The end of Giga

The end of Giga

25 July, 2008 | 10.00AM

• Written by: francispreve
• Filed under: Music News: gigastudio, nemesys, tascam

In a move that stunned the music technology industry, Tascam has ceased development of its groundbreaking sampler, GigaStudio.

Released in 2000 by Nemesys - a small Texas software developer - GigaStudio revolutionized sampling by streaming audio directly from the hard drive as opposed to loading it into RAM, which was the norm for that era.

Freed from the limitations of RAM, sound designers were then able to create incredibly detailed recreations of acoustic instruments like piano, strings, and other orchestral mainstays.

In addition, GigaStudio also offered an incredible 160 voices of polyphony per instance - an impressive achievement even to this day.

Tascam’s announcement first appeared on a forum post at vi-control.net earlier this week.

Here is the posting in its entirety:

“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.”

While the discontinuation of GigaStudio will seriously impact numerous production houses – many of which are extremely successful in the film and TV soundtrack industries – it’s always possible to simply dedicate one or more existing PCs to the GigaStudio software and continue to treat them like hardware samplers, a tactic already in use by several prominent composers.

In addition, the Giga soundware format has become so entrenched in modern production that many other software samplers can import the files (Logic’s EXS24 and Ableton’s Sampler come to mind) so sound libraries in this format should remain viable in the foreseeable future.

One final ray of hope exists in the form of Open GigaStudio, a petition to make GigaStudio open source.

It’s impossible to say whether Tascam will support the community by releasing the source code, but one thing is certain:

GigaStudio’s impact on the industry will resonate for years to come.

Full disclosure: I was part of the team that originally developed and marketed GigaStudio while at Nemesys from 1999 to 2000.

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