Tracker

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Tracker is the generic term for a class of software music sequencers which, in their purest form, allow the user to arrange sound samples stepwise on a timeline across several monophonic channels. A tracker's interface is primarily numeric; notes are entered via the keyboard, while parameters, effects and so forth are entered in hexadecimal. A complete song consists of several small multi-channel patterns chained together via a master list.

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How it works

There are several elements common to any tracker program: samples, notes, effects, tracks (or channels), patterns, and orders.

A sample is a small digital sound file of an instrument, voice, or other sound effect. Most trackers allow a part of the sample to be looped, simulating a sustain of a note.

A note designates the frequency at which the sample is played back. By increasing or decreasing the playback speed of a digital sample, the pitch is raised or lowered, simulating instrumental notes (e.g. C, C#, D, etc.).

An effect is a special function applied to a particular note. These effects are then applied during playback through either hardware or software. Common tracker effects include volume, portamento, vibrato, retrigger, and arpeggio.

A track (or channel) is a space where one sample is played back at a time. Whereas the original Amiga trackers only provided four tracks, the hardware limit, modern trackers can mix a virtually unlimited number of channels into one sound stream through software mixing. Tracks have a fixed number of "rows" on which notes and effects can be placed (most trackers lay out tracks in a vertical fashion). Tracks typically contain 64 rows and 16 beats, although the beats and tempo can be increased or decreased to the composer's taste.

A basic drum set could thus be arranged by putting a bass drum at rows 0, 4, 8, 12 etc. of one track and putting some hihat at rows 2, 6, 10, 14 etc. of a second track. Of course bass and hats could be interleaved on the same track, if the samples are short enough. If the they overlap, the previous sample is stopped when the next one begins.

A pattern is a group of simultaneously played tracks that represents a full section of the song. A pattern is intended to represent an even number of measures of music composition.

An order is part of a sequence of patterns which defines the layout of a song. Patterns can be repeated across multiple orders to save tracking time and file space.

There are also some tracker-like programs that utilize tracker-style sequencing scheme while using real-time sound synthesis instead of samples. Many of these programs are designed for creating music for a particular synthesizer chip such as the OPL chips of the Adlib and SoundBlaster sound cards, or the sound chips of classic home computers. These programs are also often called "trackers" and are listed in this article.

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History

Template:Cleanup-date The term tracker derives from Ultimate Soundtracker, the first of its type, written by Karsten Obarski and released in 1987 for the Commodore Amiga, although the general concept of step-sequencing samples numerically can be traced back to the Fairlight CMI sampling workstation of the late 1970s. The first computer game to feature tracker music was Amegas (1987), an Arkanoid clone for Amiga. Its music, composed by Obarski, is these days often said to be the first MOD ever done and is well known by fans of "old school" computer music.

Since wavetable sound cards were very expensive in the early 90s and the expressive capabilities of the cheaper FM-synthesizer were rather limited, a new generation of sound standards were needed. The MIDI standard, like you would use with the Roland MT-32 or the Sound Canvas synthesizers, consists of instructions on what note to play with what instrument. In other words, it is like a text file containing simple instructions on how to produce the sound; somewhat like a piano roll. The problem with this was that you needed an expensive piece of hardware in order to produce realistic instrument sounds, and in the earliest days there was much competition between files arranged for the MT-32, and those aimed at the new General MIDI standard. FM synthesis could be used in combination with MIDI, but sounded an order of magnitude worse than wavetable synthesis, or the MT-32.

The tracker format on the other hand, deals with sound differently. This format stores the notes and the instruments digitally in the file instead of relying on a sound card to reproduce the instruments. A tracker song, when saved to disk, typically incorporates all the sequencing data plus samples, and thus during the format's heyday it became almost a sport to create long, complex .mod (or .sng) files which were nonetheless smaller than 880 kB, the size of an Amiga floppy disk. Typically the composer would incorporate his or her assumed name into the list of samples.

Curiously, most early tracker musicians appeared to be from the UK and the Nordic nations, probably because the tracker was heavily related to the demoscene, which grew rapidly in Scandinavian countries. For example, one of the most influential PC trackers, ScreamTracker, was originally developed by Future Crew for use in their own demos.

