That's ahoy for you, he is a very talented researcher and video maker that simply puts quality over quantity, making these nicely put videos (in this case it's more closely video-art tbh) takes time and well he just does what he wants and put the schedule and release date to "when it's done" state. Btw if you ask me one particular topic is Seattle as there's tons of great games and pc stuff that originates from there mortal Kombat, duke nukem, Bungie, halo, and just a very interesting history of individuals that simply together shaped the videogame industry and broke new grounds often in the 80s and 90s. It's a broad topic perfectly suited for a ahoy video
@@AmericaLexicon Adding Oversimplified, Lemmino, *Captain Disillusion, CGP Grey, Kurzgesagt, Technology Connections, SmarterEveryDay, Veritasium, Vsauce, Joe Scott, Climate Town, Mark Rober, Coldfusion, RealLifeLore, Ilyx, and Internet Historian to the list
I’m a blind musician that used to write bog-standard, 4-track mod files in Dos using ModEdit in the 90’s and early 2000’s. Still have everything I ever wrote. I loved it and have thought many a time of trying to get back into it. This video was not only nostalgic but also amazing, and absolutely top-notch as all your videos are. I’m grateful for the time you take with your work and appreciate your channel very much. Thank you.
@@glowinggrenade Hmm. These days I’m a Logic Pro user, and I get around it fairly easily, but there was something to be said for what basically amounted to a step-based input method. Could lose your place if not paying proper attention, and some of the menus didn’t read very well with my screen-reader of the time, but stuff was doable for the most part. #GoodTimes.
@@marinellovragovic1207 I was thinking "who is that that name is vaguely familiar" then I found out I was subscribed and remembered who he was, and yes he definitely is
Hey man! Nice to see you here! Glad to see you made it in the industry. The demoscene (particularly the DC/Baltimore area scene) was always too small for you. It's been a pleasure to watch you hit gaming hard with what you have.
Great to see you here Mr Brandon! Huge fan of your music. Your work on the Unreal soundtrack in particular was incredible and helped make the game so atmospheric and memorable. I still go back and listen to it often, almost 25 years later. I learnt about trackers a few years later and was fascinated to see how you built those tracks!
A LOT of the modern game industry's senior people started out in the demoscene. During my own industry tenure, it was crazy how many people I met & worked with who wrote the demos, cracks, or early games that I had downloaded for my C64, Amiga, then PC. It was basically the era when there was no major commercial competition and anyone with a home computer could be the first to write something and have it go viral on SneakerNet or later FidoNet. Amazing times.
It is a great day when I find Ahoy has uploaded a new video. The wait in between only makes it sweeter, and the music selection to accompany this video is 👌
I was thinking the same. You have great tastes in YT creators. I see you in plenty of comments of videos I have seen. I appreciate your good attitude and helpful nature and just makes this video and comment section so much more wholesome. Cheers!
00:00 Kenet & Rez - Unreal Super Hero 3 00:49 Walkman - Let's Hear My Baby 01:28 Bill Williams - Alley Cat 02:00 David Whittaker - Speedball (Atari ST) 03:07 POW - Wonderful Life 04:19 Fred / La Marque Jaune - The Sign Of The Death 06:17 Deluxe Music Construction Set - Bach Fugue in G Minor 06:40 Chris Huelsbeck - Shades 08:41 Karsten Obarski - Amegas 10:28 Karsten Obarski - Crystal Hammer 12:08 Comrade J - Fairlight 12:46 Mahoney - Ghost 13:09 Horace Wimp - Running Water 13:24 Karsten Obarski - Telephone 14:02 Diz - Unit 5 14:53 Uncle Tom - Occ San Geen 16:00 Banana - Echoing 17:12 Luxor - Cousin's Song 18:14 Chip - Ghost of Parallax 19:20 Mahoney - Sleepwalk 20:13 Dr. Awesome - Moongazer 20:44 Jesper Kyd - Global Trash 3 v2 21:16 Jogeir Liljedahl - Overture 21:25 Jester - Stardust Memories 21:36 Lizardking - LK's Doskpop 21:56 Mel O Dee - Scales of Joy 22:20 4mat - L.F.F. 23:01 4mat - Anarchy Menu 1 23:15 Zap - Killing Denise 24:04 Brian Johnston - Hired Guns Main Theme 25:26 U4ia - Take a Trip From Me 26:44 Captain - Space Debris 27:49 Zak McKraken (PC Speaker Theme) 28:37 George Stone - CANYON.MID 29:34 Purple Motion - Future Brain 29:59 Necros - Point of Depature 30:54 Purple Motion - UnreaL ][ 32:01 Elwood - Dead Lock 32:44 Chris Jarvis/Analogue - Blue Flame 33:28 Robyn Miller - Myst Theme 34:26 Robert A. Allen - Epic Pinball (Title) 35:25 Alexander Brandon - Flight Castle 35:51 Michael van den Bos - Foregone Destruction 37:50 Fluidvolt - The Gusts of Aeolus 38:29 X-Ceed/Scope - Voyager 39:16 Hoffman - Eon
Necros is a good friend of mine - he still uses trackers even using them in the albums he did with synth pop band Iris - which he used to great effect.
I love that VLC still has tracker support, I have an old original collection of tracker music that I have moved from machine to machine over the decades and its nice to have the simple double click ability to play it.
Trackers are relatively easily file formats to decode. Rendered music files such as MP3 has comprehension, what usually need third party stuff. Trackers must be view like a script accomplished with resouces of a DJ at a given time, not really a audio file.
My love for trackers is infinite. My father died shortly after hearing my first original song in Amiga with OctaMED Proaround 1990, when I was 11 or so. I often wonder what he would say now but, I am still glad he heard and loved my first one. I still have a small notebook, handcrafted in school, where I placed all tracker commands. I had around 20 disks filled with my own samples which I mostly ripped from the gamesusing Action Replay-like cartridges... I learned a lot with trackers before going into classical school.
Our hard drive failed and I lost my early FastTracker II works. Dad was really sad about that. I still punch some tunes here and there. Spinning Bitwig nowadays.
@@pedro.camacho Absolutely. Did you do the Witcher 3 soundtrack? I lovit. Yes, production quality is great here. And it's worth reading the comments too, as sometimes there's more than warm memories to be found :) Well, none of my soundtracks did make it into this video, but one of our Demos did at 14:39 (it's called demons are forever from 1988). What made me smile was your keeping the sound-disks, as mine are still sitting here on the shelve (9 disks I think), although my amiga is long gone ;) Seems to me, this tracker era really changed some lifes for the better.
There's one very important thing trackers had that you didn't mention... The format the songs were in was open by design, so if you could play it, you could also see how it was done and pillage their samples and instruments. That was an incredible learning tool.
As a software engineer and a fan of many genres of music including electronica, this is absolutely fascinating. By the time I started programming, Windows 3.0 already existed (we couldn't afford a computer before the 90s), so I never had to deal with direct hardware access except for the occasional fight to get a game to run in DOS with whatever video card our computer had. Even though I've written assembly code before, it's hard to imagine such primitive conditions being the _only_ option for getting anything done. It makes me strangely nostalgic for a time I never truly experienced firsthand, when it was amazing just to successfully use computer for any purpose at all. Things are so very different in 2021, 30 years after my family got our first computer.
