Izotope Announcement that Multiple products will be discontinued

[balinas]

Just received this email from Izotope: (I also received a similar email regarding Exponential products marketed through Izotope) 

Dear Customers, 

We’re writing to let you know that iZotope products Iris 2, BreakTweaker, and Trash 2 will no longer be available for purchase from iZotope.com. Support for these products will remain in effect for 12 months from your date of purchase.

If I own one of these products, can I still use it?

Yes. Your product will not be deactivated or change from its current state.

Will I still get maintenance updates?

If you have purchased these products through iZotope.com within the last 12 months, we will continue to provide you with technical support and updates to address critical issues that arise for up to 12 months from your purchase date. The support period for these products will end on October 27, 2023, for all users. We will not actively test compatibility of these products on new operating systems or host application versions after October 27, 2022, and the current system specifications for these products will not change. For a list of the product system requirements, go here.

Why are you discontinuing these products?

iZotope is continually developing new products, services, and solutions to enable and innovate on journeys in audio production. We occasionally need to retire older products in order to focus our resources and development efforts on building new, innovative products and features.

Will I still be able to download the product from your website?

Yes. You can still download, install, and authorize these products. Installers can be downloaded using Product Portal or our Legacy Downloads page. Your purchased serial numbers will continue to authorize these products. You can find your serial numbers in the Purchase History section of your Account page or use Product Portal to install and authorize them when you are logged into your account.

We sincerely appreciate your support and regret any inconvenience this action may cause you.

If you have additional questions, please feel free to reach out to our Customer Care team.

[Patricio Campos]

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

[Frank]

same for Exponential Audio

 

Dear Customers, 

 

We're writing with an update on the Exponential Audio line of products. 

 

After assessing the full line of products available, we have confirmed that the Stratus and Symphony reverbs are the pinnacle of Exponential Audio's development. To show our commitment to them, we have just updated them with a new UI as well as native M1 support.

 

While we will continue supporting Stratus and Symphony, we have made the decision to discontinue selling R2, R4, R2 Surround, PhoenixVerb, PhoenixVerb Surround, NIMBUS, and Excalibur. Support for these products will remain in effect for 12 months from your date of purchase.

The good news is that Stratus and Symphony can open presets from the other reverbs (except Excalibur). PhoenixVerb, PhoenixVerb Surround, and Nimbus presets can be opened in Stratus. R2, R2 Surround, and R4 presets will work with Symphony. Find all info on preset migration here.

 

If I own one of these products, can I still use it?

Yes. Your product will not be deactivated or change from its current state.

 

Will I still get maintenance updates?

If you have purchased these products through iZotope.com within the last 12 months, we will continue to provide you with technical support and updates to address critical issues that arise for up to 12 months from your purchase date. The support period for these products will end on October 27, 2023 for all users. We will not actively test compatibility of these products on new operating systems or host application versions after October 27, 2022, and the current system specifications for these products will not change. For a list of the product system requirements go here.

 

Why are you discontinuing these products?

iZotope is continually developing new products, services, and solutions to enable and innovate on journeys in audio production. We occasionally need to retire older products in order to focus our resources and development efforts on building new, innovative products and features.

 

Will I still be able to download the product from your website?

Yes. You can still download, install, and authorize these products. Installers can be downloaded using Product Portal or our Legacy Downloads page. Your purchased serial numbers will continue to authorize these products. You can find your serial numbers in the Purchase History section of your Account page, or use Product Portal to install and authorize them when you are logged into your account.

 

We sincerely appreciate your support and regret any inconvenience this action may cause you.

 

If you have additional questions, please feel free to reach out to our Customer Care team.

 

—Your team at iZotope

[PavlovsCat]

There is a lesson here for anyone interested. We all come to this forum to save money on plugins and sample and loop libraries. We've recently seen a good deal of plugin developers engage in deep discounting,  including Izotope.  It's gotten to the point where when there's a deep discounted effects plugin selling for $39 USD or $29 that regularly  sells for several times more, it's inevitable that someone will come along and complain that they're not spending more than $10 or $15 for a plugin.  But the reality is, a developer deep discounting a plugin that normally sells for say, $179 to a promotional price of $10 - $15 isn't necessarily a good sign.

