iZotope, Brainworx, and Plugin Alliance are now part of NI

Kaiwan_NI

iZotope, Brainworx, and Plugin Alliance are becoming part of Native Instruments.

Read more what this means for you here:

https://blog.native-instruments.com/native-instruments-brand-news/

Excited that we'll soon have a seamless experience across all brands! Does the news come as a surprise for you all? Would love to know all your thoughts.

nightjar

Not a surprise.. SoundWide didn't have any established goodwill and market presence to effectively become a unified platform. This new approach will make it a LOT easier for the next phase to happen.

Smart move and I am looking forward to more integration within Native Access.

And hopefully some integration of iZotope's machine learning technology to the library tagging and browsing ecosystem.

I do wish SoundWide had never purchased Plugin Alliance and Brainworx. These products were not needed and trying to bring them into the Native Instruments new ecosystem has created needless complexity.

Maciej Repetowski

I think this is much better than creating Soundwide branding. Congratulations!!!

Crizzly

My dream plug-in is a traktor waveform visualizer

mickeyl

What does that mean, _part of NI_? Is this a formal acquisition? Where are the press releases from the acquired companies?

todd_fisher

I think this is great- Native Access is my favorite software management installer (outside of the built in app-store for Mac OS), so anything that helps me with the reinstallation of plugins is a win because I have waaaaay too many plugins at this point in my life to manage 🤣

Tulio Guilherme Grunwald

Now It's time to make all iZotope plugins NKS compatible!

Vfold

Props to the marketing team for making the failure of the weird Soundwide branding seem like a new exciting development. It's just a shame that marketing seems to be all that's happening over at Native Instruments these days.

Kymeia

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/77458#Comment_77458

And Plugin Alliance - also hopefully this will motivate them to fix the bug that stops many of them showing their presets for the VST3 versions in Maschine and Komplete Kontrol

D-One

This is total weirdness to me..

Honestly, I don't get what the expectation was here... To launch a new umbrella of companies and somehow expect that within 1 year it would be more recognizable than Native Instruments (24-year-old company) without ever actually doing anything other than press releases... ??? Am I in a parallel universe right now? WHAT?

Also.. Being recognizable is a big deal so lets change the logo and icons to a generic one. Again... "WHAT?"

Kymeia

That was quick

ysseo

not good news for me, impact on employees, almost a monopoly position (only one provider?)

The arguments are weak

• one unified login?! wow!
• only one plugin manager? double wow!
• one-stop shop? triple wow!
• more tightly connected? I don't have to be "NI" to be NKS compatible (e.g.)
• bundle offers? the price should not determine everything

I'm not convinced, sorry.

Why was metapop sacrificed?

LostInFoundation

I’ll just say that I totally agree with @D-One. Sacrificing what made NI stand out in those 24 years (hardware-software integration, innovation in hardwares controllers,…) by drastically reducing hardwares team (at the moment of Soundwide acquisition)…to then acquire what? A plugins reseller (Plugin Alliance), a generic plugins producer (Brainworx…and there’s a reason why its name isn’t the one people mention when saying “wow, have you seen this new plugin?”) and a company that makes plugins for a single segment, mastering fxs (iZotope…which in facts maybe is the only good acquisition).

NI is clearly moving from “innovating in music” to where the cash money resides.

Probably they will even succeed (if success is only measured by how much money you bill). The ones that are not gonna benefit are users. And the music world, losing the “innovators”

Now we know why “Maschine isn’t a priority”…

And I won’t add more, otherwise I’m the “negative guy”

nightjar

Native Instruments + iZotope is a logical and synergistic combination for sure. Their products lines complimented each other in a smart way. Bringing their tech together was something I was very excited about.

However when SoundWide came into existence with acquisition of Plugin Alliance and Brainworx, I was very disheartened. All of these redundant emulations of old equipment is backwards looking. innovation is NOT at all what is see in the products from PA and Brainworx.

I hope that going forward, the vision and efforts are focused on the products from NI and iZotope and how they can work together in building an awesome music creation ecosystem.

Kymeia

There are innovative products from PA but they are mostly from Unfiltered Audio. Those are definitely worth having. Also a few years ago PA acquired PPG Software products but have not yet brought them back out, those were also very innovative and I would love to see updated versions of them (I made NKS versions of some of these years ago). Apart from that there is also Thorn and Tantra from DS audio - and hopefully one day, Diversion will be updated. In terms of emulations of old stuff they are not all bad or generic - for example the Lindells are excellent.

Last but not least the 2 synths from Brainworx are actually very good - even if emulations - and are the only plugins I know of that can both export and import .nksf patches (even u-he plugins can only do export) which makes for some great integration in Komplete Kontrol. I would love one outcome of this to be for that capability being added to all the synths and fx.

just_jump

I'm not sure any of this made sense starting with the whole Soundwide thing. You put a bunch of companies under a parent company do some press releases do some management changes, do a generic NI rebrand that couldn't have been done by a designer. Sounds like a big unbranding effort with now merging (deleting?) iZotope into Native. I totally forget about Brainworx and Plugin Alliance.

Does this mean Native is just gonna drag down iZotope now? They already have too many things to keep track of / update / maintain - especially after all the cuts. Izotope's product portal never had any issues compared to Native Access.

With this I'm really gonna have to step back and watch and see what this means for end users. Can't say I'm excited at the moment.