12 ms·

Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video]

176 points by winkywooster 5y ago

dusted 5y ago
Ahoy videos are of very high quality, and this one is no exception!
kleiba 5y ago
In my younger days, I used to spend hours and hours playing with trackers on the Commodore Amiga. Over the years, I've always toyed with the idea of firing one up again but the one thing that's keeping me from doing that is the lack of sample banks. Admittedly, I've never spent too much time looking into it, so I might be wrong (I actually kind of hope it), but it seems to me that getting hold of a tracker program is not an issue, but getting a hold of any useful samples is. Typically, it involves either spending money (which is fine, I guess, but maybe not if you really just want to appeal to your nostalgia) or painfully wading through online archives of single sound samples in the hope of eventually gathering enough to create your own sample bank. That's a cumbersome process though, that would take toooo long for someone who just wants to casually try out a tracker again. In the olden days, and maybe that was just because the Amiga trackers I had came from less than official sources, always came with at least one substantial sample bank included. Probably not the greatest samples, but you got a decent amount of bass sounds, some drums (kicks, snares, hihats) and some lead instruments. Granted, there were also many garbage sounds that you could probably never use (I remember samples from Star Wars movies, etc...) but besides those, there were enough actual musical sounds/instruments that you could use to make your own songs. Like I said above, maybe it's just that I'm not looking in the right places, and I really hope that I'm just doing it wrong. So if you know how where to get samples for any tracker program (like, a comprehensive mixed set, not just single samples and not just a bank of 1024 bass sounds or so), please post a link.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  If you wanna be a traditionalist then search for “st-01 adf”. Try other numbers instead of 01. That should find you both the sounds that came with the original Soundtracker and a bunch of peoples’ personal collections that they posted.
- _0ffh 5y ago
  There's always the way how I got most of my samples at the time: Extract them from your mod collection. The downside is, you'll have to name and organise them yourself, as the sample names are usually (ab)used for text, ascii art, and maybe greetings.
- roberto 5y ago
  There are some starter sample kits that you can download for free, eg https://www.samplephonics.com/products/free/wav/hand-picked-freebie https://www.samplephonics.com/products/free/wav/hand-picked-.... Should have a little bit of everything.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Isn't Ableton Live what trackers grew up to be as an adult?
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    I have the same problem collecting VSTs/presets/sampled instruments, as I do collecting tracker samples. See my past comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29053430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29053430.
- livindub 5y ago
  Pair the Ableton free version with samples from Legowelt for maximum profit. http://legowelt.org/samples/ http://legowelt.org/samples/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- motogpjimbo 5y ago
  Maybe not quite what you're after, but Bassoon Tracker is written in Javascript, runs in a webpage without installation and has access to thousands of mod files in modarchive and modules.pl, including their samples: https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/ https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/
- wernsey 5y ago
  The MilkyTracker homepage's Downloads section has some links to sample archives in torrent form that I looked at last time I played with trackers. https://milkytracker.org/downloads/ https://milkytracker.org/downloads/
TrevorJ 5y ago
Ahoy might be one of my favorite creators on youtube. His production value is truly 'broadcast quality' while simultaneously including content that is so much more interesting and in depth than you'd ever see on television.
- iforgotpassword 5y ago
  Agree. Don't even remember how I discovered the channel, but it's one of those "upload rarely/infrequently but high quality". Enjoyed every single video so far. Only time I flinched was when he tried to pronounce "64'er" in this one. ;-)
kristopolous 5y ago
My only quibble is he left out how trackers are what basically led to the invention of jungle, trance, and hardcore
- 323 5y ago
  Citation needed for trance? Trance has long pads, the supersaw, not sure how you do those on a tracker.
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    I don't know if the supersaw was built in trackers or not, but you can use it in tracker music by pre-recording the sample and playing it back at various pitches.
    - mrob 5y ago
      A real supersaw uses free-running oscillators, so the phase between them varies with each note. This means the constructive and destructive interference between them is different each time, subtly varying the timbre, which you lose if you play the same sample each time.