Thank you for giving such love to such a niche topic. I kind of can’t believe there’s such an insanely high quality documentary like this on the subject of trackers. I was tracking music back in 1997 using Mod Plug Tracker on my PC and to this day I write game music. There’s so much history here I didn’t know about. Thanks for the VERY unexpected nostalgia trip and giving to anyone else with curiosity such a deep history and appreciation for this niche craft.
A big thanks for featuring Space Debris in the video, I'm honored to be included! ☺️ A great history lesson, there was some stuff from the early days of trackers I didn't even know / remember. - Captain
Space Debris has always stuck with me as an incredible piece! Just yesterday I was grabbing the Ares soundtrack off my old mac so I could use some drum samples on my modular synth. I copied Space Debris too while I was at it. What's the connection to the mac game by the same name? Was it written for the game? Did you develop it?
I listened to Space Debris for many hours when I was a kid when it was included (probably without license) in Macintosh game of the same name. The game wasn't much, but that sound kept me hooked for hours. Thanks for the amazing track and defining my current taste in music!
Hi, great video and documentary! I'm a tracker musician from the PC-Demoscene. I've started with Fasttracker 2 in mid 90s, and then Milkytracker on the PC. I made game music which is based on Milky XM tracker files, like Mission in Snowdriftland by Nintendo. The game gets an update and re-release on Kickstarter at the moment! Musical greetings, Rapture
I love how for so many of these videos I have next to no previous interest, nor any previous knowledge, yet straight away I'm hooked, and at no point am I confused. They take full advantage of the niece nature of delving deep into a topic like this, which makes it such a fun learning experience. They are incredibly well made and are so incredibly fun to watch.
There are areas where tracker music still has a HUGE advantage over prerecorded music. You can have the music be reactive to the game in a variety of ways. Turning on and off channels, panning individual channels instead of an entire recording, have different patterns to be switched to for a more dramatic or calmer version of the exact same song, triggering different note effects depending on in game environments, the ability to change the tempo of the music without pitch shifting anything, and I'm sure there are more examples. And all of that with a single file instead of multiple prerecorded tracks or audio tracks on a disc that may have required a split second of buffering or loading time. The access times aren't a big deal now with SSDs but boy did that make a difference for a long time. Because of the relatively small file sizes it also meant you could have a LOT more music in a lot of games that had space constraints or compared to a CD where audio took up a whole lot more space than a tracker file.
Why this reminds me of Harmonix's "Chroma"? They made multiplayer FPS games whose background music reacts to gameplay, because they store music in MIDI format and lets the game engine play the MIDI files. Maybe with Tracker format they could make the background music more reactive than ever... alas Chroma was mothballed indefinitely.
It's safe to say that soundtracker brought me where I am today. If my mom bought me a gaming console instead of an Amiga, my life would have been entirely different.
@@shinren_ I think he meant more other things than gaming... These tools in this video including soundtracker was not in gaming consoles... atleast in the production like Amiga and C64. Doh well :) Im pretty sure he's life would have been entirely different, If I had had the same thing,my life too.
I'm amazed by the level of detail on the artwork for the faces of the coders (6:48) and by the sheer number of different screencaptures required to make this video happen! Also: "VLC has support for a wide range of tracker formats". I want to say I'm surprised... but at this point I would barely raise an eyebrow if astronomers dropped a file on it containing samples of the cosmic microwave background radiation only to be greeted with a video of the first few seconds of the big bang.
I'm working on a game and it uses a tracker because I can make it adapt to the game perfectly, I can stretch and squeeze without distortion and branch the music when the scene changes. Levels have their own tempo and so when you go to the next level the tempo shifts and if the shift is too much for a particular song it will insert a bridge and move to another song with a closer tempo. Also there are a collection of songs for the menu which then get bridged into level songs when you enter a level. Everything is constructed in a huge Markov chain (everything seamlessly transitions, no hard starts or stops, and single songs can be played continuously while not being completely repetative) with links being dependent on scenes and triggers, it's so much easier to construct using trackers than audio files.
One area where trackers continued used in a more "mainstream" context well beyond the 90s were the Nintendo handhelds. The DS still used it for most soundtracks. Even the earlier disc-based home consoles still used a lot of tracker music with pretty high quality samples
Which makes sense, the SNES used tracker style music (the only limitation being the tiny RAM profile for the DSP contained all the sounds and samples, thus they were rather compressed), and that continued to the N64 due to storage and memory size limitations. The GBA and DS used the same, because a lot of it was ports and they had small memory profiles so streaming audio while doable was trickier in the 4mb of ram for a DS (and limited often to say videos). Trackers have always been compact files and kept their use on systems with tiny profiles and some sound processing but no MIDI synth chip.
Yup, earlier phone games as well. Multiple demoscene musicians found their paycheck niche there. For example, Alexander Brandon and Peter Hajba composed for the Bejeweled games.
I wouldn't really call things like SF2/USF tracker music. It's more akin to MIDI with a custom soundfont in the way it allows to have a central file for samples and then have small file for the actual composition.
It's an absolute mindblow on my part to realize that I Created Disco is all tracker music. That album was an absolute JAM when I was a student DJ. Went back and damn is that sound unmistakable to me now. As always, an amazing video Ahoy.
I've always loved 8-bit and 16-bit sounds and soundtracks in pretty much anything, as well as the amount of variety that exists in the world of trackers and demoscenes. Even though I don't know a whole lot of what goes on, seeing Ahoy make a video on this taught me a lot more than what I had previously thought went on in the scene. The best part is it still is a bit of a starting point that leaves a lot more room to discover should the person want to learn more about trackers as well! Beautiful representation as always Ahoy! Keep up the amazing work!
Weird how nobody pointed out that the early PopCap games (Bejeweled, Dynomite, etc) OSTs were made by Skaven of Future Crew and there exist the dumped files of the musical suites of these games online if you know how to find them! Beyond The Network is Bejeweled's but I forgot the rest.
@@sodaodaoda to this day hamsterball has one of my absolute favorite soundtracks to anything, there’s just such a unique feel to it skaven’s work no matter what game it was for was incredible
16-bit is such a timeless and nostalgic style for us. A testament of this is how even today, almost 40 years later, we still widely enjoy 16-bit and even 8-bit music
@@KingLich451 How? Even the 128-bits era is 20 years old already. Actually I'd take more indie game taking cues from 32/64 or even early 128 bits instead of rehashing 8-bits nostalgia again.
26:45 hearing Space Debris again after almost 30 years playing it on repeat in Digitrakker hit me like a nostalgia bomb. I ripped that tune apart, it was basically my intro to making music with computers. I'm almost in tears. Lovely video!
You would be suprised to find out that the first version of Cubase is actually from 1989 with a lot of the key features of a modern DAW and the kind of music presented in this video could be done much more easily and faster with a sequencer software such as Cubase. It's a shame (and an obvious flaw) that he didn't mention this at all.
I KNOW!!I T WAS OVER SO QUICK AND IT DIDN'T REALLY FEEL LIKE NEARLY 50 MINUTES! THIS GAVE ME A NEW LOVE FOR TRACKER MUSIC AND HEIGHTENED LOVE FOR CHIPTUNE!! FAMITRACKER, MEGA DRIVE, (genesis) SC-55, (midi/MS-DOS/doom 1993) SID, (commodore 64) AND ALL OLD COMPUTING MUSIC IN GENERAL!!!
