Tracker (music)

“lmao why dont u yuze tr4xx0rz??”

~ Average tracker user, not knowing that this outdated 30-year old software is absolute junk

“Trackers are crap!”

~ Oscar Wilde after trying to put a note in a tracker for about 6 hours

This tracker exclaims that it's trash.

A tracker is a term to describe a music making program that looks like an ugly version of Microsoft Excel.

Concept

A tracker is used to make a smaller-size music file compared to an MP3. It is mostly used in games (As I've been informed lately, nobody uses them in games since 2006) and demoscene productions.

Modules

Modules are files where all the tracker data is stored. It consists of samples, patterns and instruments (in some trackers). There are general module formats, like the S3M, XM, IT and MOD formats, and other tracker-specific formats, which aren't used.

Samples

Samples are the sounds that are used in a module. In most of the modules, they are pretty bad. They are triggered whenever there is an instruction that says so. In newer trackers, samples can be looped in various ways.

There are ping-pong (bidi) loops, which, when the sample is played until the end loop point, it goes in reverse until it hits the start point, and then it repeats the process. Those are impossible to do without some clicking appearing, it is a mystery in why does it happen; there are also normal loops, which go back to the start point when they play until the end loop point. These mostly sound bad on real-life instrument samples, because it is hard to find a good looping point.

Instruments

Instruments are used to make envelopes for samples, like a volume or a panning envelope. They can also be used to make multiple samples into one instrument, which makes the whole process easier to use. Rumor has it that nobody ever made nor used a multisampled instrument.

Patterns

Patterns are like spreadsheets. A typical pattern consists of columns called channels, and rows called... eh, rows. Note data is entered in each channel. Channel data is stored in patterns, which are made of a specific amount of rows. They are stored in modules and they are differentiated by their index number. For instance, if the pattern with the largest number is pattern 19, the new pattern would have the number 20. If there were no patterns before the new one, its number is usually set to be 0.

Pattern order

The pattern order is a list of patterns that should be played in the respective order; in most of modules it looks like this:

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1

This means that the pattern 0 is repeating 32 times and that the song ends with the pattern 1. This is how does a typical tracker song look like.

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Simple, right?

NO!

Just use a regular DAW or something, duh.

History

The Amiga era

The concept of a tracker was first developed on the Amiga. The first tracker on the Amiga was called "The Ultimate SoundTracker". It was developed by Karsten Obarski in 1987, and it came with a floppy disk with some disgusting sounds to be used titled "ST-01". There were about 110 more disgusting disks there. Unsurprisingly, nobody used this software, due to the amount of bugs and all the confusion this program caused. It was limiting you to only 15 instruments and 4 instrument channels.

Some time later, the guys in a group named "The Jungle Command" completely disassembled the software, made a new tracker named SoundTracker II, and left Obarski with nothing. Obarski later abandoned his program (I would abandon it too, it was a pile of trash), with the last version being v2.

A new tracker called NoiseTracker appeared in 1989. It was made by two Swedish people, their nicknames being Mahoney and Kaktus. It supported up to 31 instruments, and it had this new shiny format called a module. It also had various new features, and was a large improvement from the SoundTracker. Anyway, it was still shit.

The next iteration of the tracker, named ProTracker, was released in 1990. It was full of countless bugs and was very unstable. Numerous versions afterwards increased the instability and the bugs in the system, and because the computer music making community has always been the same, they appreciated the amount of bugs that was added in every version.

In 1991, OctaMED was released. It was one of the first trackers to support 8 channels on an Amiga. Nobody used it, because it took 30% more energy than ProTracker in order to play a module.

After that, there were some useless trackers, which certainly no one used, that aren't notable enough to be put on here.

The MS-DOS era

These colors are very ugly, they remind me of poo.

The first tracker software on the MS-DOS was Scream Tracker 2.21, released in 1990. It is weird that this program was on the version 2.21 at the time, as there were no versions that predated it. (Like, seriously, which mastermind ignores 1 when he's counting?) This tracker used a specific module format for itself, STM. It went through multiple revisions, such as it being renamed to Scream Tracker Music Interface Kit, until the developer decided that the name of it was too long, and, in 1994, Scream Tracker 3 was released. It used another specific module format, S3M.

