TASCAM stops development of Gigastudio effective immediately

bralston · Post by **bralston** » Tue Jul 22, 2008 12:57 pm

FYI...not sure where else to put this, but in case folks here use Gigastudio on a PC or were anxiously awaiting the new GVI sampler for MAC...TASCAM/TEAC announced today that they are stopping development of their Gigastudio software and related Gigastudio products immediately. They will continue support for Gigastudio through 12/31/2008.

LINK

This is not a Joke.

The product has already been moved from TASCAM's current product page into their "legacy" section.

And as mentioned, the MAC version of their GVI software which was supposed to see a September release will now NOT be released at all. this was confirmed by a Gigastudio team member in another online composer's forum this morning.

So...bye, bye Gigastudio. The disk streaming sampler that started the software sample revolution.

GS4 is authorized via the syncsoft dongle...so one running GS4 or GVI should be ok in the future if they need to change computers and re-install their software for some reason. But GS3 used a TASCAM server authentication system that was rather cumbersome. There is no word on whether folks still running GS3 will be able to re-install and authorize their GS3 systems due to a system change or OS reinstall after 12-31-2008.

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Tue Jul 22, 2008 1:05 pm

Wow. This is major. Thanks for the scoop, bralston.

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 3:59 am

For all those who this'll adversely affect, I'm very sorry to hear this news.

Unfortunately, this is yet more vindication for my approach IMHO, albeit budget influenced, to stick with MIDI hardware, as much as I hate having to do so.
Stalwart, pioneer, trusted industry industry leader or not, if a company makes a module you can run it reliably into the future, regardless of its on-going success or otherwise.

News like this, especially when it involves a well established player, only serves to feed my scepticism and delay the inevitable move to VI land further.
This is the driving force behind my persistent hankering for DP to include a comprehensive enough suite of professional-sounding instruments to negate the requirement of having to add 3rd party VIs and plugs.
Sure, there'll always be niche markets that aren't serviced in this way and also very-high-quality offerings of many flavours in the more conventional areas, but I'd like to (actually, need to) see buying in to them as being an option rather than a necessity.

If MOTU went broke, I'd take the same approach and choose a different company. The point is that it'd be a one-off matter to learn a new interface and familiarise myself with the plugs on offer.
A one-time interruption, as opposed to the constant stress of having to keep multiple offerings from different vendors up to date, the fear that one or more of them might soon become unsupported, the out-of-the-blue bomshells such as this one, the demise of one or more companies, the fact that the various players enjoy inconsistent success at maintaing compatibility with the latest OSes and DAW versions and so on.

billf · Post by **billf** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 8:51 am

monkey man wrote:For all those who this'll adversely affect, I'm very sorry to hear this news.

Unfortunately, this is yet more vindication for my approach IMHO, albeit budget influenced, to stick with MIDI hardware, as much as I hate having to do so.
Stalwart, pioneer, trusted industry industry leader or not, if a company makes a module you can run it reliably into the future, regardless of its on-going success or otherwise.

News like this, especially when it involves a well established player, only serves to feed my scepticism and delay the inevitable move to VI land further.
This is the driving force behind my persistent hankering for DP to include a comprehensive enough suite of professional-sounding instruments to negate the requirement of having to add 3rd party VIs and plugs.
Sure, there'll always be niche markets that aren't serviced in this way and also very-high-quality offerings of many flavours in the more conventional areas, but I'd like to (actually, need to) see buying in to them as being an option rather than a necessity.

If MOTU went broke, I'd take the same approach and choose a different company. The point is that it'd be a one-off matter to learn a new interface and familiarise myself with the plugs on offer.
A one-time interruption, as opposed to the constant stress of having to keep multiple offerings from different vendors up to date, the fear that one or more of them might soon become unsupported, the out-of-the-blue bomshells such as this one, the demise of one or more companies, the fact that the various players enjoy inconsistent success at maintaing compatibility with the latest OSes and DAW versions and so on.

I'm with you on the hardware concept. I have several hardware modules in my studio. Yeah it might seem retro, but when Atmosphere gets borked because they stop supporting it, or Kontakt vanishes because NI cannibalized its own market with soft VI's, I know my archives are safe.