Tracker music arguably is what made me fall in love with gaming and PCs in general. Unreal Tournament's soundtrack was all tracker based and it immediately sucked me into another world. I had never heard anything like it.
I still listen to that soundtrack, and all the unreal series. The composer has a distinct style, I can only describe as atmospheric and fantasy Sci-fi. It does take you to another fantasy place.
@@Domarius64 Not only that, but theres a reason Foregone Destruction is so memorable, it really fits so well on the Facing Worlds map that its crazy. The unsettling calm vibe from the start while you watch the earth from a distance is a experience I still waiting to be replicated, it fits too well, only to the track pick up in intensity while you battle for the flags that most of the time replicated the game motion so well. That map brings me memories. UT99 dont get a fraction of the recognition it deserves for that OST.
As someone who spent countless hours tinkering with more "modern" trackers in my high school days, this video is easily my favorite ever posted by this channel. Getting a comprehensive background into the history and scene is quite a treat. Absolutely ace content, man.
Literally just told my son to be quiet for 40 minutes whilst I am walked through a wonderful history of my past musical adventures and computer crashes. Great piece of documentary work. And thanks for featuring my work "U4ia - Take A Trip From Me". Makes me feel all fuzzy and warm to know I was part of history. Cheers.
Looks like your track was miscredited - It's listed in the video description as "U4ia - Take a Trip From Me". Edit: Commenter updated his comment to change the song name. S'all good now.
If I hadn't found Scream Tracker 3 on a BBS when I was a lad, I would never have considered that music was something I'd ever create. For years I spent hours at a time making tunes on Impulse Tracker. I still have a huge collection of module files that I converted to MP3 and listen to regularly. Ahoy, you brought a tear to my eye with this video. Fantastic job!
You are doing the Tracker scene a HUGE justice, my dude. Here I thought I knew almost everything about the Tracker scene but boy was I wrong. Really informative video and an awesome tribute to one of the most under-appreciated scenes in computer history. Keep it up!
About 9 years ago I begged LHS Chiptunes (guy that makes Reloaded crack themes) to remix one of my songs, and he did. I thought it was as simple as providing him a .midi, and he'd be able to quickly make it sound chiptune. I was obviously ignorant, but he still did it for me. To this day I respect him and love his music more than any other artist. I hope he gets more recognition through this video; I strongly suggest everybody to give LHS Chiptunes Palace Walls a listen. It's quite possibly one of the best chiptune songs in existence.
@@cannedbeverage7687 Hahaha, yeah I'm not too sure. I haven't torrented since my last computer, so 5+ years ago? Even then the game I torrented might have been older. But yeah, he isn't very active and even 9 years ago he wasn't. If you look up LHS Chiptunes Reloaded installer, you'll see whenever his last Reloaded crack theme was.
I’m pretty sure fearofdark is the one of the best because not only does he introduce a lot of people to tracker music but he’s usually the only tracker musician people listen to
It's so wild to see the extreme evolution of ahoys content. I remember watching the MW2 guides and now we're here 11 years later with documentary level production
Although I have been born in 2003, I was (and still are) fascinated by how old computers did stuff, from graphics to audio - and learning about the Amiga, trackers, MIDI and so on has basically molded the way I do some stuff or perceive it. I like all of this retro computing gizmos, I watch demos all the time, either emulated or, if possible, on hardware. This video just fulfills that need to know more about the past of computing. Brings me back to an era I'd wish could live in. Thanks for the video, amazing production and great telling.
Can I just say that this is one of my favorite videos you’ve done so far. I’m actually blown away by all the new things I’ve learned from it and have an even greater appreciation for the Amiga now.
"Bergsmätaren lever" by Mattis has to be one of my all time favourite tracker tunes. So much good music came out from these tools, but this one stands out.
Yooo I wrote music for the Reloaded cracktro at 0:34, thanks for featuring it hahaha Edit: now that I've watched through the rest of it, excellent presentation! It's good to see something so graphically exciting also this well researched. The world of trackers is so much more varied than covered here, but I think you've given folks a good starting point if they want to know more.
As an user of Noisetracker 1 and 2 on the Amiga, and later Fasttracker II for DOS, this was an incredible history lesson. Back then, we just used whatever version we could get from a friend of a friend. This comprehensive overview was extremely interesting. Thank you for your incredible works on all your videos. Far apart, but damn the quality is worth the wait to put it mildly. No other TH-cam channel can comprise all my interests with such immaculate quality.
Damn, this was extremely informative and done in such a professional way with good narration. This could easily air on TV as a professional documentary.... Ps. "You killed me" with that Jesper Kyd info. I first heard his music in a Hitman and immediately fell in love with it, and wanted to know who is the composer.. and now i know a little bit of history there.
Inspirational as always! I remember the first time I popped open a .MOD file to see how one game dev managed to make their music files so small and without the use of .MID files, I was stunned at the sheer creativity and complexity of the medium. This just puts all of that into context!
A friend gave me three MOD files and the trackers to run them. AxelF, AllThatSheWants, and GirlFromIpenema. I remember opening AxelF first and jamming out to the sounds of Beverly Hills Cop. Sounded WAY better than any MIDI file I'd ever heard. Then I opened up AllThatSheWants and heard... vocals? As in, actual voice samples?!? I killed the program and checked. The file was small. Small enough to fit on the floppy along with the other two songs and the trackers. Absolutely *blew my mind* that a song that sounded like it came off the radio was playing on my computer.
My first experience with trackers was the ultimate sound tracker itself. I remember it crashing for no reason at all and it was an incredibly steep learning curve before I finally found out how to load a song because it was so finicky to use. It did not save mods at all. When I got a tracker that could save mods, I kept saving as songs still, because of space issues. I eventually started to save as mods so that is the only songs that I made that I can actually faithfully listen to. The other songs I don’t have the instrument disks any more, so it is a bit more challenging to recreate those songs, but I did some research on them once. I think the songs have the exact same structure as mods, except the sample part at the end is cut off. They are also compressed, but it is not hard to find the algorithm in any of the tracker source codes.
@@AverageAlien just out of curiosity, could you explain why this is a problem. I see comments from modern vintage gamer and medlife crisis in here as well. Please inform an ignorant me. Edit: I noticed the next comment indicating that it suppressed other people’s viewpoints. I have personally not found that to be a problem. Maybe if you only read the first 5 comments.
This is a real "Why did I first discover this fantastic channel now?"-channel. I am really impressed by all the footage, all the knowledge, how well it is presented... Instant subscribe.
The great thing about trackers is the unique workflow (with all its limitations) that makes you come up with different kind of music that you'd normally produce. One reason to use them in the 90s was that PCs were pretty terrible at recording multitrack demos. This meant that a lot of song-writers used trackers to sketch out their songs even when they would later record it "properly". Many people also used trackers to create drum tracks for their otherwise traditional recordings. So trackers had a lot of impact in many genres that aren't typically associated with them.
I got into trackers in the late 90's and used them to create backing tracks for my guitar playing. Although I eventually abandoned trackers for that purpose, I still have fond memories of the countless hours I spent programming music with them.
I love UT 1999's soundtrack. Ever since my dad showed me it in 2012 I fell in love with the game and the music sounds like nothing else, so I encourage anyone to give the game a try.
