*some additional notes about this video:* - i mentioned OpenMPT over Renoise because Renoise basically has no s3xmodit support from what i know. this video is all about the s3xmodit formats so it wouldn't make sense to recommend a tracker that can't do anything with them. as far as i know, it is able to open them but it just converts them to its own format, and you can't save any s3xmodit files with it. - i didn't mention FastTracker/MilkyTracker mostly because this video was made from my own experiences with trackers and i basically have never used either of them before, so i overlooked them. sorry! - yes, occ-san-geen has an artist. no, i'm not going to give credit to someone whose artist name is a racial slur. the module itself doesn't have an artist name embedded anywhere in it, so most people think it's uncredited, which i think is a much better angle to go with than having to credit this artist. - from what i remember from reading the page that i found it on, the song i used during the Shadow of the Beast II segment was made for the game's soundtrack, but it went unused. i really liked the vibe of it and how it utilizes guitar samples, so i decided to include it in the video, even though i don't think it was directly a part of the game. - this video was specifically made to bring across all this information in an incredibly bite-sized way. most of the information used in it just came from my own personal experience with using trackers for over a decade, and additionally i probably must have sourced Wikipedia and various tracker music resources on the internet such as The Mod Archive or Amiga Music Preservation. as such, i wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of things i didn't cover - FastTracker missing from the video being one of those things. there's Ahoy's video "Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit" which does a much better job at going in-depth about the history of trackers, but that video is also 40 minutes long and it has a completely different scope than my video. i mostly made this to quickly educate people on the history of trackers, using fancy visuals and graphics to bring across the general *idea* of how trackers came to be and how they are used. it wasn't really meant to be super in-depth; if you want that, i can highly recommend checking out Ahoy's video on the topic. :) th-cam.com/video/roBkg-iPrbw/w-d-xo.html - i am not a guy, stop calling me a guy, thank you
I made an album between 1994 and 1998 when I was a teenager. I used a Mac IIsi and a mod tracker called 'Meditor'. I sent in a demo cd in 1997 to a national radio competition, I didn't win but they played my stuff and invited me on the radio for an interview (I was 17). I even sampled some good stuff with a tape recorder. The song 'Goats are very intelligent' contains samples recorded while shearing cashmere goats on my Grandma's farm! The album is called 'Weinermart', by Brendan Hoffmann, it's available everywhere now.
@@Rikaisan not exactly: a musicdisk isn't a simple collection of music module files on a floppy disk, but a self-running software with a custom graphic interface that plays a fixed selection of music modules, usually stored into a floppy disk. I know that it seems the same thing but it isn't: in the last case, you just have to boot your computer from that floppy to hear the music, without doing pretty much else
3 ปีที่แล้ว +141
Thank you for mentioning Polyend Tracker! We are developing the concept of hardware trackers even further, so definitely more to come.
Just for some clarification, almost no games used MIDI in the mid 80s, the only computers to have support for MIDI at all were the Atari ST and PCs with the MPU-401 card. The standard wasn't even finalized until like 1985. Most music was stored as "playlists" or "notelists" which were exactly what they sound like - Big lists of notes. In the case of some software, it was executable code which changed registers directly in the sound generator. Tracker music is just an abstraction of this originally designed for the Amiga.
This is why I usually bring up the direct table of music type programming first, then discuss how trackers assigned note names and human-readable tempos and everything to that big list methodology. Plus the scrolling interface to keep a better eye on where the current playback was from.
En realidad habia trackers para MIDI y mixtos como el OctaMED. El concepto de tracker es tan antiguo como las pianolas con papel perforado, pero el original en ordenadores por ser el primero en usar samples es el Amiga.
5:25 Whoa... "Celestial Fantasia" is mine! Was not expecting to see that. I'd actually never looked at ModArchive's Top Favorites tab before, and had no idea it was so far up the list o.o Anyway, thanks for putting this together! Really well-produced summary & retrospective that does an awesome job introducing tracking and its place in computer music history to the uninitiated.
This was a great little dive into trackers. Always have a hard time explaining what trackers are and their importance in a bite sized way. I feel like a vid under 7 minutes is a good run time to get folks up to speed but not overloaded. Thanks for this.