Beyond that, we need to collectively hold the vendors accountable. We should be insisting on interoperable solutions from all of them that will continue to work regardless of platform changes, bankruptcies, or the Gibson factor. These closed end systems from software providers in the audio industry are completely opposite of what is happening in other software sectors. Imagine what would happen if Adobe tried to make it so only Photoshop could read image files? There would be a monkey poo storm and a large migration to Gimp.

We need the same sort of thought process in this industry methinks.

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 9:12 am

I agree, Billy.
Time to fire up the MonkeyLabs™ Legislation Prefabulator™ (Legislate on the fly, or at least amongst 'em LOL!).

Another idea: How about you get your money back if the VI doesn't work on your system?
Seems to me that companies are getting away with murder in this area.

For now, for the monkey at least, it's gonna be hardware all the way.

Michael Canavan · Post by **Michael Canavan** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 10:40 am

monkey man wrote:I agree, Billy.
Time to fire up the MonkeyLabs™ Legislation Prefabulator™ (Legislate on the fly, or at least amongst 'em LOL!).

Another idea: How about you get your money back if the VI doesn't work on your system?
Seems to me that companies are getting away with murder in this area.

For now, for the monkey at least, it's gonna be hardware all the way.

What's funny about this is I was someone who got into soft synths early one, I bought reason a month after it came out etc. I still agree partially with your thinking though.
AFA NI, Spectral Delay and Vocator are both discontinued. They work fine on my system right now, but if a new version of OSX comes out, I'm going to wait to hear results form early adapters to see if they still work.

Brings up another point, freezing a system, when is enough enough? I have Komplete 5, DP5, Logic 8, Live 7, a ton of Ohm Force stuff, Zebra 2, Nomad Factory Vintage bundle, Wadorf Edition .....etc. etc.
It's my new feeling that I'm not in any hurry to get any more software, (except DP6

), and in turn when I feel the need for a new toy, it's analog hardware all the way.

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 10:57 am

Good point, Michael.

It seems to me that a system freeze is the only temporary protection one can afford from such insanity.

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 11:34 am

A few years ago I recall trying to make sense of the whole soft synth craze when CPUs were just barely up to the task and when some of the bigger libraries required a gaggle of machines to use them to any degree of effectiveness.

Yet, DP dropped that wonderful sampler support feature (as early as DP 3.x) which helped to integrate hardware samplers into the software environment. It didn't make the sampler dysfunctional, but the small feature made for huge conveniences.

Such devices as Liquid Mix, Duende, Muse Receptor (among a few others) seemed to fill in a much needed gap where hardware and software could be more closely integrated. The problem translates to the overuse of firewire on these devices. A single firewire bus must host everything. The upside of 2008 Macs is that the fw bus has been vastly improved even where 400 and 800 ports still share the same bus. The obvious solution for pre-08 machines is to get a fw host card, but with limited PCIe slots one can only use an audio card and perhaps something like a single UAD-1 before the slots are full. So, you decide to forego PCIe audio and make better use of a firewire interface, but that puts one more major component on the already-busy firewire bus.

The next hardware step to take is a PCIe Magma Chassis-- a seven slot box runs in the $3k area. Maybe there are some less expensive options out there, but no matter which way you turn it seems that your eggs are always in someone else's basket.

The best hardware investment for me with the least turnover (outside of monitors) has been my XV5080 which has lasted longer than any MIDI controller and has been actively in production over three Mac towers and I-don't-know-how-many versions of MacOs and OSX. Where Roland formats have themselves changed or perhaps the quality of their earlier library may leave a bit to be desired, there remains a need to convert other sample formats to Roland from-- say--- Giga....

... and thus we've come full circle.

I'm still glad that I can put the old MIDI cables to good use and such hardware as my XV5080 and S760 still see them plug and play as beautifully as they always have (however small the memory might be). It's so much less worrisome than the soft synth approach of having to chase upgrades to keep them OS or CPU compatible-- or even to wake up one morning to find them not supported at all.

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 11:54 am

Hearing you say that, Fwoggy, is the clincher for me, for now at least.
Coming from you, I feel I need no more motivation to stick with hardware for now.