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    1st we have to establish what we mean by "trance". I'm referring to an era between about 1991-1994. 2nd we need to establish what tracker music sounds like - especially how it's limited. Here's a 1991 trance track, Komakino - Frogs In Space (Trance Mix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjFBs_30uKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjFBs_30uKU Or a 1992 track, Cosmic Baby - Magic Cubes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCl9tIfje8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCl9tIfje8 I wasn't in the studio and I don't personally know the artists, but it really sounds like tracker music to me. Now I know that's probably not convincing enough so let's get into demo disks, such as Breathtaker (1994) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-QUFFcxVjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-QUFFcxVjc or Day of Reckoning (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfxDTgK3grg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfxDTgK3grg - go to 1:45 to hear those long pads you claim are impossible (they aren't). Or what about Wildfire's demos in 1992? (https://youtube.com/watch?v=0bk-qbbsgog https://youtube.com/watch?v=0bk-qbbsgog) And here's what's termed "Tiesto-Style" trance showing the actual tracker. https://youtu.be/6tNizdyx-DE?t=231 https://youtu.be/6tNizdyx-DE?t=231 Different people used different tools, that's absolutely true. My claim is that trackers played a major role as an instrument in the development of that contemporary style.
nyanpasu64 5y ago
Corrections on "MIDI Soundcards" (https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw?t=1704 https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw?t=1704): re. "their instrument banks were effectively hard-coded", the Creative Music System was a PSG-like chip with only square waves and no sample ROM at all, the AdLib was a FM synthesizer with no ROM banks either (though some MIDI banks which sounded nothing like sample-based MIDI players like the SC-55), and the GUS had a mix of ROM and RAM (and I don't think it targeted General MIDI either). I don't see any reason why any of these chips would be incompatible with trackers, and I do know the AdLib had multiple trackers historically and today (Reality Adlib Tracker, Adlib Tracker II, ScreamTracker 3, and more recently OpenMPT), though I think "feeding MIDIs through per-game custom soundbanks" was more common in video games, and AFAIK the GUS had more MIDI-based composing tools than trackers. Note that I don't know much about the CMS and GUS, and I have more experience with how Adlib music is composed/played today than in the 1990s.
- chithanh 5y ago
  I remember also that ScreamTracker was able to use Yamaha OPL series FM synthesizers, and the author detested MIDI because it did not give enough control over instrument acoustics.
- blincoln 5y ago
  My recollection is that while some PC sound cards of the era technically supported arbitrary FM and/or wavetable synthesis, it was difficult or impossible to get any custom sounds out of the MIDI side of them. I remember there typically being the General MIDI sound set, and maybe some custom presets on the higher-end cards. The big exception I ran into was the Yamaha DB50XG, which had an unbelievable (for the era/price) synthesis engine, but I had to buy third-party software to customize the instruments. I heard stories that implied vaguely similar things about the Gravis Ultrasound, but never owned one myself.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pierrec 5y ago
Trackers are underrated. In a way, I'm a bit sad that most of the time I see them mentioned, it seems to be in a historical context. Modern production tools have mostly settled on the combination of pianoroll, automation curves, and visual placement of samples on the project timeline. That's great for some types of music, but becomes really awkward in other cases. As a basic example, making a breakbeat sequence makes pretty much no sense with the above interface, but is perfectly represented by the "series of commands" approach of a tracker. I frequently go back to Buzz for that kind of thing (and was happy to see it mentioned in the video).
- adamkl 5y ago
  I remember using Buzz back when I was in university around the turn of the century. Lots of great memories with that one. I came across an excellent modern alternative when my kids started getting into electronic music. It’s called SunVox [0]. Still under active development and runs on just about anything! Lots of fun! [0] https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/
  - kube-system 5y ago
    Same here. I wish I still had some of the tracks I wrote in Buzz 20 years ago. I had a way better creative ear for music back then. I tried SunVox but I can't quite get the same inspiration that I had.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  I find Buzz a joy to use as a programmable / repeatable mixer, too. I love the tracker's ability to record knob/slider positions and play it back faithfully. Quantized recordings of parameters just make so much sense to me. I think about my Buzz files as the "source code" that will eventually be mixed-down to PCM audio. I can always go back to the "source" if I want to make modifications and re-render. I think of it a little like non-destructive editing layers in a bitmap editor, or like editing graphics in a vector format and rendering-down to raster for presentation.
  - 5y ago
cjauvin 5y ago
Excellent video! While looking at the machine code listing from the C=64 German magazine from the 80s, I realized once more that there was an extra, ninth column for the hex code, which was quite upsetting for me as kid (I think it might even have slightly slowed down my learning of 6502 programming).. turns out it was a checksum code of course!
boboche 5y ago
You know you are old if you can point on which platform the shown cracktro where playing in the video. You know you are epic if you can name the cracked software for each :) Joking aside, the background speedball music… oh man… good times.
yowlingcat 5y ago
Obligatory plug for Renoise [1], the best modern tracker. It supports VSTs and AUs and is my favorite composition tool. I've been a happy customer for a decade and a half. My production breakdown these days tends to be 70% Renoise 30% Logic. [1] https://www.renoise.com/ https://www.renoise.com/
- bane 5y ago