When you were dismissing the usefulness of trackers in comparison to CD audio, you missed one crucial and arguably unique advantage: When a CD track is finally rendered, it can never ever change, it is static, it plays back the exact same way on all devices. Sounds like a great advantage right? So what happens when you want to incorporate dynamic music in your game that responds to the state of play ? That's right, you have to re-invent a "Tracker" like setup to break your music into chunks that can be assembled dynamically. That alone makes statically recorded music an evolutionary dead end, as far as computer games are concerned.
The people behind Unreal Engine 1.0 understood this and both Unreal itself and Deus Ex, among other UEngine games, heavily utilize this feature of modules. You can use these same samples to compose a soothing ambient song and a frantic combat track in one file and switch between these on the fly via playback from a chosen pattern. Having the song loop at a certain point (ie. after the intro is over) is also useful for games.
Microsoft thought that, and created DirectMusic as nextrunner of DirectSound. As you know, it failed unknown. Gamers didn't want sophisticated low resolution(generated in their machine) sound rather than high quality prerecorded sound. Future sound generation might be more neural and procedural, not assemblic.
@@marksmithcollins Modern computers are more than powerful enough to fully generate high quality audio in real time. This has nothing to do with a tradeoff of quality AT ALL.
I played so many apogee games on a PC with 1 bit sound, so it blew my mind years later to discover that they had MUSIC and that sometimes the characters would actually SPEAK.
One thing that might have been worth adding is that the most widely-used audio library/middleware for games - Fmod - started out as a module player in the demoscene.
Not in a million years would I think that I'd want to watch a video about the music from the demos before my pirated Amiga games when I was eight. But here we are. Great job as usual.
Even developers outside of the Amiga were in on the tracker music action. I loved Shadow Wraith, Souls in the Sytem, and Candy Crisis on the Mac, Tempest 2000 on the Jaguar and Iridion 3D in the Game Boy Advance all used tracker music. That was a great era for computer music!
I used a Octamed for years, even did most of my GSCE Music coursework with it. It was absolutely awesome. These days, despite having a fancy DAW setup, I still play with Renoise frequently, and use Deflemask to make music for the Megadrive. Trackers will always have a very special place in my heart.
I like how the A in the "PAULA" acronym has no meaning, which means they could've called it PAUL but someone intentionally went out of their way to make this microchip a female.
There's also chips named Agnus and Denise. Apparently the dev team behind the Amiga and its custom chips had a habit from their days at Atari for codenaming chips after their girlfriends; the idea being that outsiders wouldn't have any idea what they were talking about. While I don't know if the Amiga's chips followed the naming theme of developer girlfriends as well, the codename for what eventually became the Amiga was Lorraine; which at the time of the project's beginning was the name of the company president's wife. Also Amiga is the female counterpart of the Spanish "amigo", of course.
I remember sitting for hours listening to demo music as a teenager, making my own mixes on octa-med. At the time I had no idea about the stories behind all this. It's fascinating to learn all this years later..
Great video that brought back a lot of memories. I do have a little addition though. A big advantage of using tracker music in Unreal was the ability to seamlessly change the type of music based on what was happening, making the soundtrack much more dynamic and immersive.
The dynamic music changes in Unreal always impressed me. The MIDI based counterpart that comes to mind is Lucasfilm's iMUSE system, used to great effect on classics such as TIE Fighter. It was a truly sad day when simple CD audio became the norm in games.
This concept first appeared in Monkey Island 2 via the iMuse technology. Though after that it became quite widespread and many games incorporated this concept into their games. Even to this very day. A good example of a modern game incorporating this concept is DOOM Eternal, famous for not having a traditional soundtrack, just parts that seamlessly changed depending in what the player was doing and where the player was. Infamously Bethesda (and others) edited these parts into a soundtrack that could be commercially sold. This angered Mick Gordon (Sound composer for the game) and allegedly he vowed to never work on a DOOM game again because of this.
One more cool feature, which you aaaallllmost touched on at the end by likening mod playback to a "performance", is that the player software had a bit of control over the music too! In some players at least, the user can turn individual channels on and off, like a real-time "remix" that simply wouldn't be possible if the whole tune was pre-rendered to a monolithic stream. It's handy for stuff like picking out morse code hidden in the music, because you can just isolate that part so it's easier to pick out. And completely absent but I think very important, is pattern looping. You showed how a song can be pattern 1-2-3-2-3-4 for instance, but being able to seamlessly loop 1-2-3-2-3-2-3- for as long as you're in the menu, and then break the loop and let 3 transition to 4 which nicely wraps the menu song as the game loads, isn't possible with any other format that I'm aware of. And of course, better players give you this control too, so you can disable looping and just hear 1-2-3-4 once through, or turn it on for a while and turn it back off, or reveal "hidden patterns" that the author left in, knowing they'd only be heard by people with players (or trackers) capable of manipulating the patterns. So a given piece might go 1-2-3-7 if played normally, but if you turn off jumps while listening to 3, you can hear 4-5-6 as well, the little easter egg in the music. I think these are generally referred to as "hidden subsongs". Beyond that, a single module can include a bunch of subsongs but only store the sample data once, so for instance 1-2-3-2-3-4 might be the menu, 5-6-7-6-7 might be the main gameplay, and 8-2-9-3-2-9-3-10 might be the high score screen, reusing some of the riffs from earlier. This takes up very little disk space since the samples tend to be quite large compared to the note data in the patterns themselves.
Oh damn. Point of Departure. Of all of Necros's (or any of the FM folks') classic tracks, that was the one that really left an impression on me. Happy to see so many share similar fond memories of different tracks they recognize here.
I may have known almost everything in the video already, but I still watched the whole thing with a big smile on my face :). I still listen to those old mod files almost every day, and I use Renoise exclusively these days to make my own music. The demoscene and modscene are an important part of computer history to me that I want to help share and keep alive, and this video is a well-made introduction to what that's all about.
It's never too late! There are still demoparties out there, even if a lot of the big ones mostly converted to LAN parties. Any compo category can always use more entries!
I remember soldering my own soundcard (just looked it up, it was a Covox; some resistors and a parallel port) so I could listen to tracker music. What a change to the PC speaker :-)
I made one too! Then I used screamtracker on my 10Mhz pc to make music. That computer was too slow to t playback the samples correctly... so I got a different sound out of that computer than others :)
An interesting usage of tracker music which didn't get mentioned in the video was when IGS (a Taiwanese company specializing in arcade hardware) decided to release a Neo Geo competitor called the PolyGame Master, and for the soundchip they decided to use the ICS2115 (pretty much a dead ringer for the chip used in the Gravis Ultrasound). IGS themselves used this hardware of course, and they also licensed it out to Cave (one of the big 2D shooting game developers) for use in a few of their games as well, which resulted in some of the best and most unique soundtracks to ever grace the world of Japanese arcade games. Also when it comes to contemporary trackers, Furnace is another option which has come out recently and it is -very- good for just about any kind of chip music imaginable, to the point of pretty much obsoleting most standalone trackers for chip music excepting ones like LSDJ which run natively on the hardware they're tracking for.
What an amazing indepth document about what we as "sceners" and us as early composers for games, demos and mentioned cracktros on all mentioned platforms lived through. It is fun to see it analysed in historic perspective. Thanks for this! 🙂
I was never in the Amiga scene I was a PC guy being in the US but I do still remember the first time I saw Future Crew demos. Late 90s I was absolutely obsessed with the sound and demos of the time. Many late nights spent with a lot of these trackers still brings back wonderful memories.
