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Impulse Tracker was used for the soundtrack in a number of computer games too, right? I know for a fact that Deus Ex used .IT files for the music (and that game

by marvin 13y ago

Impulse Tracker was used for the soundtrack in a number of computer games too, right? I know for a fact that Deus Ex used .IT files for the music (and that game has a very interesting soundtrack), but I'm sure there are others as well. Deus Ex was ~2000, so we are talking after the dawn of MP3 at least.

bane 13y ago
There was a short window where games needed lots of music, but had enough other art assets that CDs wouldn't have worked. Low quality digital samples of the music sounded terrible, and the alternatives like FM-Synth (ad-lib) weren't good enough and MP3s were still too computationally intensive to decode while rendering a game. It turns out that this type of music technology, first invented to work in the low memory environment of the original Amiga, and then advanced considerably since then, offered a great alternative. Digital samples of individual instruments were played back at different rates to simulate different notes and the note data itself was incredibly small. While almost all Amiga (and a large number of Atari ST games) used a 4-channel version of this technique, notable games that used this kind of technology in the PC era include the original Unreal, Jazz Jackrabbit, Hitman, Deus Ex, Pinball Dreams, etc. I can't say if Impulse Tracker was used in the production of all of these. There were custom trackers, and other popular tracking software at the time, but the basic technique was very popular during this time. It's likely that Impulse Tracker was less used than people think though as for a long time accurate playback of some of the advanced effects (filters, NNAs) outside of Impulse Tracker was pretty rare. Quite a few video game music designers got their start writing music in this kind of environment because it was incredibly cheap to get up and running and producing music. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Brandon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Brandon Back then most trackers were free, or like Impulse Tracker, basically free except for 1 or 2 major features and you could simply rip the samples out of other songs to reuse in your own music. Since you could also "read" other people's music files, you could also learn a lot about how to construct music. Different techniques, music theory, rhythm and percussion, etc. It's kind of like open source music in a sense. see more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker
- thristian 13y ago
  Jazz Jackrabbit and Epic Pinball were created by people from the demogroup Future Crew; I'm pretty sure those games used Future Crew's Scream Tracker 3, the tracker that IT dethroned. It's also worth noting that the original 4-channel MOD format was almost entirely designed around exposing the capabilities of the Amiga's stock audio hardware; it was a grand day when PCs grew powerful enough to do in software what the Amiga had been doing in hardware all along.

by marvin 13y ago

bane 13y ago

There was a short window where games needed lots of music, but had enough other art assets that CDs wouldn't have worked. Low quality digital samples of the music sounded terrible, and the alternatives like FM-Synth (ad-lib) weren't good enough and MP3s were still too computationally intensive to decode while rendering a game. It turns out that this type of music technology, first invented to work in the low memory environment of the original Amiga, and then advanced considerably since then, offered a great alternative. Digital samples of individual instruments were played back at different rates to simulate different notes and the note data itself was incredibly small. While almost all Amiga (and a large number of Atari ST games) used a 4-channel version of this technique, notable games that used this kind of technology in the PC era include the original Unreal, Jazz Jackrabbit, Hitman, Deus Ex, Pinball Dreams, etc. I can't say if Impulse Tracker was used in the production of all of these. There were custom trackers, and other popular tracking software at the time, but the basic technique was very popular during this time. It's likely that Impulse Tracker was less used than people think though as for a long time accurate playback of some of the advanced effects (filters, NNAs) outside of Impulse Tracker was pretty rare. Quite a few video game music designers got their start writing music in this kind of environment because it was incredibly cheap to get up and running and producing music. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Brandon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Brandon Back then most trackers were free, or like Impulse Tracker, basically free except for 1 or 2 major features and you could simply rip the samples out of other songs to reuse in your own music. Since you could also "read" other people's music files, you could also learn a lot about how to construct music. Different techniques, music theory, rhythm and percussion, etc. It's kind of like open source music in a sense. see more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

thristian 13y ago
Jazz Jackrabbit and Epic Pinball were created by people from the demogroup Future Crew; I'm pretty sure those games used Future Crew's Scream Tracker 3, the tracker that IT dethroned. It's also worth noting that the original 4-channel MOD format was almost entirely designed around exposing the capabilities of the Amiga's stock audio hardware; it was a grand day when PCs grew powerful enough to do in software what the Amiga had been doing in hardware all along.