0:06 - A tracker is a sample sequencer that derives from 'Ultimate Soundtracker', the first of its type, written in 1987 by Karsten Obarski for the Commodore Amiga. 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 which adopted programmer‑style conventions for creating music sequences; notes are entered via the keyboard, whilst length, 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.
It took me a while to figure out, but now I finally understand why they're called "trackers". The Ultimate Soundtracker was originally designed as a video game sound developer. So in other words, it was for creating a soundtrack to a game. Soundtrack...Soundtracker...Tracker.
@@k-leb4671…I’ve been into this stuff for 15 years and didn’t put that together 😅 I’d come up with other ideas like it tracks the note table directly so if you jump on one track you jump on all of them. What you said makes waaaay more sense lmao
I’d like to recommend one of the demoscene artists that were in Future Crew, Skaven252. He composed for the Bejeweled series and some other PopCap classics such as Dynomite and Big Money. He still makes great music on his SoundCloud to this day.
i've been a fan of his work ever since i heard his fantastic music in popcap games i played when i was a kid he even made one of the best tracks in ut99, razorback!
I contacted him because I wanted to buy the Bejeweled album because I couldn't find it anywhere and signed by him. He ended up printing out an album cover that he made himself I believe for Bejeweled and signed it for me. I have it kept safe in my "black box" with some other signed albums by other music artists that has made game music! Really sweet guy and I love his tracks from Uplink!
I use Milkytracker that is a fastrtracker clone and has no VST support but is so darn lightweight and multithread, love it! I mostly use it for doing Amiga retrogame musics and the occasional indie
I loved the music you used to make in a certain franchise under a different identity online! It's so great to see you move on and become powerful and make incredibly entertaining videos and music even more banger than they already were at the time!! deers kinda rad and this one is no exception
yo sorry for the late reply!! that's crazy, i never expected anyone to remember my LBP2 music (if that's what you're referring to but i assume it is). how did you even find my current stuff from there? funnily enough we also have a mutual friend who recently told me about landitube, as i mentioned i was curious to find any software that could replace veadotube mini. it's such a small world lol
@@idadeerz being a furry has its perks, and those perks are small world-ism c: I knew about the whole thing because you mentioned it recently in um.. hm... i wanna say the name but idk since its a public commenting thing. i'll just say "s-inima"
2:40 please dont break my heart knowing epic games will never make a new jazz jackrabbit game, i still have hope that one day epic games launch a new of that game in the series after the failed JJ3 release
I discovered them first thanks to Fearofdark, and then I started discovering cool channels and the Mod Archive which has lot of cool music trackers! Nice video, definitely a good introduction to the topic
I want to give some disclosure here, as this has been pointed out multiple times in the comments. While doing research for this video, i did come across this information while looking up which artists made all the modules used in the video, in order to credit them. I really wanted to use occ-san-geen in the video, as it is a classic module, and really showcases early ProTracker music very well. The module itself is uncredited, so i wasn't aware of the artist who made it. Upon doing some research, i found out that it was made by someone called Uncle Tom... which is a well-known ethnic slur against black people... and guessing from some of his other output, i doubt this is entirely unintentional: demozoo.org/music/206431/ At this point in the video's production, it felt a bit too late to go and change the song. I also couldn't really think of any early ProTracker modules that are just as iconic as occ-san-geen is in terms of quality and how widespread it is, so that made it a bit harder as well. I also considered crediting the module to Uncle Tom's real name instead of his scene handle, but that also raised the question of whether i even wanted to credit someone named after an ethnic slur in the first place, even under a different name. Since the original module does not list any artist names or handles, i ultimately decided to just credit just the module itself, without any of the additional information tied to it. Hope that explains this!