Let me tell you my own story. I had a demo I loved, back in the 90s, with the most amazing music. I would listen to it all the time, but I lost that PC so I had no idea where to find it again. For years I was convinced it was an audio demo that was on one of the Soundblaster install discs, so I would trawl Internet archives for old SB disk zips to see if I could find it. Seeing this video, I now realize I was probably misremembering the "Soundblaster" association, which was actually a Soundtracker demo. I may or may not have acquired it with a mod player, since playing mods was still doing brisk business on the local BBSes in those times. Anyway, as I was watching this, and my brain was putting the pieces together and solving that particular puzzle for me, as I was unfortunately realizing that it was even *less* likely I'd be able to find that demo again, I was shocked to hear the exact track I've been searching for for nearly 25 years, at 16:00: Banana's Echoing. So double thanks from me for putting together this video. It's been a shot of nostalgia and I'm downloading a copy of Echoing as I type.
That one is a classic. Regarding modules included on audio card’s install disks, I do remember that Gravis Ultrasound came with a few, so some audio card makers did include modules with their driver installation.
Back in ~1994 when I still had my 286 with only a PC speaker my classmate in grade school gave me a disk. On this disk was a tracker program for DOS and a selection of MOD files. I didn't know anything about what a tracker or a MOD file was really. I doubt I even knew what an Amiga was living in Canada I knew no one that had one. But I knew I liked the music! Even on a PC speaker this program was able to playback the 4ch sample based electronic music. I don't know how. I'm sure the bit rate was terribly low and the CPU usage MAXED out but it worked! I can't remember the name of the program BUT it did have that vintage beige color like the original tracker program on the Amiga. I do also remember it had visualizations inc colored circled that light up to the beat based on the channel or maybe Bass/Treble etc. One of the included song files (on the disc he gave me at least) was the theme from Beverly Hills Cop. I played it over and over amazed this sound came from the PC speaker. IIRC Pinball Dreams could also play the music on PC speaker? Maybe?
Yesss finally a big youtuber covering trackers, they are some of my favorite kinds of daws especially when it comes to chiptunes which makes sense considering that's pretty much what they're made for especially there days with the likes of famitracker deflemask LSDJ etc though obviously you could get more fancy and use VSTS in openmpt or renoise or be in the middle and go purely sample based like milkytracker or protracker or impulse tracker, there are even super niche trackers like a tracker for specifically making music for earthbound rom hacks for example or trackers that can output general midi files instead of modules
Got actual goosebumps when I saw Second Reality show up! My father had some association with Future Crew at the time, and it's crazy to think that that demo was as major as it was. I always thought it was just a cool video with cooler music. Thanks for bringing niche subjects like this into the light, mod music deserves every bit of attention it can get.
It must have been amazing being in the demoscene around that time! Future Crew were truly a bunch of John Carmack level geniuses to manage to get something as technically incredible as Second Reality to function in MS-DOS PC's at all. From Fabien Sanglard's blog, iirc Second Reality actually emulates an Amiga sound chip (the PAULA) in order to sound as good as it does.
I saw a computer running Second Reality at the Midwest Gaming Classic convention a few weeks ago. Really hit me in the feels to see it again. My friends and I just marveled over the demo back in the day. Incredible music, scaling, rotation, distortions, and even 3d graphics! And let's not forget the _piece de la resistance_ - what appeared to be a real-time raytracing scene complete with reflections! Just amazing stuff.
Ahoy has graced us with another absolute diamond of computing history. Loved every second and had completely forgotten that DE had its origins in the Unreal franchise. They might be an interesting company to do a bio-pic of in the future
I remember the first time I opened Unreal's music files in Modplug and just marveling at the construction. Those were some epic samples, and the way they were mixed together was pure genius. And the Jazz Jackrabbit games, too. I learned so many neat tricks studying those files.
I was ecstatic to find that Epic utilized their own tracker format for Jazz Jackrabbit. After hearing that, I had the entire Christmas LGR OST on my cell phone... because Clint uses Holiday Hare songs during December for his LGR intros.
Speaking of. As somebody that doesn't use trackers. Is there a way to deconstruct those tracks and export the different channels? I want to make some remixes for myself using a DAW.
This was superb. I've been using trackers for 30 years, still do. They're an important part of electronic music history that largely gets ignored by people who never used them.
This is an amazing documentary. I grew up during this time and the music still has a place in my brain. I never thought I would get a historical breakdown like this!
Well researched and well produced! Particularly great to see small, but important details like the true origin of the term "chiptune" put in. I've been a follower of your channel for quite a while so to see a video pop up on a topic which I'm quite familiar with like this was very exciting and I think you did a fantastic job!
Oh wow! ScreamTracker 3 and "Point of Departure" by Necros. I was surprised to see this one playing as you introduced ST3 (as it is still a favorite to this day). Impulse Tracker was the clear upgrade to ST3. What a time and not many probably know existed unless you were there. Five Musicians, Kosmic, NOiSE (New Objectives in Sound Exploration), etc.. there was so much talent in this scene.
So. Much. Nostalgia. You cannot even imagine what it felt like to hear these gems fo the first time. My first PC was a 486 built by some college student who made money by building PCs in Lithuania. He preloaded my 1Gb drive with Windows 3.11, MS Office, Borland Pascal, random games, and mods. I had no clue of what the computer contained so it was a joy digging through the random folders on the drive. The tiny size of these things made me feel like there was an infinate amount of music on the PC with no internet...
This video is a hidden gem on youtube for everybody with nostalgic feeling for retro pc gaming. I really enjoyed this high quality documentary and will definately watch it again!
SUPER rad touch with the computer displaying all the info upgrading to newer tech as the timeline goes on! ;) Hell of a video! I guess this explains why all those trainers I used to download back in the late 00's had such rad music!
As someone in my early 30s who has spend the last 15 years researching and listening to tracker music. You pretty much summarised my music journey perfectly. Fair to say I knew every song featured in this video. And yes. Unreal tournament music (UMX format) is the gold standard of tracker music.
Love it. Never really knew much about trackers, though I've played around with them over the years. Wonderful historical overview that really gives pride of place to the Amiga. If people think the Amiga never gave them anything but bad arcade ports, this is a video I would point them to.
Thank you for this. As a teen growing up in rural remote Oregon USA I was downloading these things on 1200 baud modem waiting for a local BBS to swap in a compilation CD with mods, trackers, and demos on certain nights on my family's 386. At points it was fun to shout out what was coming next in your video. The filling in of my gaps of knowledge with your great video was very entertaining. My and my few friends watching second reality were floored by it. We could not communicate this with others. It's nice to know we were not alone all these years later.
Dude makes a 40 minute video about computer sound interesting then disappears for another 6 months. Legend.
> Bursts in to recommendations
> Talks about 16 bit music
> -Refuses to elaborate- Elaborates a lot
> Leaves
@@Robert-tj3jq Based
Soviet Womble has a better upload schedule than Ahoy.
@@kylegamer48 ah yes but ahoy here does the research, refinement and review before upload.
That's ahoy for you, he is a very talented researcher and video maker that simply puts quality over quantity, making these nicely put videos (in this case it's more closely video-art tbh) takes time and well he just does what he wants and put the schedule and release date to "when it's done" state. Btw if you ask me one particular topic is Seattle as there's tons of great games and pc stuff that originates from there mortal Kombat, duke nukem, Bungie, halo, and just a very interesting history of individuals that simply together shaped the videogame industry and broke new grounds often in the 80s and 90s. It's a broad topic perfectly suited for a ahoy video
This channel is a rare example where the months-long waiting for a new video is absolutely worth it.
