How alive is Giga?

[JoE]

I\'ve been away (both from the forum and my beloved music-computers) for a long while because I had to write a PhD thesis. Now I\'m back, looking at what has happened during the past 6 months and my impression is that, besides the development of new libraries, not much progress has been made.

Please understand that I\'m not posting this for the sole purpose of being provocative. I just wonder how brite Gigastudio\'s future is. Granted, my expectation of finding a new, improved version of the Gigastudio software was overly optimistic. But what puzzles me is that I can\'t even find the slightest hint that there\'s something new coming our way anytime soon.
Gigastudio is a great program, and I was amazed by what can be done with a PC when I first saw it. But just like the early versions of the software, the current version looks kind of ... organic ... to me (both visually, see the Capture to wav thingy and conceptually, see the Editor). A quick port was made to Win XP, but no improved performance or anything. Does this mean the absolute performance limit of the hardware has been reached? At most 160 voices, regardless of the machine specs? How can that be? People seem to be forced to use several machines to fill their needs.
Again, please don\'t take this post as being negative and counterproductive. I\'m just trying to find out which way this is going. - For instance, producing a big library for Giga is a major commitment. In the case of the Vienna project the commitment is gigantic. Those guys are even saying they count on certain performance limitations being eliminated.
On the other hand, buying such a library is an enormous commitment, as well. I\'m sure that soon 160 voices will be considered absolutely unacceptable - Gary\'s library consumes a great portion of this polyphony right now. Right now .gig still seems to be the canonical format for new, great libraries. But how long will this be the case with all the other software samplers coming out (which actually allow the use of 3rd party plugins!!)? I think it would be a shame if I was forced to switch to a different platform some day, having to hope that smooth, reliable conversion of all my libraries is possible.

Maybe someone who has more insight into all this than myself could comment, or give some kind of prediction on what giga\'s future is. I ask this because we all know that in corporations such as TASCAM decisions are made at the conference table, without much regard to the implications for this community (see Emagic Logic). The lack of visible progress in Giga\'s version history makes me wonder.

I\'m sure there are people here who would know if the software development at TASCAM is doing well. Please tell me that it is!!

[SCARBEE]

It Is! images/icons/smile.gif
A 3.0 version will come out in 2003. And it will ve worth the wait... images/icons/grin.gif

[Chadwick]

\"A quick port was made to Win XP, but no improved performance or anything.\"

The port was never meant to be a new version - simply an aid to those who couldn\'t wait to migrate to XP.

\"Does this mean the absolute performance limit of the hardware has been reached?\"

According to those who know, the polyphony bottleneck is in hard disk bandwidth - not in the Giga code. Maybe V3 will take a leaf out of other manufacturers books and allow people to \'fake\' increased polyphony by dedicating large chunks of memory to ram resident samples. A step back for sure, but what can you do?

\"People seem to be forced to use several machines to fill their needs.\"

You mean like Steinberg users who have been offered \'VST system link\' to help them gang together several PCs in order to get around the problems of maxing out a PC with SX and a few VSTIs?

\"But how long will this be the case with all the other software samplers coming out?\"

Who knows? There are four or five soft samplers on the market which boast hard disk streaming now, or real soon. I am yet see one seriously challenge Giga on its own merits though. Sure, you get VST integration, ram based playback, time stretching and other extras, but the core prerequisits of real time low latency and 160 voices of disk streaming don\'t seem to be met.

\"The lack of visible progress in Giga\'s version history makes me wonder.\"

It\'s been said before on this forum and it\'s worth saying again. The easy road for Tascam would be to write a list of great features they\'d like their machine to have, and use that list to stop other manufacturers from selling THEIR product by splashing it all over the music world as the core feature set of their imminent upgrade, while they sit in their offices seeing which features can REALLY be made to work. This is cheap practise and I see Tascam\'s competitors do it monthly.

Also, if Tascam have blindingly brilliant innovations in development, why tell their competitors in advance? I\'d be keeping it under wraps until it there was no chance that the opposition could catch up in the short term.

Unless someone comes out with a real Giga killer, I\'m more than happy to keep working with it until V3 is debugged and bedded down.

