Native Instruments and iZotope today announced Soundwide as the new name of their parent company, and welcomed several new members to the Soundwide group of brands, including audio plugin platform Plugin Alliance and audio software company Brainworx.
iZotope and Native Instruments announced last year that they had teamed up to form a new technology group, backed by Francisco Partners and EMH Partners.
Soundwide’s brands include:
- Native Instruments – one of the leading developers of music software and hardware for music production, sound design, performance, and DJing.
- iZotope – an audio technology company that creates professional audio software for audio recording, mixing, broadcast, sound design, and mastering.
- Plugin Alliance – a company that partners with audio developers to distribute and market audio software online.
- Brainworx – features high-end software emulations of analog hardware.
- Sound Stacks, born from the minds of Cesare Ferrari and Julian Storer, the creator of the industry-standard open-source audio application framework JUCE. Sound Stacks will drive the development of new audio platform technologies aimed at improving productivity and performance for audio developers across the industry.
Together, the brands have a user base of upwards of 10 million people.
To celebrate the introduction of the parent company, Soundwide will be giving away Native Instruments’ Ethereal Earth, iZotope’s Neutron Elements and Plugin Alliance and Brainworx’s six plug-in Welcome Bundle, as free downloads through April 26th, 2022. Details are available on both the Native Instruments and iZotope websites.
Hello ,
I am not sure involving “Brainworx / Plugin Alliance” in the loop is a really “good” thing.
Two years later after the announce below…
https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/blog/blogpost/items/wolfgang-palm-interview.html
… I am still waiting for them to make Mr Wolfgang Palm’s plugins available AGAIN for buying. I have no idea why it takes so much time to allow their customer to buy Woflgang’s software through their brands.
I had all WP plugins of them except the “Phonem” which I often regret I did not buy when it was available.
The https://wolfgangpalm.com/ & https://www.facebook.com/PPGWavegenerator urls are even not existing anymore now :((
Hopefully the web archive has still a snapshot from March last year (for ref. if needed):
http://web.archive.org/web/20210312075349/http://wolfgangpalm.com/
I fully agree that people can retire after a full life of work and then, and in that case, I would have fully accepted to “loose” the possibility to buy (or even get potential updates in case of an operating system upgrade/incompatibilities) of any of my WP products, but the WP company was SOLD so I had the hope of a nice “future” for it.
I do not understand at all why some companies are spending money to buy other companies and not selling back their product. What’s the point of doing this kind of “investment” ? ok , they own the brand’s name and then what ?This is rather sad.
Eric
I wonder if it has to do with “managing” (i.e., suppressing) competition. Like if big company A wants to push product B, they might buy company who sells product C? Just a wild guess.
In any case, WP synths seem pretty innovative, so would be nice to keep them current.
I actually e-mailed Brainworx about this very subject sometime last year, and they kindly replied to me. They are a small company with numerous products to maintain, and they also suffered significant damage during the central German floods that struck Rheinland last summer. I’m optimistic that partnering with NI and iZotope – both companies with more resources – will give Brainworx the bandwidth to maintain the Wolfgang Palm products.
Many thanks for your comment
So at least there is a hope about something good to happen possibly one day.
Eric
thanks a lot for your comment
At least it seems that there is a hope that WP software will be available again in the future
Love PA stuff, been using it more and more. And hopeful NI will update its 2003 UI to be scaleable, can’t take the tiny type on it on high res screens.
Tried to install the PA plugins on my Mac (Monterey) and got a message that the licence file could not be created. I won’t change permissions on vital folders in my Mac to accommodate them…they can fix their licencer software.