Ahoy, Captain Dissolution, Tier-Zoo, Curious Droid are all great.
@@AmericaLexicon All great names are here.
@@AmericaLexicon Adding Oversimplified, Lemmino, *Captain Disillusion, CGP Grey, Kurzgesagt, Technology Connections, SmarterEveryDay, Veritasium, Vsauce, Joe Scott, Climate Town, Mark Rober, Coldfusion, RealLifeLore, Ilyx, and Internet Historian to the list
Another example I can think of is accursed farms
@@earthling_parth Mark Rober?
I’m a blind musician that used to write bog-standard, 4-track mod files in Dos using ModEdit in the 90’s and early 2000’s.
Still have everything I ever wrote. I loved it and have thought many a time of trying to get back into it.
This video was not only nostalgic but also amazing, and absolutely top-notch as all your videos are.
I’m grateful for the time you take with your work and appreciate your channel very much.
Thank you.
Do you find that trackers were more accessible than modern DAWS?
@@glowinggrenade Hmm. These days I’m a Logic Pro user, and I get around it fairly easily, but there was something to be said for what basically amounted to a step-based input method. Could lose your place if not paying proper attention, and some of the menus didn’t read very well with my screen-reader of the time, but stuff was doable for the most part.
#GoodTimes.
respect
how do you type and use the interface if you cant see?
Do you mean fully blind or partially/legally blind
I imagine using software being ridiculously difficult if someone is fully blind
You're on a short list of S+ tier TH-camrs with high production value, interesting yet niche content, and a charming aesthetic, never change.
Agreed, Stu is a cut above a lot of TH-camrs. His content is always quality
I hope Posy is on that list. He and Ahoy have way too much in common.
@@marinellovragovic1207 I was thinking "who is that that name is vaguely familiar" then I found out I was subscribed and remembered who he was, and yes he definitely is
@@realkekz Superb based tastes, dude.
I just wish there were more gaming videos, and less guns...
This is an absolutely glorious history of MODs. Thank you so much for creating it.
We got a legend in the comment section!
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 soundtrack is something I still listen to from time to time. ❤️
And THANK YOU Alexander for being part of this history with your contributions to the tracker scene, especially Unreal.
Hey man! Nice to see you here! Glad to see you made it in the industry. The demoscene (particularly the DC/Baltimore area scene) was always too small for you. It's been a pleasure to watch you hit gaming hard with what you have.
Great to see you here Mr Brandon! Huge fan of your music. Your work on the Unreal soundtrack in particular was incredible and helped make the game so atmospheric and memorable. I still go back and listen to it often, almost 25 years later. I learnt about trackers a few years later and was fascinated to see how you built those tracks!
*fangirl freaking out noises*
Can't wait to get back into this gaming history after 6 months!
Next up: RetroAhoy.
@UCWTgYlza_NGzR1UbMooxHdw what
The wait is worth it
Yes ai like ahoy my opinion is pension but no!
@@bluauber409 famous last words
I absolutely loved this video. Amazing work as always
funny seeing you here
I didn't know MVG watched Ahoy! You're one of my favorite TH-camrs!
Glad to know you've discovered Ahoy! You two are brothers in art
why did you like this so much? Do you make music?
@@TheTinnin I believe MVG makes all the music for his channel
A LOT of the modern game industry's senior people started out in the demoscene. During my own industry tenure, it was crazy how many people I met & worked with who wrote the demos, cracks, or early games that I had downloaded for my C64, Amiga, then PC. It was basically the era when there was no major commercial competition and anyone with a home computer could be the first to write something and have it go viral on SneakerNet or later FidoNet. Amazing times.
Things I learned today:
-Piracy has a pretty banger soundtrack.
Things I learned today:
-Piracy is banger
Wouldn't mIned a Razor ost to be honest
Honestly it's a lot better than hearing "Yo ho ho ho the pirate's life for me" ad nauseam...
@@nickfifteen Mirror hacker? ;)
Pirates always did have the best shanties :)
It is a great day when I find Ahoy has uploaded a new video. The wait in between only makes it sweeter, and the music selection to accompany this video is 👌
Didn't expect you here medlife :)
Damn, didn't know you also liked Ahoy
I was thinking the same. You have great tastes in YT creators. I see you in plenty of comments of videos I have seen. I appreciate your good attitude and helpful nature and just makes this video and comment section so much more wholesome. Cheers!
@@terminator572 one of my videos (about ASMR) actually features a little Easter egg tribute to Ahoy ☺️
@@MedlifeCrisis neat, gonna be on the lookout for it
00:00 Kenet & Rez - Unreal Super Hero 3
00:49 Walkman - Let's Hear My Baby
01:28 Bill Williams - Alley Cat
02:00 David Whittaker - Speedball (Atari ST)
03:07 POW - Wonderful Life
04:19 Fred / La Marque Jaune - The Sign Of The Death
06:17 Deluxe Music Construction Set - Bach Fugue in G Minor
06:40 Chris Huelsbeck - Shades
08:41 Karsten Obarski - Amegas
10:28 Karsten Obarski - Crystal Hammer
12:08 Comrade J - Fairlight
12:46 Mahoney - Ghost
13:09 Horace Wimp - Running Water
13:24 Karsten Obarski - Telephone
14:02 Diz - Unit 5
14:53 Uncle Tom - Occ San Geen
16:00 Banana - Echoing
17:12 Luxor - Cousin's Song
18:14 Chip - Ghost of Parallax
19:20 Mahoney - Sleepwalk
20:13 Dr. Awesome - Moongazer
20:44 Jesper Kyd - Global Trash 3 v2
21:16 Jogeir Liljedahl - Overture
21:25 Jester - Stardust Memories
21:36 Lizardking - LK's Doskpop
21:56 Mel O Dee - Scales of Joy
22:20 4mat - L.F.F.
23:01 4mat - Anarchy Menu 1
23:15 Zap - Killing Denise
24:04 Brian Johnston - Hired Guns Main Theme
25:26 U4ia - Take a Trip From Me
26:44 Captain - Space Debris
27:49 Zak McKraken (PC Speaker Theme)
28:37 George Stone - CANYON.MID
29:34 Purple Motion - Future Brain
29:59 Necros - Point of Depature
30:54 Purple Motion - UnreaL ][
32:01 Elwood - Dead Lock
32:44 Chris Jarvis/Analogue - Blue Flame
33:28 Robyn Miller - Myst Theme
34:26 Robert A. Allen - Epic Pinball (Title)
35:25 Alexander Brandon - Flight Castle
35:51 Michael van den Bos - Foregone Destruction
37:50 Fluidvolt - The Gusts of Aeolus
38:29 X-Ceed/Scope - Voyager
39:16 Hoffman - Eon
Thanks man!
I'm impressed you could find all these bar one
YOU ARE THE HERO I NEEDED. THANK YOU.
Necros is a good friend of mine - he still uses trackers even using them in the albums he did with synth pop band Iris - which he used to great effect.
Nice Hina
I love that VLC still has tracker support, I have an old original collection of tracker music that I have moved from machine to machine over the decades and its nice to have the simple double click ability to play it.
The vetaram foobar too
Trackers are relatively easily file formats to decode. Rendered music files such as MP3 has comprehension, what usually need third party stuff.
