About Gainware
Every tool we make starts as a real problem on a real show. Our mission is to build the small, sharp pieces of software that touring productions quietly depend on — timecode, playback, redundancy, scheduling — and make them reliable enough that nobody in the building ever has to think about them. Built by people who run shows, for the people who run shows.
The studio
Gainware is a small software studio building tools for touring and live music production. We make focused, single-purpose software that solves specific show-day problems — the kind of gaps that a spreadsheet, a workaround, or crossed fingers usually fills.
The studio exists because its founder — a working tour manager and audio professional — kept running into the same problems on the road and couldn't buy a fix. Every product traces back to a real failure mode on a real show: a session that wouldn't chase timecode cleanly, a playback rig with no safety net, a touring party that never had the day's schedule in one place. We build the fix, run it on tour, and keep working on it until it holds.
Today the line includes LiveTC, which locks Ableton Live to incoming SMPTE LTC timecode and records a full capture of the session as it plays; When's Soundcheck, an iOS app that keeps the whole touring party — band, crew, and management — on one tour-day schedule; and Failover Sentinel, which watches a primary playback rig and switches to a redundant backup automatically, over Dante. More tools are in development, each built the same way.
We don't ship features for a spec sheet. Show-critical software has exactly one job: work every night, in every room, whether or not anyone is watching it. That's the bar. If a tool doesn't clear it, it doesn't leave the studio.
How we build
Four rules the whole line is held to — the difference between software that demos well and software you can put on a show.
Every tool starts as a problem we hit on an actual show, not a feature on a roadmap. We build it in the environment it has to survive — backstage, on the bus, in the room — and it doesn't ship until it has run a full load-in-to-load-out day without us babysitting it.
Show-critical software is judged on the one night it can't fail, not on the demo. We'd rather do one job perfectly than ten jobs adequately. When the choice is another feature or another margin of uptime, uptime wins every time.
We're tour managers, audio engineers, and playback techs — not a startup that read about touring. The vocabulary, the workflows, and the assumptions baked into every tool come from doing the job, so you're not translating your world into someone else's software.
Things go wrong at showtime; good tools plan for it. Ours degrade predictably, hand off cleanly, and tell you exactly what happened — no mystery states, no guessing at front-of-house while the set is running.
I've spent my working life on the road — tour managing, running audio, and keeping playback alive through the parts of the night the audience never sees. Gainware started because I needed these tools myself and couldn't find them. Everything here was built between load-in and doors, tested on actual shows, and shaped by the specific ways things go wrong when the room is full. I'm building the software I wish I'd had, and I'm still out there using it. If something breaks on your show, I want to hear about it — odds are it'll break on mine too.
Early access
We're rolling out to a small group of engineers, tour managers, and playback techs first — the people who'll tell us where things bend. Leave your email and we'll reach out as each product opens up, starting with LiveTC.
