Izotope Announcement that Multiple products will be discontinued

[chris.r]

10 hours ago, mibby said:

The Exponential stuff will work a looong time form now - IF you're on Windows.

I hear the voices saying that these plugins should probably be still working fine on Windows for years. The only problem is decision if I should keep using them in my future projects, since Windows is behaving unpredictably, any next update might break something then we're screwed again. Bummer for me.

[mibby]

26 minutes ago, chris.r said:

The only problem is decision if I should keep using them in my future projects, since Windows is behaving unpredictably, any next update might break something then we're screwed again. Bummer for me.

Yes, it's a crap-shot with Windows and guaranteed with Macs.     You could always take your working DAW/plugins offline and keep it in that working state until you're ready to upgrade.

[Nick Blanc]

It seems to me they are ditching a majority of their creative plugins and focus more on mixing, mastering and AI stuff. Their partners at Soundwide (Plugin Alliance and Native Instruments) seem to be filling in that gap nicely. PA has creative effects and mixing/mastering tools, NI has creative tools and seem to go more and more to the sampled route. So, create your sound with NI, process it with PA and mix/master it with Izoptope.

[Fleer]

1 minute ago, Nick Blanc said:

It seems to me they are ditching a majority of their customers 

Yeah

[Nick Blanc]

3 minutes ago, Fleer said:

Yeah

Not necessarily. A while back I personally didn't really consider Izotope as a primarily mixing/mastering tool. Yes they had Ozone, but to ME they were the guys behind Trash 2, Vocal Synth, Vinyl, etc. But in time, those creative plugins kept getting replaced more and more. While their other stuff stays pretty much on track and I use it more and more. So my customer focus FOR THEM has shifted, coincidentally with their seemingly new approach. 

So maybe they are 'ditching' some portion of their customers, but i think it is more a shift within the Soundwide ecosystem. 

[Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann]

2 hours ago, Nick Blanc said:

It seems to me they are ditching a majority of their creative plugins and focus more on mixing, mastering and AI stuff. Their partners at Soundwide (Plugin Alliance and Native Instruments) seem to be filling in that gap nicely

If it were a reorg within Soundwide, these plugins would have been moved to PA and/or NI. It doesn't sound like either would be reluctant to add more reverbs, more synths, etc to their lineups

[antler]

17 hours ago, Fleer said:

I looooooove Macs. 
 

 

 

 

Kill me

Apple's pricing strategy will do that ?

[abacab]

23 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

The idea being that while Pavlov could train a dog by ringing a bell, he could never do the same with a cat.

In reality, a cat CAN be trained! But that's another story for another day!

[abacab]

22 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

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).

That's exactly what Neoverb is. [EA + AI].

Unless you are referring to R4 specifically, I suspect it is similar tech DNA in each of the EA reverbs. Someone else mentioned that R2 was used. But in any case, Neoverb has EA tech DNA and iZotope AI.

[abacab]

8 hours ago, Nick Blanc said:

i think it is more a shift within the Soundwide ecosystem. 

The new company seems focused on narrowing down their product catalog to a new starting lineup. Probably a reduction designed to maximize profits, like when two banks merge, a bunch of brick and mortar branches are closed to eliminate inefficiencies in the shared market segment. It's nothing personal against the customer, it's just business by the numbers based on analysis by the bean counters.

 

[Brian Walton]

9 hours ago, Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann said:

If it were a reorg within Soundwide, these plugins would have been moved to PA and/or NI. It doesn't sound like either would be reluctant to add more reverbs, more synths, etc to their lineups

Exactly, PA needs a decent reverb(s).  The one area they seriously lack a quality product.  The newish unfiltered one is interesting but it is not a bread and butter verb.

[Technostica]

They still have Symphony & Stratus which I think are the flagship reverbs anyway and already ported to native Apple Silicon.
In terms  of reverbs, they have trimmed the range back which is not a surprise.
But retiring all the other reverbs plus Iris, BreakTweaker and Trash at the same time, is a shock.

[Starship Krupa]

On 10/26/2022 at 11:51 AM, Brian Walton said:

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.

Not sure which pricepoint you mean. Do you mean the single-seaters for $10? I have 2 $10 licenses apiece for Phoenix, Nimbus, R1, R2, and Excalibur. That's a hundy (well-spent, I must say). The Exponential reverbs sounded so much better than anything else, in a class by themselves, at least to my ears. Then I bought a bundle from Meldaproduction that included MTurboReverbLE (pronounced "Mturboreverble") and it changed my mind about them being unequaled.

I believe you have MTurboReverbLE, how do you think it stacks up next to the Exponentials?

If someone waits for it to roll around during an Eternal Madness sale, or a 50% off everything sale (which should be coming up this holiday season), they can snag it for $75 and install it on as many computers as they own. If first-time Melda buyers rules apply (with referral code and newsletter credit), then it comes down to under $50. Or get the MEssentialsFX bundle for $125 during a 50% off sale. If a first time buyer, well under $100.

With the Exponential ones no longer a buying option, I believe that MTurboReverbLE/MEssentialsFX is the best deal on the market. Guaranteed (ha, right) updates forever (or at least as long as the one person the whole show relies on keeps at it and doesn't become incapacitated or retires)

On 10/26/2022 at 12:14 PM, PavlovsCat said:

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. 

I love Break Tweaker, I just use it as a drum machine. When I first got it I was really stoked and tried the deep dive into microedits and other programming and whatnot, but it didn't stick. To me they're just sound effects and drum sounds and I'm okay with using ones that someone else has come up with. The content that comes with Break Tweaker Expanded is....extensive.