  It's also sort of the tracker that most of the PC demo scene has settled on. Many of the ultra tiny synths meant for 4kb demo production only really work as vsti in Renoise. It's an incredibly full featured DAW.
sen 5y ago
Impulse Tracker was such a hugely influential part of my younger years. Met some great people in the local scene who’d dial in to a BBS to share IT files and samples, give advice and feedback to each other, etc. I still use OpenMPT to listen to old IT files or play with some new track ideas every now and then, but nothing like the hours-and-hours-a-day feverish obsession of back then.
lanamo 5y ago
Trackers are making a comeback: check out M8 Tracker, a fantastic hardware device, celebrated by the music making community. https://dirtywave.com https://dirtywave.com (it's in very high demand and sold out quickly every time a new batch is available)
- lanamo 5y ago
  addendum: You can run this M8 Tracker as a "headless" version with a Teensy 4.1 on your computer. https://github.com/Dirtywave/M8HeadlessFirmware https://github.com/Dirtywave/M8HeadlessFirmware (might be a good option for tracker fans since this hardware is really "hard to get" at the moment.) M8 Tracker seems like a perfect device. In the meantime, you can try the above DIY version and practice with that.
aasasd 5y ago
Don't forget to use a sampler to grab sounds for the tracker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs > “Ta-da-da-daa”... aaaaand we're out of memory.
uxcolumbo 5y ago
Here is a tracker in a box ;) Polyend Tracker https://polyend.com/tracker/ https://polyend.com/tracker/
bane 5y ago
Fun fact, VLC and ffmpeg have fantastic support for most classic tracker formats. This opens up literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of songs to listeners. I really wish modern media servers (e.g. Plex) that are built on ffmpeg would support tracker formats since it's basically "free" for them. Also modern musicians working with modern trackers like Renoise work very heavily with VSTi instead of just samples. Though trackers really give an absolutely incredible amount of expressiveness to sample playback that I don't really think anything else can quite match.
- sagamusix 5y ago
  Caution: VLC uses libmodplug on Windows (and probably macOS), which is barely maintained these days and plays many modules incorrectly. Many Linux distributions replace libmodplug with an emulation layer that lets libopenmpt do the actual decoding and playback, though, so module playback through VLC is much more accurate on those platforms. Disclaimer: I'm developing OpenMPT and libopenmpt.
  - bane 5y ago
    Thanks so much for the info! OpenMPT/libopenmpt has hands down the best rendering of these classic formats that I'm aware of. It's helped me recover "lost" songs many times. Thank you so much for the great work!
- crtasm 5y ago
  You can also drop them into Mixxx and DJ with them!
malkia 5y ago
Was it Fast Tracker that used Unreal Mode back in the days (on 286)? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_mode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_mode
- sagamusix 5y ago
  Fast Tracker runs fine on Win9x, so it's just regular protected mode.
rcarmo 5y ago
Pretty awesome, thanks. I've been bingeing on retro computing documentaries, and this is right up with the best of them. If anyone else is interested, I'd heartily recommend: - The entire "From Bedrooms to Billions" documentary series (3x2h pieces, spanning the UK computing scene, the Amiga and the PlayStation, with several discussions on game music and demoscene) - "The Chiptune Story", which covers the SID chip and the Amiga (there's also "The Commodore Story")
- nzach 5y ago
  Your comment got me thinking: "Wouldn't be nice if existed an 'awesome list' for this kind of content?" After a brief google search the best I could find is this [0] and it seems to be abandoned. Does anyone know a better source for this type of content? I'm leaving some random links to great channels that produce this kind of content: - CGA Graphics - Not as bad as you thought! [1] - DVD-RAM: The Disc that Behaved like a Flash Drive [2] - The Story of Super Mario Bros. 3 | Gaming Historian [3] [0] - https://github.com/watson/awesome-computer-history https://github.com/watson/awesome-computer-history [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecH3OU0R4ls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecH3OU0R4ls [3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxT6IwUtLSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxT6IwUtLSU
hnlmorg 5y ago
Good content. Covers the Amiga heavily, then naturally the PC. But it felt like Atari was massively glossed over. Sure they mentioned MIDI and Cubase, and sure the Amiga was a more powerful machine. However Atari was used heavily for music production as well and there were plenty of trackers available for that too.
dharma1 5y ago
Love to see this here, a very well researched video! It was an awesome scene, I used to put out jungle and trip hop tracks on Mono211/Monotonik/Voodoo and a couple of other mod labels back in the day. Everything was free, in an era where studio time and studio equipment was really expensive it was mind-blowing to be able to do it with just a PC, all in software. Lots of friendly competition between artists and the file format was such that you could open a mod and see exactly how it was put together, and reuse the samples if you wanted to. Gave birth to many people's careers in music and software!
- nuclx 5y ago
  Mono211 was such a quality netlabel. I used to download all tracks they (and other labels such as TDR) released back in the days and listen to them while learning to code. This shaped my taste in music as the only other influence in this pre-Kazaa era were rather boring mainstream radio broadcasts and MTV. It felt like wizardry and names like distance, dune, falcon or mortimer twang still give me shivers.

