Customer Reviews

TASCAM GigaStudio 3.0 Ensemble ( Windows )

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Remember the girl who broke your heart? She was SOOOO magic; Aphrodite, Athena, Artemis all in one incredible, beautiful creature. You kept trying and trying and trying.

She'd play you, too. Spend a little time with you, batting those beautiful eyelashes, brushing against you so alluringly -- then blowing you off yet again. But it was always the same story -- you'd end up alone at the end of the day with nothing to show for all your efforts but pain and frustration.

You finally wised up and blew her off once and for all -- and for three months never heard from her, until, day by day, like a nasty scrape, the pain dulled, and you would find yourself surprised that hours, even days had passed without a thought of the pain that had once dominated your entire world.

Then the phone call would come, and, with a sweet, honeyed voice, she'd work her magic on you again, and you'd think to yourself "maybe THIS time things'll be different...."

Enter TASCAM and their magic product "Gigastudio", the reputed sound sampler of the gods. GIGABYTE-sized, absolutely authentic sounds from your MIDI tracks. The ability to create aural magic for the price of a small television set.

And I bought the hype.

Not once, but twice.

Now I'm no slouch with hardware -- in addition to a one-year tech certification, I've got Microsoft MCP and COMPTIA A+ and Network+ certifications. I can build a PC from the ground up with my eyes closed and diagnose and repair virtually any problem.

I've also used a number of different audio products -- Cakewalk, Sonar, Sonic Foundry, Halion, all will generally excellent results. But EVERY incarnation of Gigastudio has only caused bluescreens or simply refused to function.

After shelling out the first 150 bucks and spending months and months of fruitless tweaking and rebuilding, you'd think I would've learned my lesson.

But no, not this hopeless romantic.

When music giant Tascam bought out Nemesys, the company responsible for the first Gigascrewedio, I thought -- like so many other hapless victims -- that THIS time things would be different.

And so I parted with another cool 250 bucks with the blind faith of the lovestruck.

Needless to say, the relationship never got past first base -- the initial installation -- and, since I waited past the warranty date, I am, once again, nicely out of luck.

So I called Tascam right before the holidays.

Getting only a recorded message, I spoke nicely, calmly, and gave detailed information about the problem, along with my contact information. I sent out a follow-up email, along the normal channels.

No answer.

I kept trying, calling long distance at different times of the day, leaving messages with tech support and the main number. E-mail after email followed.

After two weeks, my patience wore somewhat thin -- hell, even a form letter would have been appreciated as a simple gesture of courtesy.

But now, a month later, it seems I just can't get no lovin' from Tascam.

Fact is, Tascam, she just don't care.

And so, as I finally promised, I'm parting company with Gigascrewdio, never to look back. And to all of you hoping to make music with this expensively-wrapped, overly-hyped, perfumed piece of [waste] matter, expect the same. You ain't gettin' no lovin' there.

I, for one, will be looking into lemon laws to try and recoup my cash so as to spend it better elsewhere.

And so, that eternal advice still hasn't changed: dump her and look elsewhere. There are a hell of a lot better ones out there; ones who won't take all your money and leave you frustrated at the end of the day.

Tascam needs to take this product off the market, because I am pretty loath to purchase anything from this company ever again, and I am a 30 year loyal customer (3340's, 8516-A 16 track, M3700, DA38's, FW 1804, etc). If this product is any indication of the direction this company is taking - watch out!

I purchased the Orchestra version after reading the rave reviews they published, but these folks must have purchased & installed the product during a very specific window of PC hardware & O/S. Anyone with a dual core will see crashing unlike anything we have seen for many years - we are talking entire OS winks out, not even a blue screen - just launch Giga Studio when you need to do a really fast shut down. VISTA is right out, but even XP will crash ALL THE TIME on modern hardware. You will not get any productive time with the software on a modern PC.

Now, you wil get to see it run if you can patch together a very old (4-5 years) PC, but it will be very, very slow. And it will still crash sometimes, PC will hang, and it will not work well at all with any other sequencers. They say to use SP1, but SP2 is where we are now with XP.
Right now, I am fighting the license scheme because after trying to get it to run on all of these various configurations, I cannot restore the license, and my grace time has run out. Which gives me time to write this review.

Tascam - shame on you. You need to do a recall on this baby, and at least TRY to retain some lifetime customers.