Really good explanation on how tracker music worked. Even if there's a little thing that was overlooked: the size of the floppy disks was 720 kb (or 840 kb in the AMIGA filesystem) as before the 90s they were 2DD (double side double density). The 1,44 MB was the size of the 2HD (double sided high density) floppy disks, which became standard in the early 90s (even if AMIGA still used 2DD floppies)
I would say that firstly, trackers are not necessarily sample-based. You will find such software on the C64 for example, such as Chris Huelsbeck's SoundMonitor. This software already used the pattern layout that was later adopted by The Ultimate SoundTracker on the Amiga. And secondly, it's not like trackers were some kind of alternative for MIDI. Trackers were developed on C64 and Amiga, where MIDI wasn't even an option, as the hardware was far too limited in polyphony. MIDI was mainly a thing on PCs, because the PC had no audio hardware whatsoever, but there were expensive third-party options available, which were often based on synthesizer hardware from Yamaha or Roland, and had far more polyphony than most home computers or game consoles. But even on PC, the trackers were adopted, because sample-based music could be made to sound much better than these MIDI synthesizers. Initially the PC got a few straight ports of Amiga trackers, so you'd get 4-channel 8-bit audio (via software mixing on the CPU). But as PCs and sound cards became more powerful, PC trackers could quickly move up to 32 channels and 16-bit stereo.
@@k-leb4671but when Famitracker and LSDJ are brought up, the lineage to both C64 _and_ Amiga becomes clearly important. Trackers are thus just a kind of sequencer at the end of the day, and merely happen to be connected to sample-based engines/chips a lot of the time (SNES and GBA developers used them too when they were new, precisely because it was pretty Amiga/Paula-like)
Cool! I'd like to know more how trackers and MIDI split historically. Since both are somewhat similar. I always wondered why there's such low interoperability/compatibility between them. Trackers are awesome!!
Old-school tracker here (SYRiNX of N.O.I.S.E. / Landslide / Nebula). MIDI was all about using a PC + expensive commercial MIDI software to control external sound-making devices (synthesizers, etc) that were typically too expensive or rare for most young hobbyists to get their hands on. Trackers were free /cheap software, written by passionate hobbyists (rather than industry corporations) for other passionate hobbyists, to enable anyone with an Amiga or a PC (with a sound card) to write similar-quality music without needing anything more than their computer. The other advantage to tracker modules is that the only thing anyone else needed to hear them exactly as the composer wrote them was a computer running that tracker or a player program -- whereas with MIDI, only someone with the same exact expensive synthesizers configured the exact same way could hear a MIDI file exactly as the composer intended.
Quite a lot of trackers, at least on the Amiga, would let you (step-)sequence notes via MIDI if you wanted. Since the Amiga supported MIDI on the OS level, programmers just needed to call those OS routines rather than write MIDI directly. It was often kind of convoluted to get working though, and the implementations were still pretty basic. MsMadLemon has some videos showing how she did it back in the day, which is also how she’s been making music again (after a while on ModPlug/OpenMPT).
Ooooohhhhh!!! This video lived up to my hype! Thank you so much for making it, it was both very interesting, and visually interesting. Very appealing all round I need to share this around 👀 3:51 gosh dang that is a C H O O N, as is the others afterwards, and everything in this video
My ADHD led me down a tracker-laden hole after I searched for synths and found the M8 tracker. I had no idea what a tracker was until I watched this video then I realized that my old 30+ year old ass was very familiar with trackers the whole time! Thanks man!
Wow, this video is awesome. I barely know anything about tracker music as I didn't even exist when it was popular, but I still found this video easy to understand.
The reason why i love using trackers is im was specially adapted for command line text things than other composer that using GUI ( and i love monophonic chips! )
Awesome job dude. Used to be a Fasttracker2-composer, now I mainly use Renoise, SunVox (so, so good) as well as FamiTracker (first vanilla, then 0cc and now Dn-version) I have a few reeeally old tracker-plays of my own stuff on my channel. :)
i know this video is old but this video (and some of your modules) are the reason I started playing around with editing game OST modules to make meme edits
someone probably mentioned Renoise, and SunVox already. Crucial omissions! These two are far and away the top two modern tracker softwares! And SunVox is free. Renoise is absurdly low priced.
