I know many of us here also use RX and other Izotope products, so it’s surely of interest that Izotope (having been previously merged into Native Instruments) has now been sold again following NI’s insolvency and acquired by Boris FX.
Boris FX would be better known for video products, but acquired Samplitude, and more recently also Vegas Pro and Sound Forge from MAGIX. They also have an audio (video) post product called CrumplePop (VST plug-ins).
While NI have been taken over by inMusic, it’ll be interesting to see what direction Izotope will take under Boris FX, now that it’s part of a larger family of products, with quite a bit of overlap in the audio area, what with Samplitude, Sequoia, RX, Sound Forge, ACID Pro – even Vegas Pro is a very capable DAW, as well as being an NLE.
NLE ? - i once managed a construction project for the dept of defence (DOD) as my client (for the USA friends amongst us you would know this as the DOW) and at the second monthly project meeting I requested that the DOD provide a CDD (comprehensive digital dictionary) of it’s TLA’s (three letter acronyms), FLA’s (four letter acronyms) and AOFA’s (any other … acronyms) that they use, so that we could understand WTF they were talking about.
I’m not sure why I just shared that - perhaps to bring an SSTSF (small smile to someones face) in these oh, so NSST (not so smiley times) - wow, this is surprisingly addictive! So, please, what is an NLE?
I use Ozone frequently and RX occasionally. But I haven’t done anything with them since they went to Native instruments. I am now several releases behind on everything. That’s not because I dislike their products. It is because I just think they’re marketing and pricing strategies were not sensible at all.
I actually like their products. But the incremental value of each release gets smaller and smaller, at the same time that competitive products continue to mature. For me, their products seem overpriced by about 100%.
Yes, this is where I am as well. I’d been an iZotope customer since the original version of Ozone. As of late 2024, I had their Music Production Suite 6.5, as well as various other specialized plugins. The only update I’ve done since then was when they did the crossgrade to Equinox from the Exponential Audio reverbs, which actually had a decent price. Later upgrades were decidedly of the too expensive for too little value (to me, at least) sort. Also, like many NI bundle upgrade prices, they didn’t take into account the additional products you’d purchased that weren’t in the earlier bundles but now were included in the later bundles.
Now, after less than two years since my last Music Production Suite update, neither the suite update (currently $459), nor the main product I’d be inclined to update (Ozone 12 Advanced, currently $299!!!) are even close to practical to consider. So, short of some significant outreach by Boris FX to try and undo damage done by the iZotope-under-NI “customer disloyalty” pricing, I’ll likely be staying with Ozone 11 Advanced indefinitely (or conceivably shifting to other tools over time).
I will say, though, that the whole NI/iZotope “customer loyalty” pricing has really made me appreciate the actual customer loyalty pricing of other plugin developers whose products I use, with special shoutouts on that front to Arturia (both the V Collection and FX Collection) and PSP Audioware (with their TotalPack). In the former case, Arturia does take into account the products you purchase between bundle upgrades in the bundle upgrade price (and, if you get them at the introductory pricing, you end up saving over just waiting for a bundle upgrade). In the latter case, the price you pay for any new product, or paid upgrade, seems to be heavily influenced by the number of products you already have. (In particular, “updating TotalPack” to get the new/updated plugins tends to be a better deal, sometimes significantly so, compared to whatever the current sale price for the new/updated product is.)
I use Ozone (and/or individual Ozone plugins) on most all my recordings and RX on anything with vocals (which is almost all my recordings). I also always have Tonal Balance 2 in Control Room for keeping an eye on frequency curve for either their genre models or something calculated from reference recordings.
Most everything else is on an occasional basis, with probably the most common one I’ve used being the Nectar auto-leveling plugin, which sometimes has worked better than Waves Vocal Rider, which had been my default for that until recently (PSP Levelizer may end up being my new default, though it is a lot more resource-intensive than the other two). Plasma and Equinox are others I’ve used a fair bit. I especially like the way Equinox can deal with masking considerations without my needing to resort to more complex plugin and sidechaining. (That said, though, I’m more likely to use “flavor” reverbs and deal with the masking issues as needed.)