Trackers must be view like a script accomplished with resouces of a DJ at a given time, not really a audio file.
That's good to know, I used to use Winamp to play mod files.
I use Audacious, a continuation of xmms that's essentially Winamp for FOSS, even uses the same GUI and is skin compatible.
@gabriel.epsilon so it's sort of like a Midi
My love for trackers is infinite. My father died shortly after hearing my first original song in Amiga with OctaMED Proaround 1990, when I was 11 or so. I often wonder what he would say now but, I am still glad he heard and loved my first one. I still have a small notebook, handcrafted in school, where I placed all tracker commands. I had around 20 disks filled with my own samples which I mostly ripped from the gamesusing Action Replay-like cartridges... I learned a lot with trackers before going into classical school.
Our hard drive failed and I lost my early FastTracker II works. Dad was really sad about that. I still punch some tunes here and there. Spinning Bitwig nowadays.
Thanks for sharing this - it's fun reading these stories today, as tracker music connects ppl over decades, it seems :)
@@FrogFWK I just had to share it. It's been with me for so many years and this video deserved it.
@@pedro.camacho Absolutely. Did you do the Witcher 3 soundtrack? I lovit.
Yes, production quality is great here. And it's worth reading the comments too, as sometimes there's more than warm memories to be found :)
Well, none of my soundtracks did make it into this video, but one of our Demos did at 14:39 (it's called demons are forever from 1988). What made me smile was your keeping the sound-disks, as mine are still sitting here on the shelve (9 disks I think), although my amiga is long gone ;) Seems to me, this tracker era really changed some lifes for the better.
Lets be friends brother.
There's one very important thing trackers had that you didn't mention... The format the songs were in was open by design, so if you could play it, you could also see how it was done and pillage their samples and instruments. That was an incredible learning tool.
Absolutely. It's how most us learned by digging deep into tracks to see how things were done. Still learning new tricks 20 years later.
Collaborative art is the best
now with AI generative art, some people are following the same steps, generated image has metadata that you can dig in and learn how it was made
@@zaadworks trackers will always be better than AI though :)
As a software engineer and a fan of many genres of music including electronica, this is absolutely fascinating. By the time I started programming, Windows 3.0 already existed (we couldn't afford a computer before the 90s), so I never had to deal with direct hardware access except for the occasional fight to get a game to run in DOS with whatever video card our computer had. Even though I've written assembly code before, it's hard to imagine such primitive conditions being the _only_ option for getting anything done. It makes me strangely nostalgic for a time I never truly experienced firsthand, when it was amazing just to successfully use computer for any purpose at all. Things are so very different in 2021, 30 years after my family got our first computer.
You would have been a perfect fit! You have the spirit that drove the hyper creativity in the demo scene.
Thank you for giving such love to such a niche topic. I kind of can’t believe there’s such an insanely high quality documentary like this on the subject of trackers. I was tracking music back in 1997 using Mod Plug Tracker on my PC and to this day I write game music. There’s so much history here I didn’t know about. Thanks for the VERY unexpected nostalgia trip and giving to anyone else with curiosity such a deep history and appreciation for this niche craft.
Any tracks from games that you've made music for that you're particularly proud of?
A big thanks for featuring Space Debris in the video, I'm honored to be included! ☺️ A great history lesson, there was some stuff from the early days of trackers I didn't even know / remember.
- Captain
Space Debris has always stuck with me as an incredible piece! Just yesterday I was grabbing the Ares soundtrack off my old mac so I could use some drum samples on my modular synth. I copied Space Debris too while I was at it.
What's the connection to the mac game by the same name? Was it written for the game? Did you develop it?
Amiga was ahead of its time. And so was your music.
th-cam.com/video/thnXzUFJnfQ/w-d-xo.html
I listened to Space Debris for many hours when I was a kid when it was included (probably without license) in Macintosh game of the same name. The game wasn't much, but that sound kept me hooked for hours. Thanks for the amazing track and defining my current taste in music!
I LOVE YOU!
Had my hands in the air when I heard the first notes :D One of the earliest MODs I recall digging a LOT (and do to this day).
Hi, great video and documentary! I'm a tracker musician from the PC-Demoscene. I've started with Fasttracker 2 in mid 90s, and then Milkytracker on the PC. I made game music which is based on Milky XM tracker files, like Mission in Snowdriftland by Nintendo. The game gets an update and re-release on Kickstarter at the moment! Musical greetings, Rapture
:)
19:24 - The Silents, the group who released NoiseTracker, went on to become DICE, the developers of the Battlefront games and Mirror's Edge.
@@PieterPeter-ud7wf the one they shit on recently
@@PieterPeter-ud7wf This joke became less funny as time when on, let me tell ya, or funnier depend on how you look at it.
Ooooh yikes
Fun fact: DICE's past has been brought up before on RetroAhoy. Which episode was it?
@@alaeriia01 Pinball Dreams obviously.
I love how for so many of these videos I have next to no previous interest, nor any previous knowledge, yet straight away I'm hooked, and at no point am I confused. They take full advantage of the niece nature of delving deep into a topic like this, which makes it such a fun learning experience. They are incredibly well made and are so incredibly fun to watch.
Ahoy is an absolute magician!
There are areas where tracker music still has a HUGE advantage over prerecorded music. You can have the music be reactive to the game in a variety of ways. Turning on and off channels, panning individual channels instead of an entire recording, have different patterns to be switched to for a more dramatic or calmer version of the exact same song, triggering different note effects depending on in game environments, the ability to change the tempo of the music without pitch shifting anything, and I'm sure there are more examples. And all of that with a single file instead of multiple prerecorded tracks or audio tracks on a disc that may have required a split second of buffering or loading time. The access times aren't a big deal now with SSDs but boy did that make a difference for a long time.
Because of the relatively small file sizes it also meant you could have a LOT more music in a lot of games that had space constraints or compared to a CD where audio took up a whole lot more space than a tracker file.
Is that how the music for NO ONE LIVES FOREVER works? I'm still amazed how it morphs tempo as you play . . .
@@vincelang3779 No. It was actually split into several files. It was MIDI but with custom instrument sounds stored in a separate file.
Would doom 2016s soundtrack count as an example?
Why this reminds me of Harmonix's "Chroma"? They made multiplayer FPS games whose background music reacts to gameplay, because they store music in MIDI format and lets the game engine play the MIDI files. Maybe with Tracker format they could make the background music more reactive than ever...
alas Chroma was mothballed indefinitely.
@@jamesbulick1897 mick Gordon came to mind straight away
It's safe to say that soundtracker brought me where I am today.
If my mom bought me a gaming console instead of an Amiga, my life would have been entirely different.
i'm jealous
@@hri7566 Who asked tho
mind asking you why? was it that you tried doing stuff on it instead of gaming or something?
@@shinren_ I think he meant more other things than gaming... These tools in this video including soundtracker was not in gaming consoles... atleast in the production like Amiga and C64. Doh well :) Im pretty sure he's life would have been entirely different, If I had had the same thing,my life too.
@@shinren_ Why yo brain so smooth dude?
I'm amazed by the level of detail on the artwork for the faces of the coders (6:48) and by the sheer number of different screencaptures required to make this video happen!