The only question is, do I ditch the XV (hasn't been for me what it is for you, and I don't use it as a sample-playback machine in the strict sense - just the factory ROM set) and deck myself out in multiple Motif XS racks, or go for a combo of the two.
Near as I can tell from the demos, the XS creams the Roland in the drum, percussion, EP & piano departments.
My only concerns still lie in the brass and orchestral areas.
I was going to start a thread about this this week, but couldn't resist responding to your (bizarrely) encouraging thoughts.

Take care Hobster. Be back on the morrow.

kgdrum · Post by **kgdrum** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 12:07 pm

agreed Frodo- i have an XP-30 which finds itself on everything i do.
there is something nice about the immediacy as well as reliability of hardware. i generally prefer hardware synths and samplers over software based VI's,it works no drain on the system etc...I still have an Akai Z8,granted it doesn't get much use and the architecture is a bit weird but i
like knowing i have hardware based sample options on hand if needed.

like we have discussed many times, the software based VI business model seems to allow for instruments that have their quirks and often require paid upgrades.
We also seem to get as a bonus planned obsolescence that we just don't see with most hardware based instruments

Some of the things that seems to be the norm in the Software based VI market seem to show a totally different set of standards that the companies hold them selves to.
I like Hardware

KG

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 12:10 pm

You'll pry my ANCIENT Ensoniq EPS 16+ from my cold dead hands! LOL

Seriously, as I read this, the problem really seems to be of the cumbersome way we have to deal with external hardware boxes. Generally, we have to run MIDI cables to the units, then the hardware box has to convert its digital signal into analog, then we run cables to our interfaces and convert back from analog to digital again to record it into the computer.

Makes me have to consider apologizing for making fun of concepts like mLan, although I think it might have been just bad timing... dunno. It seems that if some sort of agreed upon WIDELY-ACCEPTED standard could be developed it would be a good thing.

What if someday all hardware effects modules, synth modules could have normal analog I/O, but had some sort of universal "DAW" connection that could receive and transmit MIDI and audio? (sounds maybe like mLan again?) Why couldn't this be standardized. Maybe Yahama screwed up by charging too much for licensing, don't know?

The basic idea of my rambling is wouldn't it be great to have say a firewire break out box connected to your Mac. This breakout box would have multiple of these "DAW" connections. You'd buy a new hardware effects box or module and instead of connection analog I/O etc. (which would still be there for those users), you'd connect one cable from the breakout to the effects/synth module. Your DAW software could automatically recognize it and add it to your available list of instruments if it was a synth module. Or a software interface could appear in your plug-ins if it was an effect and it could automatically report delay for ADC.

I know much of this is possible using different technologies in combination and I may be overlooking a lot... but it would be great for some sort of seamless integration of hardware into a DAW environment.

I'd love to see MOTU allow us to create our own virtual effects plugs by entering paramaters that apply to our hardware units and then have that hardware work as if it were a plug in, being able to put it on an insert, etc. and then if we have enterted in a latency for the device have it figure that in. I've heard one DAW can "ping" an attached hardware device to determine latency?

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 1:05 pm

monkey man wrote:Hearing you say that, Fwoggy, is the clincher for me, for now at least.
Coming from you, I feel I need no more motivation to stick with hardware for now.

The only question is, do I ditch the XV (hasn't been for me what it is for you, and I don't use it as a sample-playback machine in the strict sense - just the factory ROM set) and deck myself out in multiple Motif XS racks, or go for a combo of the two.
Near as I can tell from the demos, the XS creams the Roland in the drum, percussion, EP & piano departments.
My only concerns still lie in the brass and orchestral areas.
I was going to start a thread about this this week, but couldn't resist responding to your (bizarrely) encouraging thoughts.

Take care Hobster. Be back on the morrow.

Hey MM-- I'm keeping my XV. It doesn't do "everything" the best out of the box, but perhaps getting your hands on compatible CD and HDs for it will help you make more of the sampler section of it to "up" your ante on the orchestral side of things. In terms of sound quality, there are better orchestra libraries than Roland's own, and I dare say that some of those are rompler-based. However, I have no idea at this time who's making conversion software to get other formats into the XV sampler... not that I've researched this lately.

