Since Native Instruments and iZotope were combined into a new company known as Soundwide earlier this year we’ve already witnessed the demise of NI’s Absynth, and now it transpires that iZotope’s Iris 2 synth, BreakTweaker drum machine and Trash 2 distortion effect are following it to the great plugin retirement home in the sky.
A statement on iZotope's website says: "iZotope products Iris 2, Breaktweaker, and Trash 2 are no longer available for purchase from iZotope.com. Support for these products will remain in effect for 12 months from your date of purchase."
The company adds that: "If you have purchased these products through iZotope.com within the last 12 months, we will continue to provide you with technical support and updates to address critical issues that arise for up to 12 months from your purchase date. The support period for these products will end on October 27, 2023 for all users. We will not actively test compatibility of these products on new operating systems or host application versions after October 27, 2022, and the current system specifications for these products will not change."
Explaining why the products are being discontinued, iZotope says: "iZotope is continually developing new products, services, and solutions to enable and innovate around audio production journeys. We occasionally need to retire older products in order to focus our resources and development efforts on building new, innovative products and features."
Neither Iris, BreakTweaker or Trash has been updated for some time, so the three products’ demise doesn’t come as a huge surprise. However, iZotope did recently add some of Trash’s distortion goodness to its Neutron 4 auto-mixing software, and Trash 2 was actually given away for free as part of a Soundwide holiday promotion in 2021.
Earlier this year, it was announced that Plugin Alliance and Brainworx were also joining the Soundwide roster. Whether either of these companies’ products will also fall by the wayside remains to be seen.
Of its reasons for retiring Absynth, NI said last month: “Discontinuing Absynth was not an easy decision to make, but the resource required to keep the product in line with modern standards has become too much of a challenge. Absynth has also long been in need of updates and improvements, and we are unfortunately not able to provide the synth with the attention it needs.”