Man can i just find one video on trackers that mentions need for madness? Ik it wasnt massively popular but it's what got me into tracking in the first place
I don't really know a lot about the game or its history, but i hope it makes you feel better that i discovered occ-san-geen through NFM. Without that, it wouldn't have made it into the video's soundtrack! That game and its sequel definitely have some great tunes in them. :)
@@idadeerz that's cool to hear. I've seen occ-san-geen used in a few vids so i just assumed it was really popular and that's why everyone uses it. Still i wish people would at least use more nfm tunes like oberheim power or overscan
Wow! You are amazing, I like how you edit your videos and your script writing skills. I would like you to talk a little about music visualizers too pls
Thanks! I have been using OpenMPT since 2008, though i was 9 at the time so for the first years i used the software i mostly messed around with it without creating anything serious.
@@idadeerz Cool. I've been using Schism Tracker which is a like Impulse Tracker on DOS. I've probably been tracking for about a year or so. I'm surprised you didn't bring up Renoise in the video.
"piracy is based" Until it basically demolished the original creator's work. The Ultimate Soundtracker was ultimately pirated to no end, resulting in the original creator abandoning it.
There's a spectrum of morality when it comes to pirating. Unfortunately, since it's open seas out there, pirating happens to both entities that can handle it or don't even deserve the money and entities that may go broke from it.
There's a series of games that you wouldn't expect to use trackers to this day: Bejeweled. Especally with Twist and 3, trackers do have the ability to dynamically change the music based on the events in game... something that's only recently possible with traditional audio formats (most popular being Nier: Automata)
And why does it have to be one over the other? Why not go for both at the same time? Check out Renoise, it has the workflow and detail of tracker sequencing + the power of a modern DAW.
I loved the videos! I do music as a hobbyist in OpenMPT. And not gonna lie, this software is pretty good, and until easy to use. If you keep using trackers, soon it will just turn into 2nd nature, and you will realise how practical and easy are the usage of trackers, seriously!
*some additional notes about this video:*
- i mentioned OpenMPT over Renoise because Renoise basically has no s3xmodit support from what i know. this video is all about the s3xmodit formats so it wouldn't make sense to recommend a tracker that can't do anything with them. as far as i know, it is able to open them but it just converts them to its own format, and you can't save any s3xmodit files with it.
- i didn't mention FastTracker/MilkyTracker mostly because this video was made from my own experiences with trackers and i basically have never used either of them before, so i overlooked them. sorry!
- yes, occ-san-geen has an artist. no, i'm not going to give credit to someone whose artist name is a racial slur. the module itself doesn't have an artist name embedded anywhere in it, so most people think it's uncredited, which i think is a much better angle to go with than having to credit this artist.
- from what i remember from reading the page that i found it on, the song i used during the Shadow of the Beast II segment was made for the game's soundtrack, but it went unused. i really liked the vibe of it and how it utilizes guitar samples, so i decided to include it in the video, even though i don't think it was directly a part of the game.
- this video was specifically made to bring across all this information in an incredibly bite-sized way. most of the information used in it just came from my own personal experience with using trackers for over a decade, and additionally i probably must have sourced Wikipedia and various tracker music resources on the internet such as The Mod Archive or Amiga Music Preservation. as such, i wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of things i didn't cover - FastTracker missing from the video being one of those things. there's Ahoy's video "Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit" which does a much better job at going in-depth about the history of trackers, but that video is also 40 minutes long and it has a completely different scope than my video. i mostly made this to quickly educate people on the history of trackers, using fancy visuals and graphics to bring across the general *idea* of how trackers came to be and how they are used. it wasn't really meant to be super in-depth; if you want that, i can highly recommend checking out Ahoy's video on the topic. :)
th-cam.com/video/roBkg-iPrbw/w-d-xo.html
- i am not a guy, stop calling me a guy, thank you
I made an album between 1994 and 1998 when I was a teenager. I used a Mac IIsi and a mod tracker called 'Meditor'. I sent in a demo cd in 1997 to a national radio competition, I didn't win but they played my stuff and invited me on the radio for an interview (I was 17). I even sampled some good stuff with a tape recorder. The song 'Goats are very intelligent' contains samples recorded while shearing cashmere goats on my Grandma's farm! The album is called 'Weinermart', by Brendan Hoffmann, it's available everywhere now.
Definitely gonna check it out! Always love some goat content hehe
when someone tells you that you're too old to be on TH-cam, copy and paste this and tell them this
That's not an album, it's a musicdisk! c:
@@Rikaisan not exactly: a musicdisk isn't a simple collection of music module files on a floppy disk, but a self-running software with a custom graphic interface that plays a fixed selection of music modules, usually stored into a floppy disk.
