IZOTOPE UPDATE VINYL - and its free

If you are a vinyl lover, this will be good news. I have tried and tested it with Reaper and K.Kontrol. All good. If you are using K.Kontrol remember to run it in standalone before using it with Reaper. Happy daze.

It seems like iZotope changed their policy and dropped their support for older operation systems. RX7 supported Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, but now RX8 requires 10.13 High Sierra. That's a big change.

how does it differ from the original?

It's interesting when the vinyl effect gets used on music that is later released on vinyl - double vinyl crackling.

Well if they come up with software to totally remove all the crap pop and crackle from my vinyl records, let me know, that would actually be useful.

I always assumed it's supposed to mostly be a joke or a prank to mock "audiophiles" who think analog is superior to vinyl. ;) Plus, it's free. It could also be something they originally developed internally to test & refine their click & pop repair tools (in Rx). It could be legitimately useful if your making a movie (or some other dramatic production) and you want to simulate the sound of a record player.

It's kind of frustrating in a way that the stereotypical folly used when someone walks up to a mic on a stage is that of the sound guy screwing up and letting some feedback run wild. This reminds me of that vibe. But with the stereotypical malfunctioning turntable and/or damaged vinyl artifacts this time. It's like a lo-fi version of vinyl malfunction artifacts though. Gets the effect across sort of. In real life, the damage artifacts (clicks and pops) have significant dynamic range over the program and the distortions from stylus misalignment come to life in a glaring way. This plugin in like an old school telephone ring ringtone on a smartphone.

You can add these vinyl distortions or remove real vinyl distortions in Audacity which is also free.