Should sounds be part of a closed format that may not last? What happens if the format and platform that once were trusted by musicians and sound designers ceased to be? That’s the hard lesson learned by users of a popular sampling “standard” – but for once, the news is good.

GigaSampler has been a huge part of the sampling landscape since its introduction a decade ago, and users have massive investments in Giga sound libraries. As I noted over the summer, however, Tascam ceased development on the aging Giga platform, leaving users without an important tool – and some powerful technologies without a home.

Today, news has leaked out that Garritan, developer of some popular sample libraries and (with Plogue) the sophisticated, cross-platform ARIA Engine, has purchased all of the technology assets related to Giga from Tascam (TEAC). That includes GigaStudio, Gigasampler, GVI, Gigapulse, and everything that goes with it.

This is huge news for compatibility, interoperability, and the future evolution of sampling. I spoke with Garritan chief Gary Garritan himself to chat about some of the possibilities.

The most obvious potential benefit is native file compatibility with Giga sample libraries, so that that sound content isn’t stranded in an abandoned, closed format. Gary says native file reading and writing is high on the priority list – which should also be a big coup, I think, for his ARIA platform.

There are some technologies worth saving in Giga, too, though, not just the sample format. Some of the jewels in Giga include the DEF high-quality filtering algorithms, spectral morphing, and convolution capabilities.

“There’s a treasure trove of great technology and we want to make it available to as many musicians as possible,” says Garritan. “We just have our work cut out for us.”

The process of assimilating Giga’s technology is likely to take time, Garritan says:

What this means is that we have this great technology and we can do stuff with it. But we don’t have the original Giga team – and we have two million lines of source code to go through. Some of that code is fifteen years old. I want to examine the code … and I want to consult with the user base, and chart a direction.

There’s potential to merge technologies, so that future versions of ARIA benefit from Giga technology. “We have a really efficient engine ourselves,” says Garritan. “It’ll probably be using the best of both ARIA and Giga.”

Gary emphasized that this process is really open to input: “We need to consult with the user base and ask the users what they want – ask our users what they want.”

We’ve certainly seen how not to acquire technologies in the past. I’ll bet money that someone brings up the acquisition of music software developer Opcode by Gibson, which turned an entire platform into abandonware.

Far from that, what Gary is describing is really the opposite: an opportunity to embrace open standards, and perhaps to even avoid the kind of closed platform Giga originally represented. Ironically, the open source Linux Sampler Project, while its own codebase is entirely open source, relies on the closed Giga format for storing samples.

“On our ARIA Player we use an open source format, SFZ,” says Garritan. “We’re for promoting open standards.” Working with Cakewalk, Plogue, and others, Garritan says he hopes to encourage more openness. SFZ could even become the kind of common format that Giga (and other proprietary formats) have been in the past – only without being the sole domain of one vendor. “I think sampling technologies and formats should be open – they shouldn’t be closed and proprietary.”

This is also, incidentally, good news for Linux. I know there’s talk of SFZ in Linux Sampler, as well. And for those who want a friendlier interface, ARIA already works in WINE, with a native version in the works. Gary says ARIA works beautifully on netbooks. That means you could have a sampler running on the netbook, then do your production in, say, SONAR on your Windows machine at home.

I should clarify that ARIA itself is a proprietary player – and, honestly, I expect commercial developers to continue to develop proprietary technology and use that to sell their wares; it’s a system that works. But on the other hand, with a common, open standard file format, you could benefit from both the commercial-proprietary and open/free ecosystems. For many of us, we might even use both on the same machine. Right now, you have the opposite: a common file format that had been closed and proprietary (and not entirely supported), an open source sampler built on that proprietary format, and limited cross-platform support. It looks to me like we’re moving toward resolving all of those issues.

Composers and sound designers are deeply connected to sound libraries, investing time and money into purchasing or designing libraries, and in using them in their work. Happily, the days in which that investment could be gone forever because a vendor lost interest may finally be coming to a close. As I noted in July, simply open sourcing Giga wasn’t a real option: there’s too much work to do to navigate the code base and modernize the format, and we’d still be stuck with a dated, closed format. So to me, this is about the best thing that could happen: get Giga into knowledgeable hands, and really try to move the best of it into modern, open formats.

That is, open source alone is never a panacea. In this case, you need a commercial developer that can put work into maintaining the technologies, but you also need a common format for commercial and free software developers alike – because, really, it’s what the musicians, composers, and sound designers need.

Because this is sure to be a long process, we’ll be watching as it unfolds. But in the meantime, Gary has posted some FAQs and invites Giga and Garritan users to talk about what they need and want. So, don’t be silent: this is a chance to have someone actually listen and respond, rather than just “wishing” for something to happen.

Northern Sounds Forum [Garritan community]

http://gigastudio.com/ [New Garritan Giga site with press release, FAQ]

The LinuxSampler project offers GigaSampler 3 compatibility for Linux and Windows, so it’s already an open alternative for dealing with your orphaned Giga sampler files. (Naturally, you could also look to a number of Giga-compatibility samplers on the market.)

But the open source community has long been under fire — often rightly so — for simply copying proprietary software rather than doing something new and innovative. I enjoy "new and powerful," so that sounds like a great idea, and that’s what Darren is proposing. He writes:

What I want to do is build a code framework (not to be confused with a library) that will contain classes for handling streaming sample playback, resampling, and all that fun stuff, as well as directed graph building for DSP. From here, the framework can be used to build monolithic applications for sampling and synthesis, as well as a Reaktor-like application, if we do it right.

Yes, it would be better to split things out into libraries, but that takes a lot more work, and I’m tired of things not happening. The sooner we can get some code working, the better.

I should also mention that there are existing open source libraries we can and will leverage, like libsndfile, libsamplerate, libfftw3, and the Rubber Band library, so we won’t be starting completely from scratch.

This sounds terrific to me — not necessarily as a replacement for existing, proprietary tools, but as a framework on which new tools could be built. There are research and compositional projects that could absolutely benefit from the existence of such a library. And having this tool as an option could strengthen computer music platforms in general. (In other words, wherever you stand in terms of open source and philosophy, it could be a good thing. Hey, I’m happy all around — I couldn’t live, basically, without both systems.)

But enough theory — the idea needs developers and real code, so it’s not just an idea.

If you’re a developer, do get in touch. I’m happy to help host and support any such work in any way we can via CDM. Darren is on gmail as dmlandrum, or leave a comment here.

By the way, happy OSCON day.

Image: jagelado. (Interestingly, since the creation of that image, Microsoft has come to make more use of open source — you can argue about the reasons, but not the effect.)

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