176 points by winkywooster 5y ago

Ahoy videos are of very high quality, and this one is no exception!

In my younger days, I used to spend hours and hours playing with trackers on the Commodore Amiga. Over the years, I've always toyed with the idea of firing one up again but the one thing that's keeping me from doing that is the lack of sample banks. Admittedly, I've never spent too much time looking into it, so I might be wrong (I actually kind of hope it), but it seems to me that getting hold of a tracker program is not an issue, but getting a hold of any useful samples is. Typically, it involves either spending money (which is fine, I guess, but maybe not if you really just want to appeal to your nostalgia) or painfully wading through online archives of single sound samples in the hope of eventually gathering enough to create your own sample bank. That's a cumbersome process though, that would take toooo long for someone who just wants to casually try out a tracker again. In the olden days, and maybe that was just because the Amiga trackers I had came from less than official sources, always came with at least one substantial sample bank included. Probably not the greatest samples, but you got a decent amount of bass sounds, some drums (kicks, snares, hihats) and some lead instruments. Granted, there were also many garbage sounds that you could probably never use (I remember samples from Star Wars movies, etc...) but besides those, there were enough actual musical sounds/instruments that you could use to make your own songs. Like I said above, maybe it's just that I'm not looking in the right places, and I really hope that I'm just doing it wrong. So if you know how where to get samples for any tracker program (like, a comprehensive mixed set, not just single samples and not just a bank of 1024 bass sounds or so), please post a link.