I’ve gone up and down on Neutron. It’s never been my default channel strip (though I did use it exclusively on one recording I did early after it came out just to try out if it could help me do a mix more quickly than usual – it did on that particular project, but that ended up being unique for me). However, if I’m not getting something I like with the channel strips I use more frequently (various ones from UAD, Waves, and PSP), I’ll try it out to see if there is a preset that comes closer, and it occasionally ends up being a fit.
Boris FX’s pricing strategy is what would most concern me, because the deal that looks sweetest is always a subscription, and no, I’m never going to take a subscription, certainly not the “ransom” type that causes your software to stop working if you don’t pay up.
Boris FX have now acquired four products that I use, three of which I had already stopped upgrading as there was no perceptible value in it for me. Their licensing (even the “perpetual” one) can be a little opaque as well, for example their CrumplePop (what a horrible name!) VST plug-ins will only work when hosted in the Boris FX products they came bundled with.
Looking at all these corporate shenanigans I think we are well-served with Steinberg’s transparent, straightforward and fair pricing and licensing policies.
It got to where I didn’t even look at the NI stuff. I always found NI’s closed architecture off-putting, and they seemed to be quite arrogant. That was reflected in the pricing that made no sense to me. But the marketing was messed up before NI. It seemed like every time they released something, it was part of a bundle, of which I already had current versions of half the products. That was crazy. I would have spent more money with they if they hadn’t tried to be so clever.
I haven’t touched Neutron for a long time. The recent releases of Cubase, especially the UI improvements to the channel strip EQ, really gives me what I need most of the time without any extra plug-ins.
I would consider an Ozone upgrade at a fair price. Recent releases introduced a bunch of modules, some of which I really can’t hear them doing anything useful. Meanwhile, I have bought Wavelab, but still don’t feel very competent with that yet.
I’d originally bought Vegas when it was a Sony product, and it became my main video editor at that point – it was way more stable, and intuitive than whatever I’d been using at that point (I think something from Pinnacle). Then when Gibson dumped SONAR, and I started looking at other DAWs, I got a version of Samplitude that included an updated version of Vegas Pro, an updated version of Sound Forge Pro, the pre-Steinberg version of SpectraLayers (which I never ended up using), and some other things.
At some point, maybe 4 years ago, I was running into limitations with Vegas, owing to the old version I had (14?), so I started looking into upgrades. But the pricing seemed to be either subscription or a big upgrade price, and I decided to switch to DaVinci Resolve, which actually had a very powerful free version, which I’m still using to this day (I think 2 or 3 major version updates later – I just upgraded to V21 last week). There was decidedly a learning curve. Someday I’ll get the paid version just to support the development, but finances are WAY too tight at present, and the only thing I really would need with the paid version is the support for a second monitor for viewing the video full screen while working on it using the main monitor.
I didn’t realize that the change in Vegas was due to Boris FX as I didn’t notice any branding to that end – in fact the company name seemed a mystery, with just the Vegas branding being obvious. My only exposure to Boris FX was some video FX plugins that came with Vegas Pro when I got that.
I’m not sure what you mean by closed architecture, but the post-private equity buyout pricing, and value for that pricing, really seemed to take a turn for the worse for my purposes. I use a lot of Kontakt libraries, both from NI and third parties. With the Komplete upgrade prior to the latest, I grudgingly bought it, once it went on a good enough sale, because I wanted the Kontakt 8 upgrade and I was very interested in Session Percussionist. I think there was one other product that maybe would be of interest, but most of the upgrade from the previous version was either stuff I already had or not of interest. And I ended up being very disappointed in Session Percussionist because it really doesn’t deal with anything other than even numbers of measures, no less time signature changes, well – unlike the Session Guitarist products, where there are reasonable controls to deal with that sort of thing (e.g. by realigning the start of counting measures). The first time I tried using it in a project, I had to abandon it for that reason and revert to using In Session Audio’s Shimmer Shake Strike (which is excellent, but didn’t have some of the selling points for my workflow that Session Percussionist had).
