. Fuggedaboutit! Never gonna happen. So I guess, I could be referred to as "cat". Peter's also good!

My best friend in the Music Academy was called Peter, wow. Go figure 🤗

[mibby]

1 hour ago, chris.r said:

Major disappointment. They should have decided to keep the Exponential Audio R4 and NIMBUS at least at the compatibility level for future OS' updates. Never buying again from Izotope!

I seem to recall Izotope saying fairly recently that they were "done" with the Exponential Audio reverbs and had built that technology into Neoverb. Then they reversed for a while and pushed the Exponential stuff again.  Now this.  I don't fault them for trying to move ahead and put their developer time and support into their new stuff.

The Exponential stuff will work a looong time form now - IF you're on Windows.  Honestly, if I were a plugin dev I'd be pissed at Apple and all of their non-backward compatible new OS updates.  Imagine all of the man-hours put into trying to get plugins to run (again) on the new Mac OSes!  That's like software design 101 - don't do that to your customers!

[Brian Walton]

3 hours ago, simon said:

I know people expect software to be frequently updated - but if it works and does what you paid for why should a developer update it for free ?

In the olden days you bought an external effects unit - or a guitar amp - or mixing console ....and you didn't expect the manufacturer to keep popping round and adding updated ICs or generally fixing things for you....UNLESS you paid extra for a service contract.

I think it might be unreasonable us to keep expecting developers to keep improving things, year upon year, for free (after all the major bugs are ironed out)

Izotope always do discounted upgrade prices for new products so is it reasonable to say that they should keep supporting or updating R4 or any of the other 'legacy' plugins ?

(sorry I know that's not a popular opinion)

I don't expect the software to get new features unless that is the model and pricing expectation ala Melda.

However there is a big difference in hardware vs strictly software based effects.  Those hardware units continue to work for decades.  Software running on someone else's changing hardware can break due to no fault of the consumer.   It isn't that much work to keep them compatible with windows updates over the past 20 years for basic plugins.  MAC perhaps not so much but they also tend to be consumers that buy into expected obsolescence.  

I get it for plugins that really show their age and need a total overhaul to remain relevant but outside of the UI complaints, which are well laid out just not exactly aesthetically pleasing the EA verbs are arguably among the best in the market currently from sound quality to CPU efficiency.

I'm not concerned in the near future as a Windows user, but I expected support should changes happen down the road for many years.  These were flagship types of products marketed to in the know types as until the last couple years were unobtanium Uber expensive tools.  $300 for a single seat?  You could buy excellent hardware for that kind of money.

I've got NeoVerb but unless you are on an ultra powerful machine you won't be putting across all your tracks and frankly the AI function is really aimed at adding verb on a per track basis to get a clean sound by keeping the EQ and reverb in check.  So it isn't really a replacement.  If iZotope is saying they are keeping the two EA verbs that are compatible with R4 and Nimbus they honestly should just hand out those seats for current customers.

I've got 3 seats for R4 and Nimbus.  A couple for Phoenix and Excalibur.   Other iZotope products I stopped using as they were too CPU hungry.

[MusicMan]

1 hour ago, mibby said:

The Exponential stuff will work a looong time form now - IF you're on Windows.  Honestly, if I were a plugin dev I'd be pissed at Apple and all of their non-backward compatible new OS updates.  Imagine all of the man-hours put into trying to get plugins to run (again) on the new Mac OSes!  That's like software design 101 - don't do that to your customers!

That's pretty much it. It just about always coincides with Apple announcing a new OS and then developers announce dropping support for the plugins and apps, for everyone.

I'd rather they just dropped support for Apple instead. Then maybe more people would complain to Apple or move to PC and Apple might start considering the impacts to their customers.

They seem to mainly care about their native stuff they make and completely disregard 3rd party software.

I know that was always their ethos, make Macs non compatible, so people have to buy parts etc from Apple only so they're locked in, but surely it's time for them to evolve.

[Fleer]

I looooooove Macs. 
 

 

 

 

Kill me

[dubdisciple]

21 minutes ago, Fleer said:

I looooooove Macs. 
 

 

 

 

Kill me

I like Macs, but hate Apple's continual cycle of milking customers with intentional crippling of products

[dubdisciple]

I'm not mad at Izotope for abandoning these products. Many are old and /or not very popular. I'm assuming they cannibalized exponential audio code and what is useful will be in products going forward. I am more annoyed at the fact that they have included some of these products in recent bundles knowing they were on chopping block.

[MusicMan]

30 minutes ago, dubdisciple said:

I like Macs, but hate Apple's continual cycle of milking customers with intentional crippling of products

This... Even deliberately breaking compatibility with 3rd party cables and devices so you have to buy their overpriced ones. Steve Jobs was very open about wanting to lock people in and chose not to be compatible.

[Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann]

6 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

We've recently seen a good deal of plugin developers engage in deep discounting

My theory is that we are just seeing a recession unfolding. There is a serious inflation problem and prices are going up, but people are also becoming more selective in their purchases and figuring out what items are non-essential. Some companies are finding that they don't really have pricing power because people are choosing to buy nothing and, instead of being able to raise prices and follow the pace of inflation, they have to offer discounts as the revenue streams dry up. When it's clear that the revenue from discounted products cannot sustain the business, they go into more drastic cost-cutting, reducing personnel and eliminating less profitable product lines.

When we see "unusually good discounts" let's enjoy them as they come, but we shouldn't be surprised if the recession wipes out a few products and possibly even whole companies when they don't have a sufficiently good combination of both good products that people still need and a robust business model that allows them to weather the storm.

[mettelus]

13 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

Very few plugins need major updates over the lifespan.

This really should be the case, but there is no revenue stream from a "one and done" scenario. iZotope has traditionally marketed $250/year for updates. Many plugins have been "complete" for years and are still useful/functional. Audio DSP has been mature for a long time, so there is not a lot to add to things that were focused to begin with.