I know that it seems the same thing but it isn't: in the last case, you just have to boot your computer from that floppy to hear the music, without doing pretty much else
Thank you for mentioning Polyend Tracker! We are developing the concept of hardware trackers even further, so definitely more to come.
Wow
Just for some clarification, almost no games used MIDI in the mid 80s, the only computers to have support for MIDI at all were the Atari ST and PCs with the MPU-401 card. The standard wasn't even finalized until like 1985. Most music was stored as "playlists" or "notelists" which were exactly what they sound like - Big lists of notes. In the case of some software, it was executable code which changed registers directly in the sound generator. Tracker music is just an abstraction of this originally designed for the Amiga.
This is why I usually bring up the direct table of music type programming first, then discuss how trackers assigned note names and human-readable tempos and everything to that big list methodology. Plus the scrolling interface to keep a better eye on where the current playback was from.
En realidad habia trackers para MIDI y mixtos como el OctaMED.
El concepto de tracker es tan antiguo como las pianolas con papel perforado, pero el original en ordenadores por ser el primero en usar samples es el Amiga.
5:25 Whoa... "Celestial Fantasia" is mine! Was not expecting to see that. I'd actually never looked at ModArchive's Top Favorites tab before, and had no idea it was so far up the list o.o
Anyway, thanks for putting this together! Really well-produced summary & retrospective that does an awesome job introducing tracking and its place in computer music history to the uninitiated.
Absolutely adore that track so much
You did an amazing job!
Great job! Not only a great overview of trackers and their history, but those production values? Woooah.
Honored to be included as an example along with Jonne, Kenny, Tim, etc.. Great video!
This was a great little dive into trackers. Always have a hard time explaining what trackers are and their importance in a bite sized way. I feel like a vid under 7 minutes is a good run time to get folks up to speed but not overloaded. Thanks for this.
... this feels..familiar... something something AHOY
0:06 - A tracker is a sample sequencer that derives from 'Ultimate Soundtracker', the first of its type, written in 1987 by Karsten Obarski for the Commodore Amiga. 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 which adopted programmer‑style conventions for creating music sequences; notes are entered via the keyboard, whilst length, 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.
It took me a while to figure out, but now I finally understand why they're called "trackers". The Ultimate Soundtracker was originally designed as a video game sound developer. So in other words, it was for creating a soundtrack to a game. Soundtrack...Soundtracker...Tracker.
@@k-leb4671…I’ve been into this stuff for 15 years and didn’t put that together 😅 I’d come up with other ideas like it tracks the note table directly so if you jump on one track you jump on all of them. What you said makes waaaay more sense lmao
@@k-leb4671TIL!!
very nicely put together, awesome job with the design on the video! and very cool explanations. thanks for putting this out there!
that was really good! great production value and really informative. would love to see more stuff in this style
This was a great and informative overview. Thanks a lot for the hard work you put into making this.
Of the like 4 or 5 popular "history of music trackers" videos, this one feels way more thought out and researched. Great job!
OpenMPT, what an elegant piece of software. I hope to be able to use it to full extent someday.
6:01 occ-san-geen was by Uncle Tom
I’d like to recommend one of the demoscene artists that were in Future Crew, Skaven252. He composed for the Bejeweled series and some other PopCap classics such as Dynomite and Big Money. He still makes great music on his SoundCloud to this day.
Oh yeah he's frikin awesome!
he's the god of trackers, (fun fact: he still uses tracker these days)
Hell yeah, no wonder Bejeweled 3 - Butterflies reminds me so much of EDM, despite being a "medieval" song. One of my favorite pieces of VGM.
i've been a fan of his work ever since i heard his fantastic music in popcap games i played when i was a kid
he even made one of the best tracks in ut99, razorback!
I contacted him because I wanted to buy the Bejeweled album because I couldn't find it anywhere and signed by him. He ended up printing out an album cover that he made himself I believe for Bejeweled and signed it for me. I have it kept safe in my "black box" with some other signed albums by other music artists that has made game music!
Really sweet guy and I love his tracks from Uplink!
