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TASCAM ceases development of Gigastudio

Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 1:04 am
by dahnielson
Notice: TEAC America, Inc. will cease further development of GIGASTUDIO and GIGASTUDIO related products as of July 21, 2008. Product sales and technical support will continue through the end of the year.
TASCAM have now effectively killed of Gigastudio and GVI as products and ceased all development. It apparently have pissed-off some people waiting on updates for their Gigastudio products. :twisted:

Now let us preach the gospel of LinuxSampler.

Re: TASCAM Ceases development of Gigastudio

Posted: Sat Jul 26, 2008 9:23 am
by dahnielson
Knee-jerk reaction:

http://www.opengigastudio.com/

Re: TASCAM Ceases development of Gigastudio

Posted: Sat Jul 26, 2008 10:42 am
by Alex
So far, since this news got out, i've had 33 enquiries from friends and colleagues about the viability of Linuxsampler as an alternative, and a lot of nights and days helping some of them set up the linux flavour. So far so good with my limited knowledge of all things code.

If there was ever a time for this mighty Sampler to fly, now seems to be it.
Because there's going to be a LOT of gig file users out there, who will be chasing an alternative. (imho)

The PR, and word of mouth continues....

Alex.

Re: TASCAM Ceases development of Gigastudio

Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2008 1:50 pm
by sbenno
my stance on the matter
Tascam will not open the source of GigaStudio any time soon, it would give competitors an advantage to better support the format and hurt the sale of existing GigaStudio software stock around the world.
Making money in the audio software market is damn hard, too much fragmentation, competition, piracy etc. Open source applications are getting better too and once there will be a basic set of tools which are good enough (sequencer, sampler, softsynths etc) user will prefer free, open source tools as they don't cost nothing enjoy a growing and enthusiastic user and developer base don't cause headaches with copy protection scemes and are immune from going bankrupt.
Bigger sample library developers have started to cook their own soup alias writing their own bundled sample playback engine. This hurts standalone sampler software because only smaller sample library developers which cannot afford to write their own sample playback engine remain. Perhaps you might think that NI is now laughing all the way to the bank because of their main competitor going out of the way but I think they are over time doomed too as sample library developers like VSL etc don't want to pay license fees for merely playing their samples. And NI probably made big bucks with those bigger sample library vendors, Garritan departed from Kontakt too, they use their own ARIA sample player.
I think most composers want ready to use products and the editing and tweaking of samples will be limited. So only the sampling freaks remain and I think it will not be enough to keep the cash flowing to stay afloat or provide growth.
Now add the fact that the worldwide economy is slumping (subprime crisis, wars, inflation and now the growing scarcity of oil and the doubling of its price within one year which will have profound negative implications on the global economy making us all poorer) and this means if people have to cut back in spending, audio stuff is a good candidate because part of the customers are hobbyists.
I hope that we can roll out LS VST soon in order to provide some relief GSt refugees.
I think sample library vendors should join with the open source community and work on an open and common sample playback platform which would avoid reinventing the wheel over and over again and having the users struggling with several proprietary, incompatible, often buggy sample playback engines.
But unfortunately amongst the sample library vendor community too much greed and mistrust reigns. They are obsessed with copy protection schemes which are only hurting honest customers because often the stuff gets cracked and then posted on some P2P network so unhonest users have fewer installation and usage hassles than the paying ones.

Not to mention the mess M$ created with Vista, very bad performance and high resource consumption.

Re: TASCAM Ceases development of Gigastudio

Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2008 7:05 pm
by sbenno
Open Source GigaStudio Petition: Why It’s Unlikely:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2008/07/2 ... ent-530884

Re: TASCAM Ceases development of Gigastudio

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2008 8:47 am
by dahnielson
Yes. Open sourcing Gigastudio will never happen. The proverbial snowball has a better fighting chance. If anyone was serious about it (other than as a knee jerk reaction and gaming on TASCAMs good will :roll: ) they would have found out how much TASCAM want for the codebase and asked for a vetting of the code to determine what kind of encumberment it contains.

Re: TASCAM Ceases development of Gigastudio

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2008 9:29 am
by Alex
I'll just add to this, that a native opensource sample format (OSF?), and a simple 'auto converter' as a utility to convert gig files (along with akai, sf2, dls, etc...) to "OSF' would go a long way to progressing further. (imho)

Alex.

Re: TASCAM Ceases development of Gigastudio

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2008 10:43 am
by dahnielson
Alex wrote:I'll just add to this, that a native opensource sample format (OSF?), and a simple 'auto converter' as a utility to convert gig files (along with akai, sf2, dls, etc...) to "OSF' would go a long way to progressing further. (imho)
Well, the SFZ format is pretty much that. Just not widely adopted or used.

Re: TASCAM Ceases development of Gigastudio

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2008 3:00 pm
by davephillips
Fascinating news, but not at all unexpected by those of us who have been in this game long enough (anyone else remember Opcode and Studio Vision ?). I agree that hopes for an open-source Gigastudio are likely to be disappointed, though I'm all for anyone trying to persuade Tascam that it's a good idea.

It's funny. I find myself in the position of defending the Linux user's right to select closed-source software, while at the same time I recommend avoiding closed-source software for reasons like this one. It may be a hybrid world, but commercial software does have the unique capability of closing its doors forever, even to its own user-base, so I will always recommend the open-source alternative. At the same time I won't go the "whole hog" a la Richard Stallman and deny myself a choice if that choice ends up being able to turn my imaginations into reality. As an artist I can only say that such a move defeats my first purpose, which of course has nothing to do at all with computers and their operating systems.

Happily we have LinuxSampler, so I'm content. Be prepared, folks, there may be something of a rush to get on the LinuxSampler train now. :)