Scratching the Gigastudio market

[chickeneps]

Look at this from another angle:

If Giga is dying, it's not because of the Virtual instrument explosion. All other samplers are affected identically - if Sonic Implants stuff now is available via plugin and doesn't rely on Kontakt to load it, then less Kontakts are going to be sold as well.

What NI is doing is essentially allowing any developer (with the $$$) to manufacture their own synth. It's like if Korg, in 1988, took their M-1 and allowed any developer to put their own sounds into it and sell it like it was their own. Of course that wasn't practical then, but with software its is practical.

If Tascam gets into the game and starts privately licensing their engine - which isn't a difficult thing to do - that would be a good thing for them. Although it would limit the appeal being only PC, and as a result would have a more difficult time attracting licensees.

But how much does this affect the end-user? Would people really care that the player would be "powered by the Giga-Player"?

Going forward, one of the drawback sof these "players" is that it adds another consideration in the libraries they buy; namely, they are forced to use only one engine. Supose that engine isn't their preferred one, or they know it doesn't run well on their system?

On the other hand, we are getting to the ceiling here, where Kontakt and many others work well on all systems. Then the competitive task will be that the developers will need to brag about their engines - how universal, how effceint, how many features it includes.

Last thought regarding "Giga dying" - from a useage point of view, it's not. Giga established a huge user base over the years. People stick with what they know works on their systems (whether they worked at getting it to work or not). The slippage people refer is that amount of new sales (which I admit I am only extrapolating) and the amount of time current users even use the thing. I know a certain amount of former Giga usersr that were happy to get Kontakt (or use several players like Spectrasonics stuff, Sonik Synth, and/or various NI ones) and use it with their new G5's.

[luka2807]

A little OT, but:

Which sampler (Kontakt or Halion) is considered to be better in terms of importing and playing GIGA samples?

cheers

[chickeneps]

I'm biased because I wrote the Kontakt routines, but we did take a hard look at how other programs convert Giga including HALion and took their weak points and directly addressed them.

Kontakt loads Giga3 as well, whereas HALion does not. And of course, when you import into HALion 3, you are stuck there - it can't be exported to anything else because of the encryption that is on everything in HALion 3.

[nexussynth]

The strength of the big libraries is that unless you've got REAL fast connetion or your conncected all most of the time to like T1 line, your're NOT going to be downloading an 8 gig file. The cracked versions of like QLSO still have the huge monolithic file the samples are in.

This makes it less prevalent. It still goes on but if I were a developer I'd go the player route with a new release not Giga.

And First Call Horns will be available for Giga too... for a while.

Okay, now I'm out of thread!

Ummm, T1 is slow. It's 1.5 Mbits per second. My cable modem does 4Mb or 2.5 times faster than T1. So with that in mind, I can download 1 gigabyte in about 8 minutes, one full DVD of content in about 40 minutes. This ain't 1992 anymore with 2400 baud modems. Cable modem only costs me $57 a month, or $42 if I subscribe to cable TV. In short, high speed is cheap and available these days.

Devon

Okay, yes a T1 is not SOTA anymore but you made my point for me anyway

That's why the BIG BUST the other day of these types of filesharing.

And anyway, very many people (from recent statistics) still are on slower connections and so they would rather just grab a few hundred megs of VSL or Sonic Implants and be on their way.

I will end this time for sure by saying I hope the Giga platform endures for all those who have invested in it. Top pros really don't count though because they adapt to any changes in hardware or software readily.

So...long live Gigastudio 3....( )

[ChimeraMan]

"So...long live Gigastudio 3..."

No way! Roll on GS4! Actually, GS3 pretty much covers everything I need. And, regarding these so-called problems that Giga users have with it using kernel drivers etc., can't say I've ever had a problem at all with it. But then, I usually find the people that post problems on forums are usually lazy-assed wankers that won't refer to a manual first, or, thick-as-shit assholes that shouldn't go anywhere near a computer in the first place. You can include DJ's in there too (if I may be permitted to generalize, that is).

[jmh]

What "spec" is being violated?

GigaStudio works at Kernel level, meaning below Windows, it acts as hardware as far as your computer is concerned. This is why the Giga users' keyboards' "B", "S", "O" and "D" keys are all worn out from writing about their problems on forums.

Yes, I know it's a low-level kernel driver... I'm just not so convinced they're specifically "violating" something... And yes, I'm also familiar with the issues related to GS =) That's one thing that still makes me wonder how these film composers are getting a glitch-free, production stability performance. Of course, when money isn't an object, they can buy the suggested motherboards with specific chipsets and dedicate the machines solely to GS, something us mere mortals can't do =)

Kernel level drivers aren't such a rarity though, I've run into these with several applications that are timing-critical. And the odd protection that used to make machines unstable

Regards,

JMH