I use Milkytracker that is a fastrtracker clone and has no VST support but is so darn lightweight and multithread, love it! I mostly use it for doing Amiga retrogame musics and the occasional indie
Love the FT2-clone available on Linux!
Who needs multithread for tracking in the actual CPUs???
absolute banger
I loved the music you used to make in a certain franchise under a different identity online! It's so great to see you move on and become powerful and make incredibly entertaining videos and music even more banger than they already were at the time!! deers kinda rad and this one is no exception
yo sorry for the late reply!! that's crazy, i never expected anyone to remember my LBP2 music (if that's what you're referring to but i assume it is). how did you even find my current stuff from there? funnily enough we also have a mutual friend who recently told me about landitube, as i mentioned i was curious to find any software that could replace veadotube mini. it's such a small world lol
@@idadeerz being a furry has its perks, and those perks are small world-ism c: I knew about the whole thing because you mentioned it recently in um.. hm... i wanna say the name but idk since its a public commenting thing. i'll just say "s-inima"
0:42 occ san geen is from Uncle tom
2:40 please dont break my heart knowing epic games will never make a new jazz jackrabbit game, i still have hope that one day epic games launch a new of that game in the series after the failed JJ3 release
Absolutely amazing video editing
This was the best video about Tracker I've ever seen, your channel having few subscribers is a crime, seriously! you deserved more recognition
I think this one is the best:
th-cam.com/video/roBkg-iPrbw/w-d-xo.html
But of course, it's One of the best ones available.
Thanks bro
I discovered them first thanks to Fearofdark, and then I started discovering cool channels and the Mod Archive which has lot of cool music trackers!
Nice video, definitely a good introduction to the topic
Side note: Occ-san-geen was done by a guy who called himself Uncle Tom.
I want to give some disclosure here, as this has been pointed out multiple times in the comments. While doing research for this video, i did come across this information while looking up which artists made all the modules used in the video, in order to credit them. I really wanted to use occ-san-geen in the video, as it is a classic module, and really showcases early ProTracker music very well. The module itself is uncredited, so i wasn't aware of the artist who made it. Upon doing some research, i found out that it was made by someone called Uncle Tom... which is a well-known ethnic slur against black people... and guessing from some of his other output, i doubt this is entirely unintentional:
demozoo.org/music/206431/
At this point in the video's production, it felt a bit too late to go and change the song. I also couldn't really think of any early ProTracker modules that are just as iconic as occ-san-geen is in terms of quality and how widespread it is, so that made it a bit harder as well. I also considered crediting the module to Uncle Tom's real name instead of his scene handle, but that also raised the question of whether i even wanted to credit someone named after an ethnic slur in the first place, even under a different name. Since the original module does not list any artist names or handles, i ultimately decided to just credit just the module itself, without any of the additional information tied to it. Hope that explains this!
A Tracker video that doesn't mention Renoise?
No mention of Renoise?! Surely it's more commonly used than OpenMPT.
Love Renoise, it's just so fun!! :)
Did I just learn from a deer?
A gay furry
Really good explanation on how tracker music worked. Even if there's a little thing that was overlooked: the size of the floppy disks was 720 kb (or 840 kb in the AMIGA filesystem) as before the 90s they were 2DD (double side double density). The 1,44 MB was the size of the 2HD (double sided high density) floppy disks, which became standard in the early 90s (even if AMIGA still used 2DD floppies)
There is SunVox, a modular synthesizer with a tracker, extending the tracking to the another level.
I would say that firstly, trackers are not necessarily sample-based. You will find such software on the C64 for example, such as Chris Huelsbeck's SoundMonitor. This software already used the pattern layout that was later adopted by The Ultimate SoundTracker on the Amiga.
And secondly, it's not like trackers were some kind of alternative for MIDI. Trackers were developed on C64 and Amiga, where MIDI wasn't even an option, as the hardware was far too limited in polyphony. MIDI was mainly a thing on PCs, because the PC had no audio hardware whatsoever, but there were expensive third-party options available, which were often based on synthesizer hardware from Yamaha or Roland, and had far more polyphony than most home computers or game consoles.
