Alternate Giga Sample Players

[belbin]

Jon, from what I've read (haven't tried any alternate players other than Kontakt, which doesn't do it for me) of feature lists, I have to agree. Currenly, it seems that there is a long list of imitators, but no duplicators. The things that set giga apart are not dimensions, keyswitches, crossfades, etc, they are Gigapulse, morphing filters, iMIDI (I know, scripting is more flexible....) and Workstation/Editing environment which, despite a long history of alleged bugginess, allow an equally or greater-ly smooth workflow than more stable apps with itty gui design.

At this point, if no one implements the unique powers of Giga/GVI, I have to say that there appears no substitute. At least if you're into the newer, most cutting edge aspects of Gigastudio's features, that is.

Belbin

[Lixir]

Does anyone know about this OSX giga sampler ?

http://www.soundlib.com/gplayer/

Just curious...

[Brian W. Ralston]

There is preliminary word from a Tascam employee who was on the Giga team that there will be good Giga news announced soon. The insinuation (made on another forum that is not mentioned here)...was that Giga may have been sold...or is in the process of being sold and a new developer would continue on with Giga technology. Of course, everyone was speculating who it could be...Steinberg?...Spectrasonics?...SoniVox?...we do not know. But, Jeff suddenly stopped talking about it at all as to not get into trouble. So...perhaps sometime soon there will be news that Giga will be coming back...the MAC version that was 99.9% finished would be released...and Giga 4 for PC would continue under someone else's watch.

We should find out for sure sooner or later.

[JonFairhurst]

Brian,

I sure hope that the Giga News is true.

And I also hope that the Linux Sampler continues to gain Giga features, like DEF (and an installation/setup that's easy enough for musicians and burned out programmers to tolerate). Linux is really perfect for a sample farm, in theory. We don't need bells and whistles. We just need full use of RAM, performance, reliability, and those cool Giga features...

[Jake Johnson]

Does anyone know about this OSX giga sampler ?

http://www.soundlib.com/gplayer/

Just curious...

There's a link to a demo version on the page that you linked to. Let us know how it turns out. (I don't use a Mac, but I'd like to learn more about this program.)

[kitekrazy]

There is preliminary word from a Tascam employee who was on the Giga team that there will be good Giga news announced soon. The insinuation (made on another forum that is not mentioned here)...was that Giga may have been sold...or is in the process of being sold and a new developer would continue on with Giga technology. Of course, everyone was speculating who it could be...Steinberg?...Spectrasonics?...SoniVox?...we do not know. But, Jeff suddenly stopped talking about it at all as to not get into trouble. So...perhaps sometime soon there will be news that Giga will be coming back...the MAC version that was 99.9% finished would be released...and Giga 4 for PC would continue under someone else's watch.

We should find out for sure sooner or later.

I think Tascam will continue development. WE never knew the reason why they stopped.
No one in their right mind would take over the right of Gigastudio. It doesn't make good business sense.

If anyone took over Gigastudio, I would hope it's either Cockos or Image Line.

[Steve_Karl]

A win version is coming as well.

Hopefully by then they'll have some information on the site as to how many ports, maximum polyphony, etc. So far there's no detailed info.

[Joseph Renzetti]

Jon, from what I've read (haven't tried any alternate players other than Kontakt, which doesn't do it for me) of feature lists, I have to agree. Currenly, it seems that there is a long list of imitators, but no duplicators. The things that set giga apart are not dimensions, keyswitches, crossfades, etc, they are Gigapulse, morphing filters, iMIDI (I know, scripting is more flexible....) and Workstation/Editing environment which, despite a long history of alleged bugginess, allow an equally or greater-ly smooth workflow than more stable apps with itty gui design.

At this point, if no one implements the unique powers of Giga/GVI, I have to say that there appears no substitute. At least if you're into the newer, most cutting edge aspects of Gigastudio's features, that is.

Belbin

Great to read that someone else comes to the same conclusion as I, re Giga vrs the rest.
I love Giga, and especially the pulse-verb, it's the best. I hope Garritan brings Giga back with a vengeance.
I also found Kontakt fill of glitches and very unstable, PLAY is a joke.

Thanks for the critique,

Joe R

[wst3ae]

A topic near and dear to my wallet...

I've looked at the following alternatives, but I haven't made up my mind yet...

Kontakt - the obvious choice I suppose, simply because at the moment it is the market leader... but then GS was once the market leader. I don't care for the UI, but it does seem to do a better than average job of playing GS libraries.

GPlayer - Mac only at the moment, but I've heard rumors that a wintel port is in the future

LinuxSampler - I've tried this one, and it requires quite a bit of editing to get it to work with the libraries I tried. Might be worth the effort, but if I can find something easier that'd be good too.

SampleLord - thus far it does a better job of importing GS libraries, but it isn't as stable as I'd like.

Dimension Pro - IF you can limit yourself to four keyswitches or dimensions then you can use the four elements of a Dimension Pro patch to get pretty close. It's a LOT of work though, and I'm more interested in playing these days.

GigaStudio - I had a configuration on a Win XP Pro SP2 machine that was working. Something changed, and I gave up. I might go back and see if I can undo whatever changed, but that too is a lot of work. And then I have to get MidiOverLAN working again, and tie up a pair of ADAT ports on each machine, and keep an extra screen handy... sub-optimal in every respect except the one that counts... sound!

Anyone else have info or additional options?

Thanks,

Bill

[JonFairhurst]

Anyone else have info or additional options?

Garritan 2010.