[meeehoon]

Hey JoE... Just wondering, what is your PhD dissertation title??? And how\'s that going??? images/icons/grin.gif

I am also in the last few months of my PhD and I can\'t believe how much crap I still have to do!!! images/icons/mad.gif But really looking forward to the day when I hand in my thesis!!! images/icons/rolleyes.gif My title is \"Application of active noise control technique on free-field axial flow fan noise\" and I am at the School of Mechanical Engineering, University of West Australia...

Are you also in this sort of engineering field thingy???

meeehoon

[JoE]

Hi Chadwick,
I\'m still not convinced that you can\'t squeeze more performance out of a fast PC with several HDs and a decent bus configuration. But it would be esoteric to argue about that, because it\'s hard to prove that something can be done better (you\'d have to actually do it better). And it\'s next to impossible to prove that something can\'t be done better, even for the people who know.
In my experience as a computer scientist you should never believe such a statement until you see some quantitative evidence. But I think this would lead too far now.

Don\'t get me wrong. I\'m not attacking Gigastudio OR Tascam. But some sign of life isn\'t too much to ask, I think. Especially if you consider investing a lot of money into libraries, knowing that you don\'t get as far as you\'d like with just one giga-machine. But SCARBEE has just given me new hope!!

Meeehoon,
I\'m at the Department of Computer Science, TU Munich, Germany. My field is efficient algorithms.
I work on high-performance analysis of DNA microarrays, in other words: computational molecular biology. I\'ve turned in my thesis, but now the real trouble (defense, exam) starts. Good luck with your work!!

[Chadwick]

JoE,

I\'m sure you\'re right about being able to get more polyphony with the right disk array, (and perhaps some seriously improved PCI bandwidth).
I tend to think in straight lines rather than laterally, so that hadn\'t occured to me images/icons/wink.gif

Yeah, Scarbee gives me hope too - but he\'s such a tease. Maybe we should all go \'round to his place together and stand over him \'til he gives up the goods...

Good luck with your exam.

[JoE]

Thanks Chadwick!!
I hope the developers took a look at that huge wishlist that came up here a while back. For a moment there I was afraid someone, somewhere might have decided to discontinue the Giga development for financial reasons or something... Would\'ve been a shame! But yes, let\'s all bug Scarbee \'til he gives us some details!! images/icons/wink.gif

[Munsie]

If you find use for the program and use it everyday then it\'s alive. Ask yourself not what GS can do for you tomorrow, but what it can do for you today! (jeesh that was corny...) images/icons/smile.gif

But my gut feeling is we\'ll have something new around spring time of next year. I doubt it will be ground breaking, but it will probably worth the upgrade.

[pmuse]

Hello JoE,


I hope the developers took a look at that huge wishlist that came up here a while back. For <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Thanks to Rick Chadwick for organizing the \"Wish List\" effort it has become required study for the entire Giga development team. As soon as it was completed, it has been indexed, databased, prioritized, and re-prioritized according to useabiliy, functionality, and compatibility.

As you can see, no small amount of input was gathered from a wide variety of users with numerous requests for different manners of working. Deciding on what is not practical or possible to keep and therefore toss off the list is by far the most difficult of decisions.

There is much going on with 3.0 development and it is moving in a very positive and confident direction.

In the meantime, as Munsie said, it\'s a great program now, so use it and enjoy it now. In fact, if you were to dig into it some more you\'d find that you are probably not utilizing the full power of what\'s avaliable already. Even Hans Zimmer admits to using GigaStudio for a very long time before really exploring and discovering the depths of the program\'s possibilities. He\'s also a contributor to the 3.0 wish list, after all, he\'s just another Giga user, right?

Hope this helps,

Kevin

[David Govett]

From what we have witnessed, (can\'t give details though) Giga is quite alive and well and Tascam is taking it very seriously.
One little detail that is not secret is the amount of floor space they dedicate to the Giga product line and workstations. Check it out at the NAMM show sometime and you will notice at least half or more of the floor space is all Giga!
That alone should quell fears of them not investing in the product or neglecting it.
Later
Dave

[JoE]

Thanks for the positive reply, guys! I never did expect to be let in on Tascam\'s development and marketing strategies. But the info everyone has given me is all I need to keep my confidence.
Ciao,
Jens

[cunningham]

I\'ve got Gigastudio, HALion, and Kontact. While each offer something unique and lack something as well, Gigastudio simply has the best sound for giga samples straight out of the box with no tweaking at all. I\'m not sure if it\'s the handling of release samples, crossfades, or the filter quality, but the sound of acoustic instruments sound so much more realistic in Gigastudio than the other two products. Yes, the other products are easier to configure and perhaps tweak...and if you want to create and distort sounds, nothing beats Kontact at the moment. However, I believe that neither of the other products beats the sound and overall capabilities of Gigastudio combined the knowledge included in Dave G.\'s Gigastudio Mastery tutorial.