But even on PC, the trackers were adopted, because sample-based music could be made to sound much better than these MIDI synthesizers. Initially the PC got a few straight ports of Amiga trackers, so you'd get 4-channel 8-bit audio (via software mixing on the CPU). But as PCs and sound cards became more powerful, PC trackers could quickly move up to 32 channels and 16-bit stereo.
I feel like anything that precedes The Ultimate Soundtracker shouldn't be called a tracker.
@@k-leb4671but when Famitracker and LSDJ are brought up, the lineage to both C64 _and_ Amiga becomes clearly important.
Trackers are thus just a kind of sequencer at the end of the day, and merely happen to be connected to sample-based engines/chips a lot of the time (SNES and GBA developers used them too when they were new, precisely because it was pretty Amiga/Paula-like)
Very well put together and entertaining!!!!!! I gotta download a tracker now
Cool! I'd like to know more how trackers and MIDI split historically. Since both are somewhat similar. I always wondered why there's such low interoperability/compatibility between them. Trackers are awesome!!
Old-school tracker here (SYRiNX of N.O.I.S.E. / Landslide / Nebula). MIDI was all about using a PC + expensive commercial MIDI software to control external sound-making devices (synthesizers, etc) that were typically too expensive or rare for most young hobbyists to get their hands on. Trackers were free /cheap software, written by passionate hobbyists (rather than industry corporations) for other passionate hobbyists, to enable anyone with an Amiga or a PC (with a sound card) to write similar-quality music without needing anything more than their computer. The other advantage to tracker modules is that the only thing anyone else needed to hear them exactly as the composer wrote them was a computer running that tracker or a player program -- whereas with MIDI, only someone with the same exact expensive synthesizers configured the exact same way could hear a MIDI file exactly as the composer intended.
Quite a lot of trackers, at least on the Amiga, would let you (step-)sequence notes via MIDI if you wanted. Since the Amiga supported MIDI on the OS level, programmers just needed to call those OS routines rather than write MIDI directly. It was often kind of convoluted to get working though, and the implementations were still pretty basic.
MsMadLemon has some videos showing how she did it back in the day, which is also how she’s been making music again (after a while on ModPlug/OpenMPT).
just looked through your channel and you seem like the coolest person ever
great history summary! ty
Excellent video and I love the editing!
i read the notepad title on 3:29 an i agree with it
Great edited and thought out video. Also: your english is very good for a Dutch guy. Subbed!
Love the video! I also really like your little deer character, it's cute!
Plus, you have Renoise and tools like Fruity Loops even integrate a tracker in one of the plugins.
It's my pleasure to give the 1k like on such a well done video ~
This deserves way more views, great video!!
Ooooohhhhh!!! This video lived up to my hype!
Thank you so much for making it, it was both very interesting, and visually interesting. Very appealing all round
I need to share this around 👀
3:51 gosh dang that is a C H O O N, as is the others afterwards, and everything in this video
My ADHD led me down a tracker-laden hole after I searched for synths and found the M8 tracker. I had no idea what a tracker was until I watched this video then I realized that my old 30+ year old ass was very familiar with trackers the whole time! Thanks man!
excellent visuals dude
This was awesome! Thank you!👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Great video! Love that it was short an concise but i was a bit stressfull at some points. I need to check out mor of your content! :)
thank you so much for this video!!
Sick video-editing also!
Great description. Had no idea but this was awesome
35 years of awesomeness and I hope there'll be more
There also trackers on Pc like "Arkos Tracker" to create music for "Amstrad Cpc" by example. Same for Commodore 64. 8bits scene is still active ;)
What about buzz modular synth? Why does no one care about that one?!
3:26 LETS GOOOOOOO
Keygen Music! My favorite B)
Man, seeing that stuff sure gives me the feels, It's been a long time
I actually remember playing a Doom II mod with tracker music. Made by it's lead developer btw and they banged!
Wow, this video is awesome. I barely know anything about tracker music as I didn't even exist when it was popular, but I still found this video easy to understand.
Nice job! Thank you, sir.