As for the latest Komplete (Standard) update, the only thing of interest was the new Absynth as I used to use the old one quite a bit. But it wasn’t worth the price for the Komplete upgrade – all the other stuff that was new was either stuff I had already or (mostly) not of interest. They really seem aimed at the electronic music crowd at this point.
Despite the “mastering” category, Ozone and WaveLab are very different animals, with Ozone really only doing the processing side, and WaveLab more like a DAW and authoring system, though it also includes some plugins that can be used for mastering (though I really haven’t used many, if any, of those in WaveLab – I have used Ozone in WaveLab, but I really only use WaveLab when mastering and sequencing an album or as a replacement for Sound Forge, which I didn’t carry forward when moved from my old Windows 10 system to my current Windows 11 system). WaveLab definitely has learning curve. I probably use it more for critical listening versus references (using the multiple speaker/plugin configuration options) than anything else since I’ve configured different virtual listening environments (using the Waves NX plugins) and various metering plugins for that purpose.
I’m in the same boat on upgrading Ozone if it were at a fair price, but, at least thus far, it’s been far from it. Tonal Balance Control 3 is the other thing I’d be particularly inclined toward, but not at $99 – it isn’t that much of an improvement over Tonal Balance 2 and the (now discontinued) AudioLens.
Wondering where InMusic got the money to buy NI, now I’m wondering where Boris is getting all this capital from too. What is happening?
I picked up wavelab pro at the right time, looks like (and on sale). Had soundforge for a while before that. I had the worst time trying to get it to batch process. Their tech support tried their best with me and my stubborn computer, but we never did get it working. I wanted to simply batch analyze my samples, get their tempo and key written to the wav files, and acidize my drum loops.
Soundforge isn’t bad, but wavelab is way better. Now that I have Wavelab Pro version, it replaces Audacity, Soundforge, Edison (standalone), another freeware one forgot the name, which was good for batch trimming silence and normalizing, and maybe Voicemeeter Banana (if I utilize the wavelab podcasting feature, not sure). Had DB PowerAmp too, which is good for the windows property sheet, but otherwise pretty similar to other ones.
Izotope was always bla bla AI bla bla. Always with the AI this and AI that. No thanks I’ll use my ears. That’s what God gave them to me for.
I kept mp3tag, and r8brain. Good for batch processing samples. And sononym is killer. But all that other bloat is gone and am happy with that. Too much software.
With the prices Boris charges, I don’t think it’s any wonder. (Continuum - £1450 For Avid, £840 for Vegas, £280 for Final Cut(!))
As I said, odd pricing.
A new perpetual license for Vegas Pro (nothing bundled, but includes Continuum) is currently about £170/€195 + VAT or $220 + taxes. Upgrades, at a discount, from previous MAGIX versions are possible by registering a Boris account using the same email address as used for the original MAGIX registration.
All these recent acquisitions by both inMusic and Boris FX were out of insolvencies, so I’m sure they saw opportunities, a.k.a. bargain-bin prices. Sometimes it makes sense for a company to make an acquisition simply to eliminate a competitor, so perhaps we’ll just see RX, Sound Forge and ACID being subsumed into Samplitude.
As to where they got the capital, I’d say they found it down the back of the couch the so-called “AI” boys had been sitting on after they left.
Forgive my ignorance – I’ve only ever used VP “Edit”, so I’m not even sure what Continuum is yet!
I think an upgrade to at least the Vegas Pro perpetual license is worth considering for anyone who has a MAGIX version, if only to get away from any dependence on MAGIX keeping the activation servers alive, and it’s IMHO reasonable priced. So far my experience with Boris FX Vegas Pro 2026 has been positive, hopefully Izotope’s integration in the team will bring similar development benefits.
I can’t look at those plugins.