Is it even a debacle? That's a fair question. Here's my thoughts, for better or worse, with the caveat that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Giga user, and thus I'm largely talking out my ass. With that said... The majority of professional users of Giga products do so on a dedicated machine. In my experience (which is limited, I'll grant) every single person I'm aware of that uses Giga on a dedicated machine is otherwise a Mac user and runs either Logic or DP for the most part, with the occasional PT guy thrown in the mix. I have no numbers to back up anything I'm saying, but my gut tells me that that the Giga products (the recent plans for the cross-platform plugin notwithstanding) were always largely meant to turn a PC in to a powerful dedicated sampler. They didn't stop working last week, and they won't stop working on Dec. 31st. Now that every DAW has a top-line sample playback instrument available to it as a built-in (although one could argue that Cubase does not, seeing how the HalionOne player is a tragic fucking mess, and Halion itself is essentially not worth the box it comes in) and machines have progressed enough in power to the point where they can run large sample sets simultaneously within a DAW, I have to wonder if this is all much ado about nothing. Giga had its day and its purpose. So did the S1000 (which was relatively much more expensive). Quite frankly, I'm glad the days where I needed to hunch over that little LCD screen truncating samples are over. It wasn't cool then, it isn't retro now, and my back still hurts. In short, time and tools march ever onwards. In all honesty, I give kudos to Tascam for seeing the forest instead of trying to keep the trees alive. I imagine the people that will be seriously inconvenienced by this number less than a couple dozen, and if someone has a dedicated high-end machine for Giga and massive libraries for same (all of which still will work fine), they are either de facto successful at their trade, and thus able to afford a replacement of some sort, or pirates and can fuck right off.

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