egypturnash 5y ago
If you wanna be a traditionalist then search for “st-01 adf”. Try other numbers instead of 01. That should find you both the sounds that came with the original Soundtracker and a bunch of peoples’ personal collections that they posted.
_0ffh 5y ago
There's always the way how I got most of my samples at the time: Extract them from your mod collection. The downside is, you'll have to name and organise them yourself, as the sample names are usually (ab)used for text, ascii art, and maybe greetings.
roberto 5y ago
There are some starter sample kits that you can download for free, eg https://www.samplephonics.com/products/free/wav/hand-picked-freebie https://www.samplephonics.com/products/free/wav/hand-picked-.... Should have a little bit of everything.
dylan604 5y ago
Isn't Ableton Live what trackers grew up to be as an adult?
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  I have the same problem collecting VSTs/presets/sampled instruments, as I do collecting tracker samples. See my past comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29053430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29053430.
livindub 5y ago
Pair the Ableton free version with samples from Legowelt for maximum profit. http://legowelt.org/samples/ http://legowelt.org/samples/
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
motogpjimbo 5y ago
Maybe not quite what you're after, but Bassoon Tracker is written in Javascript, runs in a webpage without installation and has access to thousands of mod files in modarchive and modules.pl, including their samples: https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/ https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/
wernsey 5y ago
The MilkyTracker homepage's Downloads section has some links to sample archives in torrent form that I looked at last time I played with trackers. https://milkytracker.org/downloads/ https://milkytracker.org/downloads/

TrevorJ 5y ago

Ahoy might be one of my favorite creators on youtube. His production value is truly 'broadcast quality' while simultaneously including content that is so much more interesting and in depth than you'd ever see on television.

iforgotpassword 5y ago
Agree. Don't even remember how I discovered the channel, but it's one of those "upload rarely/infrequently but high quality". Enjoyed every single video so far. Only time I flinched was when he tried to pronounce "64'er" in this one. ;-)

kristopolous 5y ago

My only quibble is he left out how trackers are what basically led to the invention of jungle, trance, and hardcore

323 5y ago
Citation needed for trance? Trance has long pads, the supersaw, not sure how you do those on a tracker.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  I don't know if the supersaw was built in trackers or not, but you can use it in tracker music by pre-recording the sample and playing it back at various pitches.
  - mrob 5y ago
    A real supersaw uses free-running oscillators, so the phase between them varies with each note. This means the constructive and destructive interference between them is different each time, subtly varying the timbre, which you lose if you play the same sample each time.
- kristopolous 5y ago
  1st we have to establish what we mean by "trance". I'm referring to an era between about 1991-1994. 2nd we need to establish what tracker music sounds like - especially how it's limited. Here's a 1991 trance track, Komakino - Frogs In Space (Trance Mix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjFBs_30uKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjFBs_30uKU Or a 1992 track, Cosmic Baby - Magic Cubes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCl9tIfje8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCl9tIfje8 I wasn't in the studio and I don't personally know the artists, but it really sounds like tracker music to me. Now I know that's probably not convincing enough so let's get into demo disks, such as Breathtaker (1994) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-QUFFcxVjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-QUFFcxVjc or Day of Reckoning (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfxDTgK3grg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfxDTgK3grg - go to 1:45 to hear those long pads you claim are impossible (they aren't). Or what about Wildfire's demos in 1992? (https://youtube.com/watch?v=0bk-qbbsgog https://youtube.com/watch?v=0bk-qbbsgog) And here's what's termed "Tiesto-Style" trance showing the actual tracker. https://youtu.be/6tNizdyx-DE?t=231 https://youtu.be/6tNizdyx-DE?t=231 Different people used different tools, that's absolutely true. My claim is that trackers played a major role as an instrument in the development of that contemporary style.

nyanpasu64 5y ago

Corrections on "MIDI Soundcards" (https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw?t=1704 https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw?t=1704): re. "their instrument banks were effectively hard-coded", the Creative Music System was a PSG-like chip with only square waves and no sample ROM at all, the AdLib was a FM synthesizer with no ROM banks either (though some MIDI banks which sounded nothing like sample-based MIDI players like the SC-55), and the GUS had a mix of ROM and RAM (and I don't think it targeted General MIDI either). I don't see any reason why any of these chips would be incompatible with trackers, and I do know the AdLib had multiple trackers historically and today (Reality Adlib Tracker, Adlib Tracker II, ScreamTracker 3, and more recently OpenMPT), though I think "feeding MIDIs through per-game custom soundbanks" was more common in video games, and AFAIK the GUS had more MIDI-based composing tools than trackers. Note that I don't know much about the CMS and GUS, and I have more experience with how Adlib music is composed/played today than in the 1990s.