Unfortunately, FastTracker 2 was released a few months after, so the ugly beige Scream Tracker has been replaced with the beautiful dark-blue FastTracker. Just kidding, FastTracker was ugly as hell too. FastTracker 2 used a format specific for itself, named XM (eXtended Module). It featured lots of stuff that hasn't been done in earlier trackers, like instruments that support volume and panning automation, and as such, it remained on the position of the best tracker for a few years.

In 1995/1996, Impulse Tracker 1 was released. It featured up to 64 channels and this new shiny thing named NNA (no, not Nebraska Numismatic Association, it stands for New Note Action). It was also ugly and beige, like Scream Tracker. It was updated until it reached the version 3, so every module saved with Impulse Tracker 1 would have 500 kilobytes more in Impulse Tracker 3. Nice, isn't it?

The Windows era

The first native Windows tracker was ModPlug Tracker, released by some Oliver guy. It is known for having many issues and not playing any of the predating trackers' modules well. ModPlug Tracker later evolved into OpenMPT, when the Oliver guy made the code public and open-source in 2006.

Other trackers:

• MadTracker 2 was released in 1998. (Keep in mind that there was no MadTracker 1. Does any of the developers know to count?) It introduced a new format named MT2.
• Renoise, the first paid tracker (not including The Ultimate SoundTracker) was released in 2002. It had much more capabilities than an ordinary tracker, but it's not worth it as it's paid. (I've already paid for Microsoft Excel, why would I pay for this too?) Many tracker musicians have migrated to this paid junk of software which isn't compatible with any tracker at the time.
• Schism Tracker, also known as Spasm Chasm Tracker, is a clone of ModPlug Tracker, made to look ugly, like the good old Scream Tracker 3. (Damn, why does every single tracker developer make bad design decisions?)
• Skale Tracker is a clone of FastTracker 2, but with more features and a fancier, but still ugly UI. MilkyTracker is another clone of FastTracker 2, but, unlike every other tracker, it looks pretty nice.
• Microsoft Excel is a software that is used to structure data into tables. It is the most popular tracker as of now.

Complaints

• Many users complain that trackers are very hard to use because of their sheer lack of any guide or manual. This resulted in lots and lots of frustration because notes just wouldn't put themselves in. Little did they know you have to click Space before inputting notes.
• The incompatibility between trackers makes songs very difficult to listen; a bunch of trackers doesn't even have an export option for any general audio format, like WAV or MP3.
• Almost all trackers are unstable. Regular tracker musicians blame this on their operating system, as there is no way it could be their tracker.
• The most popular trackers aren't supported by the newest systems, mostly because they were released 30 years ago with no updates.

Users

The only good tracker users. Rest in peace.

The users of tracker software are big (and in some cases overweight) geeks who have no social life and sit in front of their computers all day long. They often use 1337 speax0rz and type in WeiRD CaSinG in order to be very kewl, but they just look very stupid. The other, good type of tracker users are the ones that have deceased.

The users in the 90's often left their addresses and phone numbers in the modules, in order for someone to contact them. This exposed a huge vulnerability to their poor mothers, who constantly received calls from somebody that claimed to be "Maniac" requesting to talk with their child (it turns out that Maniac was just another user, and that was his nickname).

Most of the tracker musicians made noisy and screechy 20-second chiptunes or very repetitive boots-cats 9-minute rave songs. Needless to say, they were effortless and absolute crap. If you want to see how bad is their "music", just visit The Mod Archive.

Tracker users can fight to defend their tracker from the bad mouths, usually resulting in a loss. There were some rare cases where tracker users won against the other side, but it was very uncommon to see that. They would die for their trackers. For instance, if you tell a FastTracker 2 user that Impulse Tracker is better because it has NNAs, he would come into your house and slaughter your family. This happens because the user recognizes that his choice is very stupid, but he doesn't want to admit that to himself.