iZotope RX8 is out, with lots of new features

[mhschmieder]

Hugely expensive upgrade pricing this time around; $300 for RX8 Advanced.

Lots of Advanced-only professional-level features that many here will need.

Not sure the non-Advanced additions and improvements are quite as earth-shaking.

As usual, there are ever-changing product suite configurations and upgrade paths. I've given up at this point it's too hard to figure out where one stands with that company.

I think some of the "new" Advanced-only features are ones they took away a while back, but I could be wrong. For instance, Spectral Recovery (Advanced-only), and Wow & Flutter, as well as Dialogue Contour and Dialogue De-Reverb.

This might be the first version (Advanced-only) to support Dolby Atmos 7.1.2, which is a standard that my across-the-bay former employer was also involved with. I don't yet do surround sound myself, but it's pretty essential for a lot of people so it's good that they have the support.

Loudness Control is for all versions and is labeled as new but is a feature I thought they had and then took away. De-rustle is Advanced-only, as is Dialogue Isolate and De-wind. De-hum is said to have been improved in this version.

Other Advanced-only features (maybe not new?) are Ambience Match and EQ Match.

I suppose it's a major update, unlike the last one or two revisions, and the GUI screenshots look like they have moved to a blue-biased vs. orange-biased colour theme.

[monkey man]

Thanks Mark.

I wonder how long we MPS users will have to wait to upgrade to MPS4 at a reasonable price, something we've usually had to wait up to a year for.

[mikehalloran]

As usual, there are ever-changing product suite configurations and upgrade paths. I've given up at this point it's too hard to figure out where one stands with that company.

No kidding! It’s beyond ridiculous with these guys. It’s a laugh when I see all these upgrade offers to products I already own in my iZotope account.

At the moment, I see nothing compelling me to hit the trigger now. I’ll likely wait till some new bundle upgrade includes RX8 Advanced, then upgrade to that for the same price or less. RX7A is an essential tool in my box, though, especially as I work with tracks generated in all sorts of environments.

As for features, not all work with DP. A few Advanced tools require ProTools or Adobe’s apps. Read carefully if some feature jumps out at you to make sure you can use it.

[mikehalloran]

The upgrade to Post Production Suite 5 from PPS 4 is the same $299. The only differences are RX8 Advanced and the two included Exponential Audio reverbs, Stratus and Symphony, have been upgraded to the 3D versions—nope, I got those licenses with PPS 4. So RX 8 A is the only change.

Since I own enough of their product and their various bundles to have so many extra licenses, Izotope is the one company that I'd be glad to switch to a subscription model — but not the bad kind where you can't use the software once you stop paying but the one where you no longer have upgrades if you stop paying. If they'd let me pay just once a year and let me upgrade/add when new stuff is released, I'd jump on that. I spend around $300 a year anyway and their Product Portal works pretty well.

[mhschmieder]

I agree on all of those points. The iLok license bloat is a REAL problem as there's a limit to how many it can hold, and as you know, having a suite with a downgrade version of an app can cause problems in the upgrade version being seen as authorized and its feature set properly exposed.

Thanks for pointing out something I forgot to mention due to being sleep-deprived, regarding the trend in Pro Tools only features, which they aren't very open about. There was a suite upgrade last year that only benefitted Pro Tools users but they sure didn't advertise that fact!

In this case, I think I spotted one or two new RX8 features that subtly infer the pro Tools exclusivity by mentioning one of their plug-in formats.

Seriously, I'd dump the company altogether due to their business practices and deliberate obfuscation, if there was an alternative, but I depend on RX7 Advanced pretty regularly as one of my three main top-level tools alongside Digital Performer and possibly DSP-Quattro.

I do see some new RX8 Advanced stuff that could help immensely, but the craziness of our current times is making it hard for me to predict which music projects I'll work on when, as so many of them don't have realistic paths forward in 100% isolation mode. Otherwise, I could be pretty confident I'd need the new Spectral Recovery feature right away.

[mhschmieder]

On another forum, someone mentioned that there's apparently a new plug-in coming from iZotope fairly soon, that isn't an update to an existing one, and that will be part of the next suite they offer (whatever that is), as well as an upgrade to which version of some codec they're supporting (I think it was a codec that was mentioned, but maybe it was a surround sound format).

So they're saying hold out for the next suite. It's also been the case that they tend to release some products back to back between SEP and NOV and hope people will buy each suite over that period and thus spend more than if they waited for the full set of updates to be ready to purchase together.