About Gainware™
Gainware™ is a small software studio started by two people who spend the year on tour, a front-of-house engineer and a lighting designer. We build the small, sharp pieces of software that touring productions quietly depend on, 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
We kept running into the same problems on the road and couldn't buy a fix. So we started building them ourselves, boots on the ground, tested on the shows we're actually working, built specifically for the professionals who do these jobs for a living.
Every product traces back to a real failure mode on a real show. We build the fix, run it on tour, and keep working on it until it holds. Five tools are out the door now, each built the same way. LiveTC™ locks Ableton Live to SMPTE timecode and captures whole sessions, LiveRack™ hosts AU and VST3 plugin chains for front of house and stage, Audioduct™ streams 2 to 32 channels of audio between Macs over Ethernet, BetterRTP™ keeps network MIDI connected and fails over in about a second, and Gainware Chat™ turns crew talk into text everyone reads live.
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.
The founders
Both of us are out there a good part of the year, which is why these tools get tested where they actually have to work.
Front-of-house engineer
Jamison mixes front-of-house for heavy acts with serious followings, From Ashes to New and The Funeral Portrait among them. He spends the year in the room where the show either lands or doesn't, which is exactly where Gainware's tools have to hold up.
Lighting designer
Tim designs and runs lighting for The Funeral Portrait and has toured extensively with bands like Dead on a Sunday, building their entire visual production from the ground up, and playing drums. He builds the show people see, then builds the software that keeps it locked.
How we build
Four rules every tool is held to, the difference between software that demos well and software you can put on a show.
Every tool starts as a real problem on a real 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 a front-of-house engineer and a lighting designer, 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.
We're still out there using this stuff, on our own shows, next to the people we built it for. 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. If something breaks on your show, we want to hear about it. Odds are it'll break on ours too.
The tools
Timecode, live plugins, network audio, network MIDI, and crew comms: five standalone macOS apps, each held to the same bar. Gainware Chat™ is free.
