TEAC is the world leader in recording technology and started the project studio revolution. TEAC invested a great deal in Giga, and they developed an award winning software product line with Giga. Last year they made the decsion to "cease further development of Gigastudio and Gigastudio related products as of July 21, 2008". Product sales and technical support officially ended December last year and the team of developers who created the Giga technology moved on new pursuits. TEAC wanted the technology to continue and chose Garritan as the ideal candidate. Garritan has the market reach, the industry partnerships, and the technical expertise to bring the benefits of Giga technology to a large number of musicians. Garritan also has a history with Giga, and the Giga technology fits into Garritan's mission to revolutionize music technology and provide musicians with the tools needed to make great music.

Our plans are in the prelimary stages. We are evaluating how to incorporate Giga technologies in our future products. We will extensively develop the Giga technologies and take them to the next level. The Giga software product line ended in the summer of 2008, but we plan to continue the legacy of these products in new forms. We have taken the first step by acquiring the Giga technology assets from TEAC. We have a great programming team that is working with the software code. And we will consult with appropriate experts, as needed. Now it will be very important for us to get input from our users. This will help us with ideas and to chart a course of action. We will share our plans as they develop and mature.

While we cannot provide support of products under the TEAC/Tascam or Nemesys brands, any new products under the Garritan brand will be supported. We are not in a position to pick up support from TEAC as we acquired the technology assets only.

One possibility is a community-maintained Giga support forum on Northern Sounds (www.northernsounds.com) where existing users of legacy products can support each other. Northern Sounds started as the first Giga forum "of Giga users for Giga users" back in 1999. It may be the perfect place to revive a community-based support forum and re-energize the user base.

Our top priority is to our users and how this acquisition will benefit them. Garritan will continue to offer its libraries based on ARIA and the open SFZ format. For the foreseeable future, many of the real-time performance tools from Giga can fit into ARIA's modular architecture. We will seek to combine ARIA and Giga technologies creating products that showcase the best of both. In time, as we undergo our evaluation, we will see interesting possibilities that will benefit Garritan users.

It would be highly impractical to execute an immediate revival as there are reputedly two million lines of code we need to evaluate and analyze. Some of the legacy code is old and in need of updating and we face technical challenges. With most of the original development team who created Giga gone and working for other companies, development obviously cannot continue from where it left off with TEAC.

Of course, if we can revive some of the Giga products and if it makes sense, we will do it. Some things might possibly be marketed in a form close to its Giga counterpart but others will be merged at our discretion with the ARIA technology.

One example is Gigapulse which could possibly be developed sooner than other offerings, and in a form similar to its Giga counterpart. The Gigapulse technology has enormous merit, and we may take steps to re-brand it and develop our large library of impulses for it.

In short, we are determining how to best position Giga technology for future products. We are evaluating the code, consulting with experts and with users, and fully exploring our options to see what is feasible. Obviously, this process takes time.

We realize that many Giga users have a great deal invested in Giga libraries. It is our hope that those who invested in Giga libraries will be able to continue to use them in our future products. Owning the Giga format puts us in the ideal position to provide native solutions for Giga files.

Giga is a powerful brand that is recognized throughout the industry. Garritan has acquired the Giga trademarks and Giga is now part of the Garritan family. We may incorporate names that have been identified in the past with Giga (for example, "Garritan GigaPulse" or "Garritan GigaViolin").

Giga in its current form cannot and will not be open source. We are aware of the Open GigaStudio initiative. While this idea has merit, open source is NOT possible because multiple parties are involved in some of the underlying code-ownership. It may, however, be possible to offer some sort of public or compiled freeware version someday, but that remains to be seen. We will check into what's possible and, in light of the ownership issues, consult with the legal folks and communicate with the user base.

Giga has employed a strategy of creating a popular platform where sample developers could build product offerings on top of that platform. Although Garritan did not assume any third-party developer libraries or licenses in the acquisition of the technology assets, we would like to explore how to best serve the developer community. We will be talking with the developer community to explore various options.

Garritan is continually acquiring and licensing new technologies. The Giga Technology Assets represents one such key technology acquisition and will help further the development of our music technologies. Garritan continues to explore opportunities that will support its long-term strategy.

Garritan will license technologies and soundware to other companies as it has in the past. The ARIA player and/or samples are widely deployed and found in Microsoft Songsmith, Finale 2009, SONY Acid Pro, Akai EWI-USB, Sibelius 5, Cakewalk Sonar, and a number of other leading products. Garritan pioneered the use of samples with notation programs and its sounds are used in thousands of schools, colleges and universities. It is expected that Giga technology may find its way into many music products and in music education. The possible integration of Giga and ARIA technologies into a unified framework could create a ubiquitous platform and dramatically expand the opportunities for music creation.

Companies interested in licensing technology or soundware, please contact Gary Garritan directly.

“Giga” is a word that’s been used to describe a variety of products and technologies developed by Nemesys Music Technologies and later TEAC America, Inc. GigaStudio (and its predecessor Gigasampler) is regarded as the world's premier software sampler and leaves a superb legacy. GVI (Giga Virtual Instrument) was developed in recent years to bring the Giga technology into a plugin format. GigaPulse (a revolutionary reverberation sampler and modeler), GigaViolin, GigaPiano, the Continuous Velocity Piano and other products make up the Giga line of products.

Gigasampler revolutionized the music industry when it was introduced in 1998 and its importance in the music world cannot be overstated. Giga products enjoy exclusive rights to Endless Wave technology, a patented system which allows large samples to be streamed directly from the hard drive with low latency.

Giga became the professional's sampler of choice for many film, game and television composers, including many high-profile musicians. GigaStudio was the recipient of the TEC Award for Musical Instrument Technology and won numerous industry awards. Many musicians the world over preferred Giga's simple interface, high polyphony counts, very low latency and the expansive sound libraries. Giga has led the industry throughout the past decade and sampling leadership will continue under the Garritan banner.

Garritan was with Giga in the beginning and was one of the very first developers for the Giga platform. The GigaHarp was developed in 1998. A couple years later Garritan introduced Orchestral Strings, the first super-library for the GigaStudio platform consisting of high-quality strings which took advantage of GigaStudio's extensive features and introduced many firsts. Its innovative MIDI performance tools (MaestroTools) became a model for iMIDI and the other tools that followed. Orchestral Strings for GigaStudio was the recipient of numerous industry awards and was a staple for many Hollywood composers.

Please contact Gary Garritan by email or phone.

The best place to keep abreast of the latest developments is at at www.garritan.com, and at the community-based Giga forum at www.northernsounds.com. We welcome to visit the forum to tell us your thoughts and ideas as to the direction of the Giga technologies.