World’s leading sampler is no more
While not announced officially it seems to be sure that Tascam decided to discontinue the whole line of Giga software instruments, including GigaStudio – the news was confirmed by the company’s head of marketing in the US. Under a slightly different name, as GigaSampler, the product has opened a new era in the history of sampling ten years ago. Sampling solutions were strictly in dedicated hardware boxes then, equipped with expensive computer RAM chips to hold sound samples up to 64 megabytes (in the best case). GigaSampler offered two breakthrus: at first, it was a PC software product which can transform any compatible computer into a high-end sampler, and second, it played back sound samples real-time from hard disk instead of RAM. The latter feature revolutionised the market: you shouldn’t had to fight with short sound samples any more – the gigabytes of cheap hard disk space couraged the sample library creators to create much more detailed instrument samples than ever before.
All this together caused a quick fall of the hardware sampler market and all the dedicated high-end units disappeared soon from the shops. But the competition hasn’t ended, only started over – a new wave of software samplers was poured out, some even featured the still-magical hard-disk playback. Giga’s market share lowered, partly because of the long lack of a Mac version. Now loyal users started a campaign for pushing Tascam to open the code of the instrument – it can secure the future of the platform and protect their investment in the expensive sample libraries.
