TC Electronic’s PowerCore, a hardware DSP platform for audio processing is officially discontinued. You could easily continue working with PowerCore for some time, however. A recently-released 4.0 update provides full support for current OSes and hosts, even 64-bit ones, says the manufacturer. Nor is TC going anywhere: the company says it will continue to pursue audio interfaces and software (non-hardware-DSP) plug-ins. In fact, it’s a safe bet TC simply wasn’t getting enough business out of PowerCore to justify it, and will devote its resources elsewhere.

One manufacturer that is making it in hardware DSP that’s not Avid Pro Tools is Universal Audio. Their UAD-2 system remains a popular choice, and may become more so now that it offers FireWire support on Macs (something previously offered only by the PowerCore). Updated: James Grahame reminds me that it’s worth mentioning Sonic Core, who have their own Scope platform. As with UA, they’re basically a specialty shop, whereas TC has a number of other businesses. With S|C covering new-fangled digital ground like graintable and physical modeling, and UA focusing on first-party development of analog modeling and vintage emulation, you’ve got a good range of choice for DSP.

The crossgrade doesn’t give you a break on new UAD hardware, but it does give you significant bundles of free plug-ins for the platform. The breakdown goes something like this:

Solo line: Fairchild + Cambridge + Puletc-Pro ($377 value)
Duo: add LA-3A, DreamVerb ($675 value)
Quad: add Precision Limiter, EQ, multiband ($1322 value)

That’s on top of coupons for plug-ins of your choice included with each of those packages. And it includes the new FireWire Satellite systems.

None of this will entirely comfort existing users, though, I’m guessing. Our friend Oliver at Wire to the Ear writes a nice obituary – and I agree that I hope we see native ports of some of these plugs. (That or else maybe we’ll see TC introduce them on the iPad, the way the industry is going.)
TC Electronic Discontinues the PowerCore

The ongoing success of the UAD-2, even if for a specific niche, demonstrates that hardware DSP platforms aren’t necessarily going away. At the same time, it’s easy to understand that TC might focus instead on native software and specialized hardware (like stompboxes).

It’s not so often that I write obituaries for hardware, but this time, it seems appropriate. JazzMutant has announced that its Lemur, the multi-touch hardware controller, is officially at the end of its life.

Their announcement:

Since 2002, JazzMutant has been a acknowledged pioneer in the field of Creative Computing and Multi-touch technology, being the first-ever company to develop and bring to the market a product featuring a multi-touch screen as early as 2005. Since its market launch, the Lemur has been endorsed by a fascinating community of music and video artists. Nine Inch Nails, Richard Devine, Hot Chip, Ritchie Hawtin, Matthew Herbert, M.I.A, Mike Relm, Alva Noto, Ryuchi Sakamoto, Daft Punk, Bjork, … : The list of prestigious and influent artists who have made the Lemur their favorite pet companion on stage would be way too long to be mentioned here. Its visionary concept and groundbreaking technologies allowed the Lemur to win numerous international press awards and was recently elected “Innovation of the decade” by Future Music.

During five years and despite the new fever surrounding touch technologies, the Lemur remained the only Multi-touch device capable to meet the needs of creative people. From now on, this ecosystem is evolving quickly : powerful consumer tablet devices are becoming mainstream, bringing the power of multi-touch to everyone. In the meantime, JazzMutant, renamed Stantum in 2007, has become a technology-centric company and developed partnerships with tier-one industrial partners to speed up this democratization. As a result, the need for a high-end dedicated hardware is doomed to vanish in the near future. This is why Stantum is announcing today that it will close its JazzMutant activity unit and stop selling its legendary Lemur Multi-touch hardware controller at the end of December while the stock lasts! The last batch of Lemurs just came out of the factory. These very last units are now available at a special discounted price from JazzMutant’s webstore and from its authorized distributors and retailers. These very last units are now available with 25% discount! Moreover, the Dexter App and an original Lemur T-shirt will come along for free. Don’t miss this last opportunity and grab the legendary Lemur from authorized retailers while the stock last! The Technical support and after sale service will be handled until December 31, 2011. The jazzmutant website will stay online in order to let the user community access support resources and share their projects.

