TASCAM, a division of TEAC and the makers of GigaStudio has announced they are killing the product Giga product line. I can’t find any official word of this but it seems TASCAM has notified their vendors. GigaStudio is a high-end sampling suite of tools and virtual instruments as well as a file format for those instruments. I always thought it was popular amongst soundtrack scorers but to be honest, I’m having a hard time confirming any hard numbers of their users through Google searches. (It seems only one producer on ccMixter claims to use it.)

According to the forum post I linked to above there are five developers out of work and product line has been eschewed to the TASCAM product dead zone (aka “legacy“) area of the site.

I’ll admit that I’m having a hard time following all details of the these developments as my personal life is in a bit of turmoil right now (the good kind) but almost everywhere I go there is tons of speculation and hard-to-pin-down facts because TASCAM isn’t actually saying anything publicly to, you know, their customers.

Piling speculation on top of speculation I guess they were losing a lot of money on the products, they shopped it around and couldn’t get any takers and they have chosen to bury the software into some propriety vault.

The answer seems obvious to me that they should open the damn thing up. Peter at CDM makes a good case why this is unlikely but you know, if they had just an iota of imagination they could make it work. It doesn’t have to be as tortured as the ccMixter RFP but it could be done if there was a will to do so.

Of course there’s already a “petition web site” called OpenGigaStudio already out there.

The bottom line, this just sucks.

One of the original ccMixter musicians Sharp is starting a phone sample project: call in, leave a message, noise or music and he’ll publish everything in public domain and use the cool ones for his next album.

You can trust Sharp, he got game.

Brad has uploaded the “last” of his a cappellas to ccMixter. Actually, this just completes the solo tracks to his “I Don’t Know What I’m Doing” album.

I haven’t done a count recently but at one time he was the most (non-contest-related) remixed artist on the site. Since then we’ve had some phenomenal rap pells by Ms. Vybe (kendra) as well as great rap and R&B stand-bys uploaded by J. Lang and killer spoken word by our resident beat poet eight prime.

Either way, this latest upload (reverse dump?) will no doubt put Brad back in front.

here scroll down, click on ’start search’ . These are supposed to be Bonham out-takes from 1978. I’m not 100% convinced but it makes a great story, if somewhat echo-y loops.

Someone named Vitaly Zolotarev uploaded several decent to great percussion loops to the archive a while back under NonCommerical-Sampling+ CC License — I definitely have a favorite.

Slowly but surely modern musicians are starting to leverage technology and community. NIN’s Reznor has released a 70MB sit file for a Garageband project for anybody to remix and contribute to. more info at MacWorld.

This was too weird not to mention. An album called the “The CONET Project” at the archive.org that is, well, numbers being read over shortwave radio. The imagination (with, you know, good chemical additives) goes wild with speculation.

I could not resist listening to the Hungarian one (I happen to know the language a bit) and two things are obvious: it’s a kid reciting the numbers and it’s obviously been sliced together. Just plain creepy.

In a bit of linky-exchange Dave has a good write up with lots of related links.

Apparently, back before there was software called ACID and a genre of music called acid house there was a little tab of paper some hippie degenerates used to put on their tongues to experience euphoric celestial navel explorations with the occasional fire-breathing dragon, disappearing ceilings, spontaneous Catskills comedy routines and VW bugs doing donuts on freeway exits. In Santa Monica. In the middle of rush hour. Apparently.

I wouldn’t know anything about that, but it seems this type of “acid” was celebrated by a nine hour commercial free radio broadcast on (what else) KPFA some 40 years ago. Don Joyce of Negativeland and The Professor have posted half of that broadcast, called The Trip Receptacles and features many informed luminaries in this field including Albert Hoffman, D. M. Turner, Sasha Shulgin and (who else) Dr. Timothy Leary of Harvard.

Culling samples ahoy.

[via Dave]

Unless I’m mistaken GYBO has just opened up a new forum for trading pellas. Not a lot of activity there now but I suspect in the coming weeks/months this could become a very active board.

The RSS feeds are up and working at CC Mixter and they are based on the new genre/tagging system. So, for example, if you wanted to watch for every upload of just loops with a Sampling Plus license it would look like this:

http://ccmixter.org/rss/loops+sampling_plus

Or if you want to watch the remix uploads of a certain person you can add their sign-on name:

http://ccmixter.org/rss/remix+mhite

The feed link itself point directly at the MP3. If you have any suggestions or wishlist items let me know as I’m collecting them now. (Someone has already suggested including a streaming link in the body of the item for the feed.)