Then, there's MachFive. I have no idea how MachFive is stacking up to Kontakt in the soft sampler market, but I see a whole lot more third-party collections being released for native Kontakt format than for MachFive. That doesn't mean that one universal sampler can't deal with the universality of the other-- but the bigger point with this is that we're back to software.

...And where MachFive is concerned, we sweated through 2.5 years wondering if we'd ever see version 2. That's really hard to forget, especially with the disappearance of GIGA.

To be honest, MM-- I'm keeping everything until it totally falls apart and can't be fixed. That includes my S760 which is max'd out with 16MB of RAM (lol), my XV5080, and even my G4 still running an OS9 partition.

Thing is-- I can't *afford* to sell this stuff. With all due considerations for depreciation aside, there's no replacing the investment. I couldn't even sell the XV for the amount I paid for its RAM upgrade alone. But I *can* find add-ons for all of these machines for pennies on the dollar that continue to extend their life spans. The XV is now 7 years old and anything but a doorstop. The S760 is twice its age (!) and it just won't stop. Sample rates top out at 48k, but that's okay for now. Both units still take a huge load off even my MacPro.

Keeping the gear in production for as long as it works is the best way I know to make the most of it. It also bucks a system that expects users to turn over hardware almost annually.

mhschmieder · Post by **mhschmieder** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 1:08 pm

Ethernet. It's the future and the past all at the same time

. Some of the devices Frodo listed are Ethernet-based, not Firewire-based. A separate discussion nonetheless.

I seem to recall that Gigastudio didn't start out as a Tascam product, so maybe it's just being sold or spun off.

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 1:11 pm

kgdrum wrote:agreed Frodo- i have an XP-30 which finds itself on everything i do.
there is something nice about the immediacy as well as reliability of hardware. i generally prefer hardware synths and samplers over software based VI's,it works no drain on the system etc...I still have an Akai Z8,granted it doesn't get much use and the architecture is a bit weird but i
like knowing i have hardware based sample options on hand if needed.

like we have discussed many times, the software based VI business model seems to allow for instruments that have their quirks and often require paid upgrades.
We also seem to get as a bonus planned obsolescence that we just don't see with most hardware based instruments
Some of the things that seems to be the norm in the Software based VI market seem to show a totally different set of standards that the companies hold them selves to.
I like Hardware
KG

Yes! And when one area of your hardware sounds might experience issues your entire project is rarely brought to its knees.

The biggest problem with hardware is getting firmware updates when needed. Fortunately, these are not updates that are needed often-- not nearly as often as software updates rear their ugly heads.

billf · Post by **billf** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 1:15 pm

James Steele wrote:What if someday all hardware effects modules, synth modules could have normal analog I/O, but had some sort of universal "DAW" connection that could receive and transmit MIDI and audio? (sounds maybe like mLan again?) Why couldn't this be standardized. Maybe Yahama screwed up by charging too much for licensing, don't know?

The basic idea of my rambling is wouldn't it be great to have say a firewire break out box connected to your Mac. This breakout box would have multiple of these "DAW" connections. You'd buy a new hardware effects box or module and instead of connection analog I/O etc. (which would still be there for those users), you'd connect one cable from the breakout to the effects/synth module. Your DAW software could automatically recognize it and add it to your available list of instruments if it was a synth module. Or a software interface could appear in your plug-ins if it was an effect and it could automatically report delay for ADC.

I know much of this is possible using different technologies in combination and I may be overlooking a lot... but it would be great for some sort of seamless integration of hardware into a DAW environment.

I'd love to see MOTU allow us to create our own virtual effects plugs by entering paramaters that apply to our hardware units and then have that hardware work as if it were a plug in, being able to put it on an insert, etc. and then if we have enterted in a latency for the device have it figure that in. I've heard one DAW can "ping" an attached hardware device to determine latency?

I've always wanted my DAW to be a dashboard into every component in my studio. The reason external hardware feel out of favor was in large part due to what you're articulating. The integration into the DAW is kludgy. I suspect the hardware paradigm would be widely embraced by customers if there were better integration standards that were open and not owned by a single vendor.