We would like to thank all the people involved in this fantastic adventure: first of all the user community which exceeded our wildest expectations in creating the most amazing templates; our devoted resellers, who helped us to show the Lemurs all over the world; finallymusic software editors for their support.

http://www.jazzmutant.com/press_release.php

None of this is necessarily news. To me, the surprise is that the transition away from a dedicated multi-touch controller to widespread multi-touch took as long as it did. (Well, actually, it isn’t so much of a surprise in retrospect, but perhaps the Lemur made the coming transformation so vivid that I hadn’t thought through just what that transformation would take to come to pass.)

At the end of 2005, writing a review for Keyboard Magazine of the Lemur, I concluded that powerful as touch was, it should be viewed as a complement, not a replacement, for tactile hardware – a tool ideal for certain tasks:

The Lemur is an unusual piece of hardware. Because it rethinks fundamental questions about what music hardware should be, it raises questions we normally take for granted. But it also suggests that conventional hardware interfaces aren’t as arbitrary as one might think.

If anything, I think at the time I wildly underestimated some of the Lemur’s most important contributions:

• Simple, geometric, high-contrast user interface elements improved legibility and usability.
• It pointed to physics-driven touch interfaces which still haven’t been fully explored – even by the likes of Apple.
• It demonstrated how important multiple touch points could be – not just two, or three, but the same number of touch points for which you have fingers.
• It led adoption of OpenSoundControl (OSC), leading to more intelligently-labeled controls, network-based control schemes (whether Ethernet or WiFi), and higher-resolution data.
• It showed the usefulness of floating point control precision, particularly in the visual space.

But more importantly, in my Keyboard story I said I felt that the Lemur would ultimately be replaced by computers that had touch, rather than dedicated touch controllers:

There’s no question that multi-touch touchscreens represent the future of computer interfaces, and the Lemur is the biggest leap yet toward that science fiction future. For now, the challenge is that the Lemur’s features lie somewhere between a computer display and music controller, without effectively supplanting either one. The Lemur sacrifices the sensitivity and tactile feedback of physical controls in the name of flexibility, but that payoff is limited by the restrictions of its pre-built interface objects and the difficulty of configuring new layouts and assigning them to software controls.

If the Lemur could be truly fused with the computer display, rather than requiring an entirely independent interface, it would become a must-buy. Until that happens, the Lemur could be a worthy acquisition if you need more flexible control of parameters like timbre and surround sound, or want a programmable interface you can touch, and can afford paying a premium for emerging technology. But for most of us, less-expensive and more musical physical hardware will remain the preferred way of interacting with the virtual worlds of computer sound.

In fact, in one odd sense, the Lemur’s separation of control from sound source has hindered the fusion of sound and interface on devices like the iPad; control surfaces remain arguably more popular than dedicated musical instruments and production tools that take advantage of the new touch paradigm.

I imagined that the fusion of touch displays with computers was a couple of years off; it was actually closer to six years. It really took the debut of Apple’s iPad this year – some five years after the Lemur’s introduction – for us to see the computer fused with the touch interface. And I think the year of the tablet is more likely to be 2011, as Windows, Linux (MeeGo and Ubuntu), Android, and presumably Chrome tablets all hit the marketplace. (True, we’ve seen computers with touch, but they’ve all made compromises that prevented them from even matching the Lemur, either in sacrificing performance, adding cost, losing multiple touch points and resolution, or some combination.)

Some of the coming models will seem more like conventional computers with touch displays, others more like tablets in the mold of the iPad.

