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One cool development in the past year or so are hardware trackers. Basically trackers for the DAW-less crowd. The polyend tracker [1] is really nice and a great

One cool development in the past year or so are hardware trackers. Basically trackers for the DAW-less crowd. The polyend tracker [1] is really nice and a great value. And I'm super excited for the dirtywave m8 [2], kind of like a supercharged hardware LSDJ [3] (which is also a great project). Starts shipping in the next month or so, but you can already try it with publicly available firmware using just a teensy 4.1. Back in software, can't help but mention Sunvox [4]. Not exactly the same niche as Renoise (which aims to be closer to a traditional DAW), but it's an excellent modular tracker that runs pretty much anywhere, free (as in beer) on desktop and cheap on mobile. It doesn't have any support for VSTs but comes with a nice set of synth and FX modules that can be connected and bundled into "metamodules". [1] https://polyend.com/tracker/ https://polyend.com/tracker/ [2] https://dirtywave.com/ https://dirtywave.com/ [3] https://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/index.php https://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/index.php [4] https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

pmoriarty 5y ago
Yeah, Sunvox is great, and Alexander Zolotov (its developer) has also made a lot of other innovative and interesting audio apps.
Applejinx 5y ago
I'm a NerdSeq user: looking forward to the NerdSeq hardware tracker. The one I'm using is the Eurorack module. That said, I've been a Renoise owner for years now. It didn't end up clicking for me as far as composing music on it, but that's mostly because I'm not really DAW-minded. I should probably see if I can use it as a live mixer as I think it'd be more efficient than Logic Pro :)
- dimatura 5y ago
  I'm not into modular, but I'm definitely looking out for the nerdseq portable!
- atoav 5y ago
  I have a needseq as well, without having been a tracker user before and I still got the hang of it pretty quickly. As far as DAWs go I totally recommend looking at bitwig, because it has the modulation capabilities someone coming from the modular synth domain would like to have
ujuj 5y ago
I've been using a Polyend Tracker for ~6 months and it's been such a fun experience. I'm by no means someone old enough to have been using trackers back then but the Polyend Tracker is has a really thought out interface enabling rapid prototyping as well as whole song production on it.
aasasd 5y ago
I thought SunVox is closer to low-level-ish purely modular synths/effect graphs like Max/MSP and Pure Data.
wombatmobile 5y ago
I know what a DAW is since I use Logic Pro X, but what is a tracker? What are they good for?
- poisonarena 5y ago
  Trackers came before modern DAWs, a tracker used to be a sort of different way to compose music on computers, a sort of different kind of DAW, using a sort of notation, with time scrolling down, instead of to the right. It was popular for making music for early video games, especially when size was a big factor in creating music for computer games. But with the layout and and function you could do unique tricks that are very familiar with early VGM and Demoscene music
  - k__ 5y ago
    unique tricks?
    - snek_case 5y ago
      I think they mean tricks things like reversing samples, or having a segment of an audio sample keep looping after starting playback so you could "stretch" it longer. Also pitch-shifting samples so you can play them at different notes. Trackers were strange kinds of sequencers that were very focused on using samples to make music, and they were created at a time when memory was expensive, so you'd typically have fairly low resolution samples (8-bit 22KHz?), and people tried to use those samples creatively because you might not have many of them, both because of memory and hard drive space, but also because they weren't as easy to get as they are today. Most people didn't have the internet at home before the mid-late 90s, and even when people started to have the internet at home, it wasn't like today, the music making community was smaller. I first discovered trackers in a French gaming magazine around 1997 or 1998, but they had already been around much longer. Said magazine had came with a CD that contained multiple different tracker programs and a collection of music files in different formats (MOD, XM, etc). The compelling thing was that these files were small, because they contained a few audio samples and the data on how and when to play them, so you could fit a tune that was multiple minutes in 1 megabyte or less. For an example of what tracker software looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NjqNwHidpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NjqNwHidpk
null4bl3 5y ago
Do you know of any tracker like options for the Eurorack modular format?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- teolandon 5y ago
  NerdSeq

pmoriarty 5y ago

Yeah, Sunvox is great, and Alexander Zolotov (its developer) has also made a lot of other innovative and interesting audio apps.

Applejinx 5y ago

I'm a NerdSeq user: looking forward to the NerdSeq hardware tracker. The one I'm using is the Eurorack module. That said, I've been a Renoise owner for years now. It didn't end up clicking for me as far as composing music on it, but that's mostly because I'm not really DAW-minded. I should probably see if I can use it as a live mixer as I think it'd be more efficient than Logic Pro :)

dimatura 5y ago
I'm not into modular, but I'm definitely looking out for the nerdseq portable!
atoav 5y ago
I have a needseq as well, without having been a tracker user before and I still got the hang of it pretty quickly. As far as DAWs go I totally recommend looking at bitwig, because it has the modulation capabilities someone coming from the modular synth domain would like to have

ujuj 5y ago

I've been using a Polyend Tracker for ~6 months and it's been such a fun experience. I'm by no means someone old enough to have been using trackers back then but the Polyend Tracker is has a really thought out interface enabling rapid prototyping as well as whole song production on it.

aasasd 5y ago

I thought SunVox is closer to low-level-ish purely modular synths/effect graphs like Max/MSP and Pure Data.

wombatmobile 5y ago

I know what a DAW is since I use Logic Pro X, but what is a tracker? What are they good for?

poisonarena 5y ago
Trackers came before modern DAWs, a tracker used to be a sort of different way to compose music on computers, a sort of different kind of DAW, using a sort of notation, with time scrolling down, instead of to the right. It was popular for making music for early video games, especially when size was a big factor in creating music for computer games. But with the layout and and function you could do unique tricks that are very familiar with early VGM and Demoscene music
- k__ 5y ago
  unique tricks?
  - snek_case 5y ago
    I think they mean tricks things like reversing samples, or having a segment of an audio sample keep looping after starting playback so you could "stretch" it longer. Also pitch-shifting samples so you can play them at different notes. Trackers were strange kinds of sequencers that were very focused on using samples to make music, and they were created at a time when memory was expensive, so you'd typically have fairly low resolution samples (8-bit 22KHz?), and people tried to use those samples creatively because you might not have many of them, both because of memory and hard drive space, but also because they weren't as easy to get as they are today. Most people didn't have the internet at home before the mid-late 90s, and even when people started to have the internet at home, it wasn't like today, the music making community was smaller. I first discovered trackers in a French gaming magazine around 1997 or 1998, but they had already been around much longer. Said magazine had came with a CD that contained multiple different tracker programs and a collection of music files in different formats (MOD, XM, etc). The compelling thing was that these files were small, because they contained a few audio samples and the data on how and when to play them, so you could fit a tune that was multiple minutes in 1 megabyte or less. For an example of what tracker software looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NjqNwHidpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NjqNwHidpk

null4bl3 5y ago

Do you know of any tracker like options for the Eurorack modular format?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
teolandon 5y ago
NerdSeq