3:16 🎉🎉PURPLE MOTION MENTIONED🎉🎉
4:48 sannes
The reason why i love using trackers is im was specially adapted for command line text things than other composer that using GUI ( and i love monophonic chips! )
I feel honored to give you your 200th like
Awesome job dude. Used to be a Fasttracker2-composer, now I mainly use Renoise, SunVox (so, so good) as well as FamiTracker (first vanilla, then 0cc and now Dn-version) I have a few reeeally old tracker-plays of my own stuff on my channel. :)
How are you soooo underrated with such high quality content bro?
tracker music will never die🎧🤟
0:42 cosmic rift moment
How u no mention renoise?!
Dope content dude
I mostly use famitracker, openmpt, deflemask and furnace tracker
i know this video is old but this video (and some of your modules) are the reason I started playing around with editing game OST modules to make meme edits
someone probably mentioned Renoise, and SunVox already. Crucial omissions! These two are far and away the top two modern tracker softwares! And SunVox is free. Renoise is absurdly low priced.
Man can i just find one video on trackers that mentions need for madness? Ik it wasnt massively popular but it's what got me into tracking in the first place
I don't really know a lot about the game or its history, but i hope it makes you feel better that i discovered occ-san-geen through NFM. Without that, it wouldn't have made it into the video's soundtrack! That game and its sequel definitely have some great tunes in them. :)
@@idadeerz that's cool to hear. I've seen occ-san-geen used in a few vids so i just assumed it was really popular and that's why everyone uses it. Still i wish people would at least use more nfm tunes like oberheim power or overscan
Now i understand how this works. Very nice
trackers! what are they?
Wow! You are amazing, I like how you edit your videos and your script writing skills. I would like you to talk a little about music visualizers too pls
love how begrudging you are about deflemask
Were the tracks Super Sharp Shooter and Renegade Snares really made on trackers?
Nice video. How long have you used tracker software? I take it you use OpenMPT for the most part right?
Thanks! I have been using OpenMPT since 2008, though i was 9 at the time so for the first years i used the software i mostly messed around with it without creating anything serious.
@@idadeerz Cool. I've been using Schism Tracker which is a like Impulse Tracker on DOS. I've probably been tracking for about a year or so. I'm surprised you didn't bring up Renoise in the video.
Dat 60Hz goodness.
0:45 . Ha, deze video ook voorbij zien komen op reddit :P
Ha inderdaad ja, daar heb ik die video ook voor het eerst gevonden.
"piracy is based"
Until it basically demolished the original creator's work. The Ultimate Soundtracker was ultimately pirated to no end, resulting in the original creator abandoning it.
There's a spectrum of morality when it comes to pirating. Unfortunately, since it's open seas out there, pirating happens to both entities that can handle it or don't even deserve the money and entities that may go broke from it.
More people got access to it in the end than would have otherwise, so that mattered more.
0:31 and it says “OwO”. thats funny
1:36 that doing sound oof
oh, my favourite Amiga game track at 2:10
NO WAY you're that gay deer i listen to on spotify sometimes hahaha
i can't speak anymore woof bark woof woof bark!
There's a series of games that you wouldn't expect to use trackers to this day: Bejeweled.
Especally with Twist and 3, trackers do have the ability to dynamically change the music based on the events in game... something that's only recently possible with traditional audio formats (most popular being Nier: Automata)
Well done, thanks.
Nothing about Renoise?!
Renoise ftw
Fantastic!, great video! 😊
is a music tracker is like communication for sound chips like the ym2612 and vrc7?
Try deflemask
Antlers.
Why choosing a tracker over a DAW? Other than replicating old limitations
And why does it have to be one over the other? Why not go for both at the same time? Check out Renoise, it has the workflow and detail of tracker sequencing + the power of a modern DAW.
I love trackers
I loved the videos!
I do music as a hobbyist in OpenMPT. And not gonna lie, this software is pretty good, and until easy to use.
If you keep using trackers, soon it will just turn into 2nd nature, and you will realise how practical and easy are the usage of trackers, seriously!
awesome, thanks
*2^08 - WOW!!! I love this game!*
Thanks, but I still don't understand how to read or write trackers compared to common music programming in a piano roll view...
The Lotus III soundtrack is a perfect example of how much you can achieve with just 4 tracks ( ... if you've got the skillz, that is ;)
That 6:21 video lenght was on purpose right?