What remains to be seen is whether we’ll see Stantum’s technology – technology derived from the Lemur – in some of those devices. (See my April interview with JazzMutant’s co-founder.) No new information there. Update – it bears saying, based on what I see in comments: we already know that there are a lot of tablets and touch-equipped laptops and specialized devices coming to market in 2011 and beyond. There are more devices, from what I’ve seen, than there are vendors of touch technologies. That makes this a very desirable marketplace, and could explain why JazzMutant are in no hurry to open source their code. It’s a safe bet that Stantum is still making a play for that enormous market, with everything from general consumer electronics to specialized gear for certain industries in the mix (and not just music). I don’t have any new information, but I expect when they’re able to make something public, you’ll know.

As for the Lemur touchscreen, though, it is now committed to computing history. The present is, primarily, the iPad, and the future, from Apple and others, offers multitouch as inexpensively and seamlessly integrated with computing hardware as the trackpad, keyboard, and mouse have been in the past. The knob, the piano keyboard, strings and frets, and other tactile interfaces live forever, but touchscreens can at least be powerful options for the digital realm between tactile musical control and composition, as a more direct way to reach out and touch interactive interfaces for sound.

Tascam has chosen to cease development and support of its popular GigaStudio sampler and product line, including GigaPulse, GigaViolin, and Giga VI, breaking a widely-used product and various other products based on it. I had actually heard this was coming some time ago, but unfortunately couldn’t verify on-record sources in a way that would allow me to share. Now, it’s official.

MusicRadar has the story: Tascam axes GigaStudio

and Film Music Magazine’s Peter Alexander broke the news first:

Tascam Ceases Giga Development as of July 21; Sales And Support End December 31

Tascam has made no official statement, but the report has been confirmed in a message thread by Tascam’s Marketing Manager, and the product has been removed to the discontinued section.

All I can say is, shame on Tascam. It seems this decision was made some time ago, but not announced — all while sales continued. Furthermore, based on the information I’ve been able to find, there seems to be no information whatsoever on the long-term state of availability or support for the product beyond December 31. A company with the size, reputation, and pro relationships that Tascam has ought to be able to present some sort of legacy support plan. Abandoning users in this way risks the trust the Tascam brand has with customers. Gibson Guitar has become practically an adjective because they discontinued Opcode’s Studio Vision Pro following an acquisition. People are still sore about that even a decade later, and they’re a guitar company, not a pro audio company like Tascam. GigaStudio has a similarly loyal following, particularly in fields like film scoring, and — whether Tascam’s business decision was justified or not — you can bet you’ll be hearing about this for some time to come.

So what’s life after Giga? Given that Giga’s audience was fond of massively huge sample libraries, and the tool was Windows-based, I could believe that 64-bit-native sampler applications could be next. (Clarification: GS4 was native 64-bit, but that doesn’t do you a whole lot of good now, of course.) With 64-bit memory addressing, it’s possible to go an order of magnitude beyond 4 GB (or less) memory limits, which would appeal to Giga’s hard-core sampling audience. Cakewalk supports 64-bit Windows for both their host (SONAR) and instruments, but it’d be nice to see, say, Native Instruments Kontakt in a 64-bit version for Vista 64-bit, too. I’d run Kontakt and SONAR together in a second. (Yes, Mac fans, Mac OS theoretically can support 64-bit memory addressing, but no music app on Windows does, either, at present. So, 64-bit Logic and EXS24, perhaps?)

At the very least, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Cakewalk, Native Instruments, MOTU, and others offer crossgrade offers. They all offer very fine sampling products, though I’m not sure that’ll come as much comfort to disgruntled Tascam customers.

It’s also possible that a third party could take up support of the GigaStudio product and continue it for its user base. No one appears to have stepped up to the plate yet, though. Stay tuned.

And, Earth to Tascam: please make some kind of statement to your customers, even if it means a series of messages if the situation is evolving. Your website is an official outlet, so moving an active product to the discontinued section of your site can be considered an official statement. Word in audio circles gets around fast even without the Web, and your customers deserve to hear more from you officially. (If we get additional information, we’ll run it on CDM.)

Tascam Legacy Software