After a developer discounts that deeply, it's trained the market that the product may be deeply discounted again and its regular price can seem inflated. And that leads to the bigger problem of deep discounting software...a developer selling a plugin for $10 or $15, unless they can sell an enormous quantity of licenses,  isn't  likely to be investing in the continued development of that plugin. 

The lesson is, go ahead and bite on that super deep discounted plugin, but don't get too fond of it or expect updates and don't expect plugins that are very actively being improved to sell for the same kind of ridiculously low price as one that hasn't had major updates in years. The writing was on the wall for all of these Izotope plugins for years. 

Edited October 27, 2022 by PavlovsCat

[simon]

Those izotope/exponential plugins haven't been updated for years anyway. They were already legacy.

Bad news if current ones stop working (eg you buy an new mac ) - but for most I don't think it makes any difference.

Current izotope products have bugs too - and it's not like you get actual technical support from Izotope....although customer services are good IMO

basically nothing changes

 

[Brian Walton]

This is lame.  Period.

Exponential audio plugins they want us to buy $300 or $400 to keep up-to-date?

They talked about keeping these products relevant for years.  Neo is cool but it is a massive CPU hog by comparison.  

 

Trash I never thought was very useful and have but never used BeatTweaker.  Iris is farily surprising as while it is old, it is still very processor intensive. 

I'm not concerned with updating for more features, but with both Windows and MAC making major changes that does have concerns for future compatiblity.  We have already seen VST2 and 32bit be retired in what wasn't really that long of a term.   

[Brian Walton]

48 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

There is a lesson here for anyone interested. We all come to this forum to save money on plugins and sample and loop libraries. We've recently seen a good deal of plugin developers engage in deep discounting,  including Izotope.  It's gotten to the point where when there's a deep discounted effects plugin selling for $39 USD or $29 that regularly  sells for several times more, it's inevitable that someone will come along and complain that they're not spending more than $10 or $15 for a plugin.  But the reality is, a developer deep discounting a plugin that normally sells for say, $179 to a promotional price of $10 - $19 isn't necessarily a good sign.

After a developer discounts that deeply, it's trained the market that the product may be deeply discounted again and its regular price can seem inflated. And that leads to the bigger problem of deep discounting software...a developer selling a plugin for $10 or $15, unless they can sell an enormous quantity of licenses,  isn't going to be reinvesting in the continued development of that plugin. 

The lesson is, go ahead and bite on that super deep discounted plugin, but don't get too fond of it or expect updates and don't expect plugins that are very actively being improved to sell for the same kind of ridiculously low price as one that hasn't had major updates in years. The writing was on the wall for all of these Izotope plugins for years. 

Very few plugins need major updates over the lifespan.  They simply need a few bug fixes and compatiblity ( future format usage), and if was developed a while ago - it also needs resize abilities to stay relevant.  This isn't a DAW that needs new features and massive updates to stay relevant.  

The number of people that pay the "normal sales for" price is the extreme minority in a $179 catergory.  The vast majority pay $40 or less these days for any single plugin.  Plain and simple except for a few special tools that are usually a package of things to command that price the new norm is what you are calling some sort of extreme discount.   Even if a plugin sells for $179+ and it never gets any discounts, we run the exact same risk.  Look at Drum Core 4 which got a major overhaul a few years ago for the v4 release and is now totally discontinued.    The price the consumer pays has nothing to do with the support model, a lower price means it is more likley to have more people using and depending on the product for production.  

Izotope is saying they won't even support you if you are unable to install the product on future machines.  This is poor customer service.  

 

I personally own all of those plugins that were listed (in most  instaces , I actually have multiple copies of each), and I can think of one of them that did have install and authorization issues on a machine even during the supported life....so this news is relevant for the future even though we think "they should last for the forseeable future"

Edited October 26, 2022 by Brian Walton

[kitekrazy]

Can anyone find those so called legacy installers on Izotope?  Product Portal seems to never work on one machine. 

[Wibbles]

3 minutes ago, Paul Young said:

Can anyone find those so called legacy installers on Izotope?  Product Portal seems to never work on one machine. 