chithanh 5y ago
I remember also that ScreamTracker was able to use Yamaha OPL series FM synthesizers, and the author detested MIDI because it did not give enough control over instrument acoustics.
blincoln 5y ago
My recollection is that while some PC sound cards of the era technically supported arbitrary FM and/or wavetable synthesis, it was difficult or impossible to get any custom sounds out of the MIDI side of them. I remember there typically being the General MIDI sound set, and maybe some custom presets on the higher-end cards. The big exception I ran into was the Yamaha DB50XG, which had an unbelievable (for the era/price) synthesis engine, but I had to buy third-party software to customize the instruments. I heard stories that implied vaguely similar things about the Gravis Ultrasound, but never owned one myself.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

pierrec 5y ago

Trackers are underrated. In a way, I'm a bit sad that most of the time I see them mentioned, it seems to be in a historical context. Modern production tools have mostly settled on the combination of pianoroll, automation curves, and visual placement of samples on the project timeline. That's great for some types of music, but becomes really awkward in other cases. As a basic example, making a breakbeat sequence makes pretty much no sense with the above interface, but is perfectly represented by the "series of commands" approach of a tracker. I frequently go back to Buzz for that kind of thing (and was happy to see it mentioned in the video).

adamkl 5y ago
I remember using Buzz back when I was in university around the turn of the century. Lots of great memories with that one. I came across an excellent modern alternative when my kids started getting into electronic music. It’s called SunVox [0]. Still under active development and runs on just about anything! Lots of fun! [0] https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/
- kube-system 5y ago
  Same here. I wish I still had some of the tracks I wrote in Buzz 20 years ago. I had a way better creative ear for music back then. I tried SunVox but I can't quite get the same inspiration that I had.
EvanAnderson 5y ago
I find Buzz a joy to use as a programmable / repeatable mixer, too. I love the tracker's ability to record knob/slider positions and play it back faithfully. Quantized recordings of parameters just make so much sense to me. I think about my Buzz files as the "source code" that will eventually be mixed-down to PCM audio. I can always go back to the "source" if I want to make modifications and re-render. I think of it a little like non-destructive editing layers in a bitmap editor, or like editing graphics in a vector format and rendering-down to raster for presentation.
- 5y ago

cjauvin 5y ago

Excellent video! While looking at the machine code listing from the C=64 German magazine from the 80s, I realized once more that there was an extra, ninth column for the hex code, which was quite upsetting for me as kid (I think it might even have slightly slowed down my learning of 6502 programming).. turns out it was a checksum code of course!

boboche 5y ago

You know you are old if you can point on which platform the shown cracktro where playing in the video. You know you are epic if you can name the cracked software for each :) Joking aside, the background speedball music… oh man… good times.

yowlingcat 5y ago

Obligatory plug for Renoise [1], the best modern tracker. It supports VSTs and AUs and is my favorite composition tool. I've been a happy customer for a decade and a half. My production breakdown these days tends to be 70% Renoise 30% Logic. [1] https://www.renoise.com/ https://www.renoise.com/

bane 5y ago
It's also sort of the tracker that most of the PC demo scene has settled on. Many of the ultra tiny synths meant for 4kb demo production only really work as vsti in Renoise. It's an incredibly full featured DAW.

sen 5y ago

Impulse Tracker was such a hugely influential part of my younger years. Met some great people in the local scene who’d dial in to a BBS to share IT files and samples, give advice and feedback to each other, etc. I still use OpenMPT to listen to old IT files or play with some new track ideas every now and then, but nothing like the hours-and-hours-a-day feverish obsession of back then.

lanamo 5y ago

Trackers are making a comeback: check out M8 Tracker, a fantastic hardware device, celebrated by the music making community. https://dirtywave.com https://dirtywave.com (it's in very high demand and sold out quickly every time a new batch is available)

lanamo 5y ago
addendum: You can run this M8 Tracker as a "headless" version with a Teensy 4.1 on your computer. https://github.com/Dirtywave/M8HeadlessFirmware https://github.com/Dirtywave/M8HeadlessFirmware (might be a good option for tracker fans since this hardware is really "hard to get" at the moment.) M8 Tracker seems like a perfect device. In the meantime, you can try the above DIY version and practice with that.