[Chadwick]

Please keep in mind that they Gigabrains don\'t spend their time in a dark room ignoring the rest of the industry. They KNOW what Native Instruments, Emagic, Steinberg, Bitheadz, Propellerheads et al are releasing. They are definitely not ignoring the cool features which sometimes turn up on other platforms.

I thinks we\'ll all be grinning next year =))

[esperlad]

Tascam has stated that they will not announce a product until it is avalible now, and yet version 3.0 has been mentioned by various people including people from the company itself.

I can understand that Tascam wants to keep the new features a secret, but it is difficult to understand why the basic system requirements are not being released. I will be buying a new computer soon, and it would help me to know which type of hardware will work.

Secondary sources have informed me that dual processors are being fazed out, due to the power of one processor. This information could have been useful on the forums. This is hardly a software feature. This is how the computer industry is changing, and Tascam has no control over that.

I also need to know how much RAM Gigastudio will be able to use, but this is probably one of the new features, and I won\'t hear anything definite until the product is released.

I also find it very strange that the RAM usage is not being stated for the current version avalible now. Can someone explain why until recently that this issue has not been brought up?

I hear that only 1 gig of RAM can be used. It would be nice if this could be verified from someone from Tascam. There is no reason (that I can understand) why current features cannot be discussed.

[pmuse]

There are no inherent limitations built into GigaStudio with regards to RAM. The only limitations imposed by the software are the 160 voice polyphony, 32 audio outputs, and 4 MIDI ports. Essentially, with cpu and memory, the sky\'s the limit.

The issue here is with how the hardware drivers and operating systems cooperate at delivering performance to the excessive limits Giga users push their systems. The people who sell, service, and support the latest and greatest computers still look at us Giga users kinda funny when we think it would be a pretty neat idea to put 3GB of RAM in our systems. \"Why on earth would you want to do that?!\" You know the look I\'m talking about. They just don\'t understand.

Anyway the use of extreme amounts of memory and the equally extremely irritating limitations seem to be inherent in the specifics of hardware/drivers/OS compatibility. WinXP has been out for one year now and driver support is just beginning to mature. Write your local hardware driver support representative.

Meanwhile new hardware and new standards are coming out every day it seems like. How many new storage mediums are hitting the market this quarter? At the AES show iZ Technology (Radar folks) announced thier FlashRam storage drives (2GB-300GB). Studio Network Solutions announced their fiber channel audio storage system. Seagate is selling Serial ATA drives. Several new generation motherboards are supporting Serial ATA-1 (150 MB/s).

GigaStudio has always been on the edge and its users are constantly pushing the bounds of that edge everyday. There are more and more of us everyday as the word spreads about the benefits of the massive sampling capabilities of the program yet we still make up a tiny percentage of the rest of the computing community.

Suffice it to say that it is miraculous what we are presently able to do with our PCs, yet we are hungry for more....

I\'m not a programmer. I don\'t understand the plethora of merciless logic that must first be set in stone so that I can then be freed from the tyranny of the latest driver download, so I just do it. The download, that is, not the merciless logic.

Just my thoughts on a rainy Texas evening.

Kevin

[JoE]

When it comes to the technicalities of computing I\'m more the Linux type, so I have to ask a trivial question about XP. Is XP able to operate \"normally\" with 3Gigabtyes (or even just 1.5GB) of RAM? You can certainly plug in a number of current boards. Are there similar difficulties as with Win98? And can Gigastudio use this RAM normally? A long while back I gave up on using 1.5GB because loading instruments was so painfully slow when some quantity was exceeded. So I worked with 512MB. I\'m also thinking of seriously upgrading my hardware. But maybe I should wait until more is known about Version 3 of Gigastudio.
Thanks,
Jens

P.S. Oh, and I still love the idea of Giga being able to render music off-line with no voice limitation. I\'m curious if that will be implemented some day.