[Fmpro] Gigastudio dropped by Tascam, get me the razor blades

[Christopher Alpiar]

OK well maybe not the razor blades for real. But this announcement  
today has left me with a hole in my gut (and quite a gut it is!). My  
studio is completely based on GigaStudio 3 and 4, I spent significant  
money recently building xp 64 bit systems to run GS4 64-bit version,  
which ALMOST works... so so close but some features are too screwy to  
make GS4 viable for production use (like channels changing and when  
you change them back you get BSOD....) but its so so close and I have  
been checking EVERY DAY on Tascam site for GS 4.02 release that fixes  
these issues...... and now the big baseball bat to the groin - Tascam  
is dropping the full GigaStudio product line.

The thing that kills me is that its always been an AMAZING product  
that never had enough devs to really release it properly. And the  
Tascam customer service has been one of the worst - really I mean  
WORST - experiences over the last 5 or so years of any company of any  
nature in the world I have ever dealt with. Both problems a direct  
result of the bean counters at Tascam not putting money into it to  
have the bugs fixed and the right people support it. And that is  
because they weren't creative enough to think of ways to leverage  
their product that could bring in the revenue they needed to grow it  
properly. POOR MANAGEMENT!

Anyhow, while I also have Kontakt, I like the sound quality and  
features of Gigastudio MUCH more, plus my mixes live from the included  
GigaPulse convolution reverb in GS3 and 4. And also the mainstay of my  
sample libraries is the VSL Full Pro edition which is all GS 3 format  
(much of that tricky scripting won't translate to kontakt so I hear,  
especially performance set stuffs). I would LOVE to be able to afford  
the full upgrade path to vienna instruments, but that is like $15,000  
and its not on my list for the moment. I did upgrade to the Vienna  
Instruments Special Edition extended, which is really nice and all,  
but its only the most basic articulations.

Some talk is being made of open source GigaStudio. There already is  
the LinuxSampler open source sampler, which is really cool but its  
like only as far advanced as GS3 and doesnt support some things  
like .art articulation files. So there is now a petition being put  
together by I think Mark Belbin to ask for the source code to  
GigaStudio and to have it become an open source project. Personally I  
doubt that will happen because some of the components that make up  
GigaStudio were licensed from 3rd parties. But it might happen, which  
if it did would be totally cool! Either way I think its a cool  
petition to sign and I highly suggest you all to do it too, it takes  
literally 15 seconds. Just go to:

http://www.opengigastudio.com

and then click the text saying "Click this link to sign petition" and  
then add a post on the blog there. You can post as much or little as  
you like just include that you support Open GigaStudio

Thanks


Christopher Kennedy Alpiar
Cinematic Composer
937.294.0900 (Dayton Studio)
310.339.9603 (Los Angeles)
877.294.0912 (Toll Free)
www.alpiar.com