aasasd 5y ago

Don't forget to use a sampler to grab sounds for the tracker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs > “Ta-da-da-daa”... aaaaand we're out of memory.

uxcolumbo 5y ago

Here is a tracker in a box ;) Polyend Tracker https://polyend.com/tracker/ https://polyend.com/tracker/

bane 5y ago

Fun fact, VLC and ffmpeg have fantastic support for most classic tracker formats. This opens up literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of songs to listeners. I really wish modern media servers (e.g. Plex) that are built on ffmpeg would support tracker formats since it's basically "free" for them. Also modern musicians working with modern trackers like Renoise work very heavily with VSTi instead of just samples. Though trackers really give an absolutely incredible amount of expressiveness to sample playback that I don't really think anything else can quite match.

sagamusix 5y ago
Caution: VLC uses libmodplug on Windows (and probably macOS), which is barely maintained these days and plays many modules incorrectly. Many Linux distributions replace libmodplug with an emulation layer that lets libopenmpt do the actual decoding and playback, though, so module playback through VLC is much more accurate on those platforms. Disclaimer: I'm developing OpenMPT and libopenmpt.
- bane 5y ago
  Thanks so much for the info! OpenMPT/libopenmpt has hands down the best rendering of these classic formats that I'm aware of. It's helped me recover "lost" songs many times. Thank you so much for the great work!
crtasm 5y ago
You can also drop them into Mixxx and DJ with them!

malkia 5y ago

Was it Fast Tracker that used Unreal Mode back in the days (on 286)? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_mode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_mode

sagamusix 5y ago
Fast Tracker runs fine on Win9x, so it's just regular protected mode.

rcarmo 5y ago

Pretty awesome, thanks. I've been bingeing on retro computing documentaries, and this is right up with the best of them. If anyone else is interested, I'd heartily recommend: - The entire "From Bedrooms to Billions" documentary series (3x2h pieces, spanning the UK computing scene, the Amiga and the PlayStation, with several discussions on game music and demoscene) - "The Chiptune Story", which covers the SID chip and the Amiga (there's also "The Commodore Story")

nzach 5y ago
Your comment got me thinking: "Wouldn't be nice if existed an 'awesome list' for this kind of content?" After a brief google search the best I could find is this [0] and it seems to be abandoned. Does anyone know a better source for this type of content? I'm leaving some random links to great channels that produce this kind of content: - CGA Graphics - Not as bad as you thought! [1] - DVD-RAM: The Disc that Behaved like a Flash Drive [2] - The Story of Super Mario Bros. 3 | Gaming Historian [3] [0] - https://github.com/watson/awesome-computer-history https://github.com/watson/awesome-computer-history [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecH3OU0R4ls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecH3OU0R4ls [3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxT6IwUtLSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxT6IwUtLSU

hnlmorg 5y ago

Good content. Covers the Amiga heavily, then naturally the PC. But it felt like Atari was massively glossed over. Sure they mentioned MIDI and Cubase, and sure the Amiga was a more powerful machine. However Atari was used heavily for music production as well and there were plenty of trackers available for that too.

dharma1 5y ago

Love to see this here, a very well researched video! It was an awesome scene, I used to put out jungle and trip hop tracks on Mono211/Monotonik/Voodoo and a couple of other mod labels back in the day. Everything was free, in an era where studio time and studio equipment was really expensive it was mind-blowing to be able to do it with just a PC, all in software. Lots of friendly competition between artists and the file format was such that you could open a mod and see exactly how it was put together, and reuse the samples if you wanted to. Gave birth to many people's careers in music and software!

nuclx 5y ago
Mono211 was such a quality netlabel. I used to download all tracks they (and other labels such as TDR) released back in the days and listen to them while learning to code. This shaped my taste in music as the only other influence in this pre-Kazaa era were rather boring mainstream radio broadcasts and MTV. It felt like wizardry and names like distance, dune, falcon or mortimer twang still give me shivers.