Beagle
Jan - Gigastudio. I invested a lot of money in Gigastudio and Tascam ran it in the ground. I had GS3 and a lot of 3rd party libraries. I never did buy GS4 when it came out, but was planning to eventually. GS4 was only on the shelves a couple of months when Tascam announced it was a dead product.
So in order to update my library, I had to invest in Komplete and port as much of GS over to Komplete as I could. not everything transferred and some of the stuff that did still wasn't correct (i.e. keyswitching on a lot of instruments didn't work any more).
I could have just continued to use GS as is, but it had problems which needed to be fixed anyway, which I had hoped that GS4 would have solved. part of the problem, however, was that the key gen needed to install it was flakey. it required an answer / call to the server for installation and I was afraid that the support for that would eventually go away.
TASCAM had "acquired" GS from another company, can't remember the name right now. they got rid of that company's management and most of the programmers then they designed GS2 & 3 themselves. running the company into the ground by the time GS4 was released.
writing on the wall...
GS was a disaster waiting to happen when Tascam bought it and then they mishandled it badly.
All of the crazy, low level stuff that were necessary to make GS work at all became completely unnecessary with faster computers, which essentially meant that a total rewrite was necessary.
What Tascam missed was that when competition arrived what people really cared about were the sample libraries. NI actively recruited content partners
and included a much larger real sample library with Kontakt while GS always included mostly demo content with everything at unreasonable prices.
The magic of GS was that it worked at all in the days of Pentium3 computers running Win98. The GS name was all Tascam really had once competition arrived and a name won't get you far in a rapidly changing competitive SW environment. Even though Tascam completely booted it, it would have been hard for GS to survive all of the new competition they faced under any circumstances.
But I don't get the impression that Tascam will be running Cakewalk anyway.
And it's not clear what Gibson intends. It could be another GS-style disaster or another lackluster version of Roland/CW or Sony/SonicFoundry. Or it could be Apple/emagic too - where Apple really wanted something in Logic (but only the Mac version of course), which they both cannibalized (Garageband) but also actively continued to support and develop (while dropping everything else emagic did).
The big question is whether Gibson wants to continue CW as it is, focus on only one piece and slowly or rapidly kill everything else, or cannibalize things in some way, maybe the Les Paul Sonar - the first guitar with a built in DAW (or DAW integration) - I wouldn't put this kind of thing past Gibson, given their largely unsuccessful attempts to create high tech guitars like the Darkfire:
http://www2.gibson.com/Pr...son-USA/Dark-Fire.aspx