I'm wondering how long before Stutter Edit 2 goes on the chopping block. If Break Tweaker got the boot, maybe they decided that glitch sounds are "out."

[abacab]

15 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

I love Break Tweaker, I just use it as a drum machine. When I first got it I was really stoked and tried the deep dive into microedits and other programming and whatnot, but it didn't stick. To me they're just sound effects and drum sounds and I'm okay with using ones that someone else has come up with. The content that comes with Break Tweaker Expanded is....extensive.

I got BreakTweaker Expanded included when I upgraded to iZotope Music Production Suite, but haven't really spent much time with it yet. It's on a very long to-do list! ?

But PluginGuru John "Skippy" Lehmkuhl is a big fan, and that's enough of an endorsement for me! He designed 3 libraries for it that I may explore at some point. https://www.pluginguru.com/products/category/breaktweaker/

[PavlovsCat]

6 hours ago, abacab said:

That's exactly what Neoverb is. [EA + AI].

Unless you are referring to R4 specifically, I suspect it is similar tech DNA in each of the EA reverbs. Someone else mentioned that R2 was used. But in any case, Neoverb has EA tech DNA and iZotope AI.

Yeah, that was my point. An EA employee told me that Neoverb used R2, I was just saying that perhaps Izotope will do the same with R4 at some point or use it for an advanced version of Neoverb (if it doesn't already exist and I'm just not aware; the chat I had was when Neoverb was just released). 

[Lionel]

Makes me not want to invest their plugins anymore

[Starship Krupa]

3 hours ago, Technostica said:

retiring all the other reverbs plus Iris, BreakTweaker and Trash at the same time, is a shock.

It's unfortunate, but understandable. In the past year, there have been other companies that have retired large swaths of their product line, some of them releasing them as unsupported freeware.

I suspect that these culls have to do with Apple Silicon. They can keep these products around in the catalog and have them either trickling out every so often or going out in bulk during deeply discounted sales, not costing the company anything at all, only as long as they don't have to spend money on updating the code. The M1 switch forced companies to make decisions about what products were worth porting to Apple Silicon. iZotope had already effectively lowered the price on all of these products to $10. $10 plug-ins, no matter how great and useful they are to me, aren't worth the cost to port them to Apple Silicon.

The only way these could have survived would have been to add desirable features and call them Break Tweaker 2, Iris 3, and Trash 3. All of these products are, IMO, already overloaded with features. As faithful users, "all we want is a resizable GUI," but is having that as the only new feature going to pry $75 out of our wallets? Probably not me.

The Apple way of stomping on backward compatibility is annoying enough when confined to Apple products, but it also has effects on other parts of the market. ?

[Pragi]

I think it's a pity that the E/A  plugins are no longer maintained.

The reverbs are of very high quality. EA would have deserved to remain economically healthy on the market with these reverbs,but they couldn't take part in the marketing campaigns (29 bucks per plugin, groupbuy aso) such as Waves and IK because the team was probably too small. very bad.

Edited October 28, 2022 by Pragi

[Brian Walton]

10 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Not sure which pricepoint you mean. Do you mean the single-seaters for $10? I have 2 $10 licenses apiece for Phoenix, Nimbus, R1, R2, and Excalibur. That's a hundy (well-spent, I must say). The Exponential reverbs sounded so much better than anything else, in a class by themselves, at least to my ears. Then I bought a bundle from Meldaproduction that included MTurboReverbLE (pronounced "Mturboreverble") and it changed my mind about them being unequaled.

I believe you have MTurboReverbLE, how do you think it stacks up next to the Exponentials?

If someone waits for it to roll around during an Eternal Madness sale, or a 50% off everything sale (which should be coming up this holiday season), they can snag it for $75 and install it on as many computers as they own. If first-time Melda buyers rules apply (with referral code and newsletter credit), then it comes down to under $50. Or get the MEssentialsFX bundle for $125 during a 50% off sale. If a first time buyer, well under $100.

With the Exponential ones no longer a buying option, I believe that MTurboReverbLE/MEssentialsFX is the best deal on the market. Guaranteed (ha, right) updates forever (or at least as long as the one person the whole show relies on keeps at it and doesn't become incapacitated or retires)

 

I do have all of those.  I also love MTurboReverbLE as it offers an awful lot of reverb styles and creative effects that the Exponential Audio stuff doesn't do.  Of course if I could only have one reverb unit, I'd have to go with that for versatility.

That said, the EA has a place because getting some basic reverb to really feel transparent in the mix is so much easier and straightforward with the EA options.  

The MTurbo is a fun playground, but for basic production where time is valuable, it is really hard to beat the EA stuff.  

[Starship Krupa]

10 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

The MTurbo is a fun playground, but for basic production where time is valuable, it is really hard to beat the EA stuff. 

I agree. I mean, there are several projects that I have that use only the default Nimbus preset, it's just that good. Set it up as a send and I'm off to the races.

Having said that, I poked around in MTurboReverble and found a few that can be just as "go-to." The "Brichamber" is one of them. I guess it's their attempt at emulating the legendary Bricasti.

So even if my beloved EA reverbs stop working at some point (I'm not too worried, they have been among the most trouble-free FX I've used), I'd be fine with MTurboReverble. Also given that at that future point, MTurboReverb will likely be even more useful than it is now.

I mentioned it because it's the only other reverb I've tried that can touch the excellence of the EA ones. Apparently my ears are sensitive to reverb tails, so I react negatively to any graininess or other artifacts.