Here you go: https://www.izotope.com/en/products/downloads/legacy-products.html

[Marina]

IZotope’s regular pricing for all their products looked always heavily inflated to me anyway. All their plugins are CPU-heavy. There’s nothing unique about their overhyped products. Trash 2 is a good heavy distortion for the price of $ 10, but still CPU-heavy ?

I feel free to speculate that the next to be made obsolete are Insight 2, VocalSynth 2, Neoverb and probably Dialogue Match.

[PavlovsCat]

49 minutes ago, Brian Walton said:

The price the consumer pays has nothing to do with the support model, a lower price means it is more likley to have more people using and depending on the product for production.  

It's fine to disagree, but your above statement is fundamentally incorrect. Without getting too academic, a seller lowering its price certainly is INTENDED to increase unit sales of a product and gross sales. Of course,  the seller has to sell a lot more product to generate the same total profit as the net profit per unit is severely reduced. Unlike a product like soap or toilet paper,  technology products (this is where I've spent my career, btw) come with support,  and that is an incredible difference. Unlike soap, software products do require investment to be maintained and improved and each customer that paid $10 for a plugin costs the same to support as a customer that paid $199 (AKA there are variable costs that you need to consider; you treated tech support as if it was a fixed cost; it's not and that's why selling 1,000 licenses at $10 that each come with the same support as a $199 license is unlikely to be a sustainable model for most plugin developers).

For an effect plugin, as you mentioned,  one area of ongoing maintenance is compatibility with monitor technology,  which, of course, changes over time. Then there's compatibility with hosts/DAWS, other plugins,  hardware and OS's and that also changes over time. All of that requires the plugin has resources actively committed to a product,  which costs the developer money and with any competently run business, human and financial resources are going to be directed towards those products that generate the most revenue. In short, it's incredibly unlikely that you're going to be maintaining and improving that ten dollar plugin for very long, but see it as a cash cow and take the money you made from the ten dollar plugin and invest it into more products that show greater profit potential. 

Now, you can disagree with what I wrote above, but all of it is business economics and strategy 101. There's nothing I wrote above that isn't considered fundamental. I have lots of opinions on this stuff,  but they aren't contained in this very elementary explanation. 

Edited October 26, 2022 by PavlovsCat

[simon]

38 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

It's fine to disagree

I don't disagree - and had a long and VERY boring reply typed out but I think it best to summarise it by saying :

There are no guarantees that any of the companies we spend our money with will be there tomorrow.  Unfortunately audio software is not an 'investment'.  Buy what you want and use it today and hope it continues to work.  Genuine support is rare in the audio software world.

(IMO!) Mac users have it even worse - they cannot even guarantee their hardware will work with the next generation, never mind their software.  I also understand Apple will be dropping Rosetta 2, probably sooner rather than later.  

I'm not saying that this is 'A Good Thing' but we have to be realistic about the software we buy

Edited October 26, 2022 by simon

[Brian Walton]

41 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

It's fine to disagree, but your above statement is fundamentally incorrect. Without getting too academic, a seller lowering its price certainly is INTENDED to increase unit sales of a product and gross sales. Of course,  the seller has to sell a lot more product to generate the same total profit as the net profit per unit is severely reduced. Unlike a product like soap or toilet paper,  technology products (this is where I've spent my career, btw) come with support,  and that is an incredible difference. Unlike soap, software products do require investment to be maintained and improved and each customer that paid $10 for a plugin costs the same to support as a customer that paid $199 (AKA there are variable costs that you need to consider; you treated tech support as if it was a fixed cost; it's not and that's why selling 1,000 licenses at $10 that each come with the same support as a $199 license is unlikely to be a sustainable model for most plugin developers). For an effect plugin, as you mentioned,  one area is compatibility with monitor technology,  which changes over time. Then there's also compatibility with hosts/DAWS, other plugins,  hardware and OS's and that also changes over time. All of that requires the plugin has resources actively committed,  which costs the developer money and with any competently ran business,  your human and financial resources are going to be directed towards products that generate the most revenue. In short, it's incredibly unlikely that you're going to be maintaining and improving that ten dollar plugin for very long, but see it as a cash cow and take the money you made from the ten dollar plugin and invest it into more products that show greater profit potential. 

