The Tracker Tradition - richardjwild/arctracker GitHub Wiki
Before I describe Tracker and Desktop Tracker, we have time for a quick history lesson.
This story begins with a German computer programmer and musician called Karsten Obarski, who in the mid-80s was working for the computer game publisher EAS. He wrote a program there called Ultimate Soundtracker, a tool for composing and playing back computer game music loosely based on techniques pioneered by Rob Hubbard on the Commodore 64. It ran on the Commodore Amiga and it played back 8-bit PCM samples at varying pitches through the Amiga's hardware: up to four samples simultaneously, directly mirroring the Amiga's audio capabilities. Up to 15 different samples (called "sounds") could be used in a single song. Songs were sequenced in "patterns" while the patterns themselves were sequences of "events." An event was a cross-section in time across all four channels: in each channel, an event would either do nothing (if empty) or one of the following things:
- It could trigger a new sample at a certain pitch, to begin a new note.
- It could apply an effect to a sample that was already playing.
- It could do a combination of the two: trigger a new sample and simultaneously apply an effect to it.
The timing of the application was controlled by an internal clock which ticked 50 times a second. (I suspect that its clock was synchronised with the vertical refresh of the VDU. I have no citation for this, however I do know that Tracker on the Archimedes synchronised its clock this way). The speed of the music was set to an integer value from 1 to 15 where 1 was the fastest (1 tick per event) and 15 the slowest (15 ticks per event). A pattern was an array of 64 events, which were displayed as four columns, one for each audio channel ("track"). During playback, the pattern scrolled from top to bottom, thus time was represented vertically unlike most contemporary music sequencers which represent time horizontally. Up to 64 patterns could be defined in a song. The song itself comprised an array of "positions" - up to 128 of them, I think - each position was a slot that could be assigned one of the defined patterns. A pattern could be used in any number of song positions, which allowed reuse of repeating sections or phrases in the song. Finally, the program could export the songs as assembly language playback routines which could be incorporated into a game. The routines were very efficient, leaving enough CPU cycles free to run the rest of the game.
EAS released Ultimate Soundtracker as a commercial product in 1987, but it was not very successful - reviewers described it as "illogical," "temperamental" and "difficult" - and it was eclipsed in the market by software like Sonix by Aegis and EA's Deluxe Music Construction Set. It did, however, become a standard for Amiga game music. I do not know whether EAS ever released Ultimate Soundtracker into the public domain, but one way or another the program was distributed, disassembled, and modified versions were widely spread across the burgeoning Amiga underground. A disc of instrument samples (called ST-01) was distributed along with it.
Over the following years various clones and workalikes of Ultimate Soundtracker appeared, some derived illegally from the original code and some written from scratch. Along the way the file format was extended in various incompatible ways, for example in Soundtracker 2.4 the number of samples was increased by Unknown/D.O.C. to 31, which he indicated by inserting his initials "M.K." in the file at the end of the pattern table. In 1989 an improved version called NoiseTracker was released by Swedish hackers Pex "Mahoney" Tufvesson and Anders "Kaktus" Berkeman, who are often incorrectly assumed (by me included, in an earlier version of this wiki page) to be responsible for the "M.K." format id. By this time, trackers had spread across the Amiga demoscene with many keen musicians using them to compose music, which frequently got ripped off in demos.
1991 saw the release of ProTracker by Lars & Anders Hamre, Sven Vahsen and Rune Johnsrud, which set a new standard of quality for trackers. ProTracker increased the maximum number of patterns to 99, it included a sample editor, allowed finer control of the music speed, and introduced more effects. Another notable tracker was OctaMED, a very popular program which allowed eight-channel music, used its own (incompatible) file format and was not based on Ultimate Soundtracker code.
By the mid-90s trackers had spread to the PC, where the greater capabilities of audio interfaces like the SoundBlaster 16 and the Gravis Ultrasound allowed PC trackers to be developed far beyond the original Amiga versions. Faster CPUs and 16-bit audio capability meant that hardware mixing was replaced with software mixing; the new wave of tracker programs were led by FastTracker, Scream Tracker and Impulse Tracker.
To this day, Renoise continues the tracker tradition, but packaged up as a totally polished and professional application. It includes modern features found in contemporary DAWs, such as support for VST plug-in instruments and effects, plus a large selection of built-in effects including EQ, filters, dynamics processing, reverb, delay and much more. (I do not work for Renoise or get any benefit from them for that plug - I am simply an enthusiastic user).