Music Tracker - History

History

The term tracker derives from Ultimate Soundtracker; the first tracker software. Ultimate Soundtracker was written by Karsten Obarski and released in 1987 by EAS Computer Technik for the Commodore Amiga. Ultimate Soundtracker was a commercial product, but soon shareware clones such as NoiseTracker appeared as well. The general concept of step-sequencing samples numerically, as used in trackers, is also found in the Fairlight CMI sampling workstation of the early 1980s. Some early tracker-like programs appeared for the Commodore 64, such as Sound Monitor, but these did not feature sample playback, instead playing notes on the computer's internal synthesizer.

The first trackers supported only four channels of 8-bit PCM samples, a limitation derived from the Amiga's Paula audio chipset and the commonplace 8SVX format used to store sampled sound. However, since the notes were samples, the limitation was less important than those of synthesizing music chips.

1990s and the PC

During the 1990s, tracker musicians gravitated to the PC. Although the IBM and compatibles initially lacked the hardware sound processing capabilities of the Amiga, with the advent of the Sound Blaster line from Creative, PC audio slowly began to approach CD Quality (44.1 kHz/16-bit/Stereo) with the release of the SoundBlaster 16.

Another soundcard popular on the PC tracker scene was the Gravis Ultrasound, which continued the hardware mixing tradition, with 32 internal channels and onboard memory for sample storage. For a time, it offered unparalleled sound quality and became the choice of discerning tracker musicians. Understanding that the support of the tracker/demo-scene would benefit sales, Gravis gave away some 6000 GUS cards to participants. Coupled with excellent developer documentation, this gesture quickly prompted the GUS to become an integral component of many tracking programs and demos. Inevitably, the balance was largely redressed with the introduction of the Sound Blaster AWE32 and its successors, which also featured on-board RAM and wavetable mixing.

The responsibility for audio mixing passed from hardware to software (the main CPU), which gradually enabled the use of more and more channels. From the typical 4 MOD channels of the Amiga, the limit had moved to 7 with TFMX players and 8, first with Oktalyzer and later with the vastly more popular OctaMED (all Amiga programs), 16 with ScreamTracker 3

on the PC, then 32 with FastTracker 2 and on to 64 with Impulse Tracker.

As such, hardware mixing did not last. As processors got faster and acquired special multimedia processing abilities (e.g. MMX) and companies began to push Hardware Abstraction Layers, like DirectX, the AWE and GUS range became obsolete. DirectX, WDM and, now more commonly, ASIO, deliver high-quality sampled audio irrespective of hardware brand.

2000s

Tracker music could be found in computer games of the late 90s and early 00s, such as the Unreal series, Deus Ex and Hitman: Codename 47. However, the easy availability of software samplers/synthesizers and sequencers has caused some professional musicians to adopt other music software. Nonetheless, tracker software continues to develop. Some of the early Amiga trackers such as ProTracker, OctaMED have received various updates, mostly for porting to other platforms. ProTracker having resumed development in 2004, with plans for releasing version 5 to Windows and AmigaOS, but only version 4.0 beta 2 for AmigaOS has been released. Other cross-platform trackers include Renoise, MilkyTracker and SunVox.

Buzz, ModPlug Tracker, Renoise, Psycle, and others offer features undreamed-of back in the day (improved signal-to-noise ratios, automation, VST support, internal DSPs and multi-effects, multi I/O cards support etc.).

Current State

During 2007, Renoise and Modplug Tracker (OpenMPT) were presented in the Computer Music Magazine as professional and inexpensive alternative to other music production software.

Jeskola Buzz Modular is being regularly updated as of September, 2012.

As of year 2010, Renoise and Modplug Tracker (OpenMPT) are probably the most actively developed tracker and the most long-living project of this kind, started on years 2000 and 1997 respectively.

On 2011, DefleMask is released. It is a Multi-System Chipmusic Tracker, supporting SEGA Genesis, SEGA Master System, Nintendo Game Boy, YAMAHA's SMAF, among other systems, developed by Delek.

In June 2011, an on line software synthesizer based tracker called Sonant Live was released. It is different from other trackers in that it runs completely in a web browser.