Native Instruments has announced that it is dumping the Soundwide brand, announced in April of 2022 as the parent company for NI, iZotope, Plugin Alliance, Brainworx and Sound Stacks.
Now, iZotope, Brainworx, and Plugin Alliance are becoming part of Native Instruments. The company says that the move will help create a seamless and consistent experience for customers that use Native Instruments, iZotope, and Brainworx products.
Native says that they’re making the change because most people had never heard of the Soundwide brand:
“What about Soundwide?
Some of you might remember back in 2022 when iZotope, Native Instruments, Plugin Alliance, and Brainworx came together as a group called Soundwide. While the spirit of Soundwide lives on—our brands coming together to empower creativity—the Soundwide name wasn’t as familiar to our community.
With that in mind, we made the choice to move forward with a brand that more people know and love: Native Instruments.”
The company says that they are working to make it possible to:
- Use one unified login for your accounts across the brands, so you don’t have to remember multiple sets of login details;
- Utilize Native Access as the preferred destination for installing and authenticating a broader range of products, reducing the need for multiple product installation tools;
- Get access to one Customer Care center to get the support you need, across all product lines;
- Visit a one-stop Shop and discover products across all their brands, including loyalty offers and upgrades; and
- Explore more tightly connected experiences and technologies across NI products.
Well let’s hope they bring back wolfang Palm’s infinte pro which Brainworx bought and buried some years ago. It was a lovely synth with a lot of potential and i still remember i had a lot of fun controlling it with Rolli in mpe mode.
rise of the MegaCorps
stay frosty, choomba
Now everyone can hate the abandonware policy of one brand, instead of four.
lol! NI – Nolongerusable Instruments
Wildly accurate
Oh wow. A seamless and consistent experience. What an incredible concept, that will surely be well executed for many years. Consistent and seamless, like we’ve all experienced from Native Instruments, year after year………….
As someone that has plenty of products with all these companies this is good news if I can merge accounts. For instance I own Ozone 9 Advance but just upgraded to Komplete 14 which comes with Ozone 10 standard. It’s pretty confusing since they have completely different software licensing apps (the Ozone 10 doesn’t even show up in my Izotope account) and completely different upgrade paths if I wanted 10 Advanced.
How much more can they charge for Komplete Ultimate REALLY Komplete this time?
I own many of Izotope’s products and am sad they killed off IRIS and iDrum.
NI is brain dead since years. Who cares about their business non-sense? ^^
Agree that it is sad if not a travesty that Wolfgang Palm synths were sold to PA on the understanding they would continue to be available .
Generally , seems an AA meeting ; Abandonware Anonymous – my name is Izotope – my $200
software on my website is also now on sale for $12 at Plugin Boutique –
but never gonna be M1 support .
unified licensing/account management is awesome, but ultimately not that helpful if there’s nothing worth installing anymore. NI still have a wide range of formerly wonderful projects that can’t run natively on apple silicon, they haven’t really developed anything new beyond kontakt libraries despite a catalog of incredible synths and platforms with unfortunately aging, inefficient codebases, and largely just continue repeatedly repackaging the same old products. Same can be said for izotope, which has a few valuable, but tired, products. this doesn’t really offer any hope for these things changing.
Soundwide was too expensive to update, so they just abandoned it
i think this is great, the other way was quite confusing with so many names and email newsletters and promotions flying around, NI offerings were the only ones i ended up paying attention to because i use them the most, keep it simple!
NI was a lovely company, about 10 years ago.
They have been on a steep decline ever since.
Too bad, I used to like them very much.
Today I don’t care if they come or go.
More duckspeak. Say hello to the new boss. Same as the old boss. When changing business card artwork is a BIG ANNOUNCEMENT, don’t expect anything new or interesting in the actual product department.