Now, you can disagree with what I wrote above, but all of it is business economics and strategy 101. There's nothing I wrote above that isn't considered fundamental. I have lots of opinions on this stuff,  but they aren't contained in this very elementary explanation. 

I've fully aware of economics and marketing.  The intention of sale prices doesn't have to do with my statement.

 

If I pay $179 or $10 the plugin requires the same actual support.  The break even on profitibility and ability to support has many factors.  If done properly and on a basic plugin, the suport required for updates and compatilbiy can be minimal depending on what you are chosing to support.   Speaking of these plugins mentioned here, there is little to believe they are super complex.  Monitor tech usage is going to vary, many of these are not going to off-load to the GPU and host/daw compatiblity is usually tied to the standards of VST3 so the support is based on that spec not the DAW/Host itself, outside of rare instances where things like multi-outs and routing within the DAW is supported.  

 

I only remember about one update to the Exponential products since they went under the izotope umbrealla (perhpas there were more), which points to minimal updates required to keep them relevant outside of MACs breaking things.  

While a $20 may imply more people buying it and therefore needing more people to provide customer support, that also assumes problems with the product with installs, authorization and functionality, etc.  Which also seems pretty problematic as it was the same plugin that used to cost $300.  Little support needed if it was a solid product to begin with.

 

I understnad that dollars get invested back into new products that then generate the initial influx of funds but that doesn't have anything to do with the risk you are implying.  Any of these companies can go belly up regardless of how much they charge for the plugin.  If it cost $179 few people will buy it = Drum Core 4 bankrupt, if they charge $20 it could also go belly up.  

Edited October 26, 2022 by Brian Walton

[Brian Walton]

3 minutes ago, simon said:

....

There are no guarantees that any of the companies we spend our money with will be there tomorrow.  ....

This is precisely my point.  The purchase price of the plugin seems to have no guarantee on the future of the product or company staying in business, nor the quality of support while it is around. 

[PavlovsCat]

23 minutes ago, Brian Walton said:

I've fully aware of economics and marketing.  The intention of sale prices doesn't have to do with my statement.

 

If I pay $179 or $10 the plugin requires the same actual support.  The break even on profitibility and ability to support has many factors.  If done properly and on a basic plugin, the suport required for updates and compatilbiy can be minimal depending on what you are chosing to support.   Speaking of these plugins mentioned here, there is little to believe they are super complex.  Monitor tech usage is going to vary, many of these are not going to off-load to the GPU and host/daw compatiblity is usually tied to the standards of VST3 so the support is based on that spec not the DAW/Host itself, outside of rare instances where things like multi-outs and routing within the DAW is supported.  

 

I only remember about one update to the Exponential products since they went under the izotope umbrealla (perhpas there were more), which points to minimal updates required to keep them relevant outside of MACs breaking things.  

While a $20 may imply more people buying it and therefore needing more people to provide customer support, that also assumes problems with the product with installs, authorization and functionality, etc.  Which also seems pretty problematic as it was the same plugin that used to cost $300.  Little support needed if it was a solid product to begin with.

 

I understnad that dollars get invested back into new products that then generate the initial influx of funds but that doesn't have anything to do with the risk you are implying.  Any of these companies can go belly up regardless of how much they charge for the plugin.  If it cost $179 few people will buy it = Drum Core 4 bankrupt, if they charge $20 it could also go belly up.  

I'll leave it at this. Yes, of course,  any company can go belly up. My point is that when a software product is dramatically discounted, that's something that would rarely happen to a healthy, successful product where the brand management sees a long healthy future ahead for that product. And no, the basic concept of fixed and variable costs which apply to tech support for software isn't something that just applies to problematic software. Issues occur with well coded software, it's reality. 