Image:Protracker.gif The edit window of a tracker resembles a player piano scroll, moving from the bottom of the screen upwards. The first trackers allowed for only four channels of 8-bit music, although as the notes were samples this limitation was less important than those of synthesising music chips, such as Commodore's SID or General Instruments' venerable AY-3-8912 and Yamaha's compatible YM2149, as the user could sample chords, for example, and play them back on a single channel, a process which became a cliche in early pop-rave chart tunes; rapid chordal stabs, often of fifths, were the hallmark of Altern-8 and other transient techno phenomena. Later tracker software, most famously OctaMED, allowed for eight channels of music or more, whilst special hardware could allow for 16-bit playback.

Karsten Obarski's original Ultimate Soundtracker, often just called Soundtracker, was originally an internal development tool for EAS (a German Software Company) which goes some way towards explaining its programmer-friendly interface. The company eventually released it as a commercial product. Soundtracker itself was never a very big success, as it was technically very limited and user-unfriendly, but soon illegally cracked and improved versions such as MasterSoundtracker, ProTracker and NoiseTracker became extremely popular. The machines on which tracker software ran were not expensive, particularly in the UK and some other European countries, where the Amiga and Atari ST were the default home computer choice during the six or so years spanning the dawn of the 1990s. Thus, tracker music became something of an underground punk phenomenon, especially as so much contemporary chart music was then sample-based dance music, a genre which was relatively simple to produce with step-based sequencing. Tracker music was a fantastic training ground for a generation of electronic dance musicians, many of whom saved up for an Akai sampler, a multi-effects unit, a mixer and a microphone, thence to storm the charts.

There was a downside to all this, however, in that 'tracker music' became something of a term of derision for stereotypically ravey, computer-game-style pop tunes, whilst the difficulty involved in adding 'swing' to a mechanistic sequencing style resulted in much 4/4 music based around strict four-bar sections, often using similar samples (being instrumental, tuneful tracker music required distinctive lead voices, of which chimes, pitch-bent guitar tones and rave piano were overused). One tracker addressing these issues is Radium. However, whether Radium qualifies as being a tracker is an open question.

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PC

Image:Pt5.png Over the 1990s, tracker musicians gravitated to the PC, although they initially lacked the capability of hardware sound processing. Even the most popular sound cards from Creative weren't offering very good quality, because they only supported stereo and tracker software had to mix voices into one or both of its output channels, resulting in the loss you will have. The MOD format had 4 channels, which meant the Creative sound card had to downmix 2 channels. The sound loss of this might not have been huge, but when the ScreamTracker 3 was introduced in 1993 standardizing 16-channels, the existing Creative cards just couldn't keep up.

Enter the most popular card on the PC tracker scene, the Gravis Ultrasound, which solved the channel problem by having dedicated digital audio output channels for each track. Since the card supported 32-channels and had onboard RAM for storing samples, the card almost instantly became the tracker's choice and thus the demo scene's card of choice. Gravis understood early on that to get the demo scene's support would be a sales booster, so they gave away 6000 cards for free to the most famous scene groups and persons. The PC scene then quickly changed from being mostly Sound Blaster supporting to almost exclusively support the GUS. Many demos and intros made in the 90s do not work with anything but GUS. The situation partially reverted with the arrival of Sound Blaser AWE32 and its successors, which also featured on-board RAM.

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Current state

Tracker music lives today. Computer games still use it, notably the Unreal series and its descendants such as Deus Ex. However, the easy availability of software samplers/synthesizers and sequencers, and the advent of the MP3 format has caused most professional musicians to adopt other music software. Nonetheless, tracker software still exists and, in some cases, is still being developed as of 2005. The original Tracker series (Sound/Noise/Pro Tracker) started on the Amiga still lives on the PC with ProTracker version 5 under development since 2004. Buzz, ModPlug Tracker, MadTracker, Renoise, Skale, CheeseTracker, BeRoTracker and others offer features undreamed-of back in the day (hi-quality output, automation, VST support, internal DSP's and multi-effects, multi I/O cards support etc.). Tracker files have also become popular in the Game Boy Advance community; unlike the original Game Boy, the Game Boy Advance has the processing power to support tracker music, and the quality is vastly superior to the built-in tone generators, while still taking up little space compared to MP3s or other forms of higher-quality audio.

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List of trackers (software)

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List of well known composers using tracker software

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See also

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External links

it:Tracker ja:マルチトラックレコーダー pl:Tracker fi:Tracker-musiikki sv:Tracker (Musik)

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