So back to my original point. When someone buys a license to software deeply discounted, by 75% or more,  there's a significantly greater probability that product may not have a bright future ahead. That's not the same as saying that's certain,  but there's a significantly higher probability that a deep discounted plugin is not going to be as actively invested in than a plugin a developer doesn't deep discount. Deep discounting can also be a sign of a developer having an urgent financial need, like needing to cover salaries and rent. With small developers,  it can be less logical. Now I could analyze this from a branding strategy perspective too (I used to write on this stuff, and enjoy discussing it now that I'm not required to write about it every xx number of days). While there's no certain correlation to a business's financial situation from deep discounting (although it can be a signal), there's definitely a correlation that products that a developer is considering abandoning are more likely to be deep discounted. 

Okay, back to work. 

Edited October 26, 2022 by PavlovsCat

[Brian Walton]

6 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

I'll leave it at this. Yes, of course,  any company can go belly up. My point is that when a software product is dramatically discounted, that's something that would rarely happen to a healthy, successful product where the brand management sees a long healthy future ahead for that product. And no, the basic concept of fixed and variable costs which apply to tech support for software isn't something that just applies to problematic software. Issues occur with well coded software, it's reality. 

So back to my original point. When someone buys a license to software deeply discounted, by 75% or more,  there's a significantly greater probability that product may not have a bright future ahead. That's not the same as saying that's certain,  but there's a significantly higher probability that a deep discounted plugin is not going to be as actively invested in than a plugin a developer doesn't deep discount. Deep discounting can also be a sign of a developer having an urgent financial need, like needing to cover salaries and rent. With small developers,  it can be less logical. Now I could analyze this from a branding strategy perspective too (I used to write on this stuff, and enjoy discussing it now that I'm not required to write about it every xx number of days). While there's no certain correlation to a business's financial situation from deep discounting (although it can be a signal), there's definitely a correlation that products that a developer is considering abandoning are more likely to be deep discounted. 

Okay, back to work. 

The problem with your argument assumes that the published retail rates have any basis in reality and the cost or value of the product.

PA releases a new product at $350 and this is the every day price.  They also know no one is going to pay it and that the profitibility price is much closer to just give the thing away rates.  

We are not talking about physical goods or even goods that are expected to be sold at highly inflated retail rates.  The stragegies of many of these companies it create as much percived value as the market will allow so that when it drops to the level someone can actually afford to buy it, they will sell quite a few copies and provide minimal support to the end user perhpas just enough that they will forget the prevoius terrbile experience and still by the next new things....ala WAVES.  

 

I would agree with your assessment if we were talking about physical goods, or even digital goods sold at a COGS + SG&A + some small markup = normal retail rate.  But that isn't the plugin world.  It is the wild west out there.

[paulo]

31 minutes ago, simon said:

Mac users have it even worse

Not really - those folks love nothing more than an opportunity to try and be first among them to pay a boatload of cash for basically the same thing that they already have.  ?

[Brian Walton]

1 hour ago, Marina said:

IZotope’s regular pricing for all their products looked always heavily inflated to me anyway. All their plugins are CPU-heavy. There’s nothing unique about their overhyped products. Trash 2 is a good heavy distortion for the price of $ 10, but still CPU-heavy ?

I feel free to speculate that the next to be made obsolete are Insight 2, VocalSynth 2, Neoverb and probably Dialogue Match.

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.

[PavlovsCat]

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.  

I don't have any inside knowledge,  but this looks a lot like Izotope's new parent company is just looking to make the company more focused and efficient. I own all of the Izotope products they just discontinued and a few of the Exponential ones, but considering the EA reverbs basically haven't been touched since Izotope acquired EA and Izotope recently being acquired itself,  those being discontinued is unsurprising. Iris 2 and BreakTweaker being discontinued also doesn't come as a surprise. The only one that surprises me is Trash 2, as it's  an effects plugin, so it fits more with the Izotope ecosystem. But hey, I am pretty happy with my Izotope plugins and I'm expecting they'll probably come up with an effect that does the same thing as Trash 2 and more -- although there are plenty of other alternatives if they don't. I like Iris 2, but guessed it wasn't a great success from the lack of chatter about it, even more so with Break Tweaker,  which, candidly,  I've never used in a production. 

Edited October 26, 2022 by PavlovsCat

[Last Call]

I disagree Pavlov, but ok ?