Also: "VLC has support for a wide range of tracker formats". I want to say I'm surprised... but at this point I would barely raise an eyebrow if astronomers dropped a file on it containing samples of the cosmic microwave background radiation only to be greeted with a video of the first few seconds of the big bang.
Goat of players
It's like the SFW equivalent of Rule 34: If it exists, VLC can play it.
@@BrightSpark unless it's on bluray, because heaven forbid you be able to play this disk you bought
@@matthewparker9276 unless it's from the seas :)
I was so glad to see Follin on here.
I'm working on a game and it uses a tracker because I can make it adapt to the game perfectly, I can stretch and squeeze without distortion and branch the music when the scene changes. Levels have their own tempo and so when you go to the next level the tempo shifts and if the shift is too much for a particular song it will insert a bridge and move to another song with a closer tempo. Also there are a collection of songs for the menu which then get bridged into level songs when you enter a level. Everything is constructed in a huge Markov chain (everything seamlessly transitions, no hard starts or stops, and single songs can be played continuously while not being completely repetative) with links being dependent on scenes and triggers, it's so much easier to construct using trackers than audio files.
Any info about the game? I'd love to see how that works, because as a programmer it's not quite obvious and sounds really bloody cool.
so something like IMUSE from the secret of monkey island?
i'd love to see what you made!
Thats so cool, it makes me want to buy and play your game!
One area where trackers continued used in a more "mainstream" context well beyond the 90s were the Nintendo handhelds. The DS still used it for most soundtracks. Even the earlier disc-based home consoles still used a lot of tracker music with pretty high quality samples
Which makes sense, the SNES used tracker style music (the only limitation being the tiny RAM profile for the DSP contained all the sounds and samples, thus they were rather compressed), and that continued to the N64 due to storage and memory size limitations. The GBA and DS used the same, because a lot of it was ports and they had small memory profiles so streaming audio while doable was trickier in the 4mb of ram for a DS (and limited often to say videos). Trackers have always been compact files and kept their use on systems with tiny profiles and some sound processing but no MIDI synth chip.
Yup, earlier phone games as well. Multiple demoscene musicians found their paycheck niche there. For example, Alexander Brandon and Peter Hajba composed for the Bejeweled games.
@@CerealKiller your comment makes me want a midi keyboard
Modern hardware trackers are very fun. Check out the Polyend Tracker, Dirtywave M8 Tracker, and all of Elektron’s instruments are tracker based.
I wouldn't really call things like SF2/USF tracker music. It's more akin to MIDI with a custom soundfont in the way it allows to have a central file for samples and then have small file for the actual composition.
It's an absolute mindblow on my part to realize that I Created Disco is all tracker music. That album was an absolute JAM when I was a student DJ. Went back and damn is that sound unmistakable to me now. As always, an amazing video Ahoy.
In this case OctaMED was only used to sequence an Akai sampler, but the tracker soul is in there.
@@pkaulf Huh, ok. That's really interesting to know. Thanks for adding more context to this revelation on my part, I really appreciate it.
I've always loved 8-bit and 16-bit sounds and soundtracks in pretty much anything, as well as the amount of variety that exists in the world of trackers and demoscenes. Even though I don't know a whole lot of what goes on, seeing Ahoy make a video on this taught me a lot more than what I had previously thought went on in the scene. The best part is it still is a bit of a starting point that leaves a lot more room to discover should the person want to learn more about trackers as well!
Beautiful representation as always Ahoy! Keep up the amazing work!
Is this comment visually dimmer on mobile for anyone else or is it just me
Yeah, in that part near the end, our guy pretty much handed us a roadmap to learn more about anything in the video.
@@clankplusm might just be you
Weird how nobody pointed out that the early PopCap games (Bejeweled, Dynomite, etc) OSTs were made by Skaven of Future Crew and there exist the dumped files of the musical suites of these games online if you know how to find them! Beyond The Network is Bejeweled's but I forgot the rest.
Insaniquarium!
thats sick as hell
It explains why I played Dynomite so much... loved the music!
Hamsterball's OST is also made by Skaven, great stuff! I have the dumped files on my phone
@@sodaodaoda to this day hamsterball has one of my absolute favorite soundtracks to anything, there’s just such a unique feel to it
skaven’s work no matter what game it was for was incredible
16-bit is such a timeless and nostalgic style for us. A testament of this is how even today, almost 40 years later, we still widely enjoy 16-bit and even 8-bit music
What about 32/64 bits?
@@ikagura not old enough yet.
@@KingLich451 How? Even the 128-bits era is 20 years old already.
Actually I'd take more indie game taking cues from 32/64 or even early 128 bits instead of rehashing 8-bits nostalgia again.
@@ikagura i dont know honestly, i wouldnt mind those
Regular people pirate to spend less money, gopniks pirate to listen to keygen music
Ayyyyy your music is rad as hell bro! I play it at the shop all the time!
Ok
This is some high quality nahui.
Eventually they start using Sunvox to make their own keygen music
un ko tu te dari, mister latvieti? :D
26:45 hearing Space Debris again after almost 30 years playing it on repeat in Digitrakker hit me like a nostalgia bomb. I ripped that tune apart, it was basically my intro to making music with computers. I'm almost in tears.
Lovely video!
Watching this and seeing the parallels to how modern DAWs are designed is fucking awesome.
You would be suprised to find out that the first version of Cubase is actually from 1989 with a lot of the key features of a modern DAW and the kind of music presented in this video could be done much more easily and faster with a sequencer software such as Cubase. It's a shame (and an obvious flaw) that he didn't mention this at all.
"Why does pirate software has such amazing soundtrack"
What a fantastic way to start
I love how Ahoy can take something I know nothing about and make me finish a 45 minute video on it
I KNOW!!I T WAS OVER SO QUICK AND IT DIDN'T REALLY FEEL LIKE NEARLY 50 MINUTES! THIS GAVE ME A NEW LOVE FOR TRACKER MUSIC AND HEIGHTENED LOVE FOR CHIPTUNE!! FAMITRACKER, MEGA DRIVE, (genesis) SC-55, (midi/MS-DOS/doom 1993) SID, (commodore 64) AND ALL OLD COMPUTING MUSIC IN GENERAL!!!
This brought me back to my days as an Amiga tracker artist. You also mentioned several of my friends. Thanks!
What do you do now? Are you still making music in some way or another or is that a hobby of the past?
Nice too know
It’s still going strong with beautiful custom made music like this th-cam.com/video/dPGB3TqIHVI/w-d-xo.html
I've been making music on trackers for decades. There's still nothing quite like the top down hex approach.
Great little doc! 🎵
Tracker music arguably is what made me fall in love with gaming and PCs in general. Unreal Tournament's soundtrack was all tracker based and it immediately sucked me into another world. I had never heard anything like it.
Fuck yeah, I used to load them up in fast tracker and borrow the instruments.
I still listen to that soundtrack, and all the unreal series. The composer has a distinct style, I can only describe as atmospheric and fantasy Sci-fi. It does take you to another fantasy place.
'Excellent!'😄
@@Domarius64 Agree. The soundtrack from Speedball 2 was similar in style and also excellent
@@Domarius64 Not only that, but theres a reason Foregone Destruction is so memorable, it really fits so well on the Facing Worlds map that its crazy. The unsettling calm vibe from the start while you watch the earth from a distance is a experience I still waiting to be replicated, it fits too well, only to the track pick up in intensity while you battle for the flags that most of the time replicated the game motion so well. That map brings me memories. UT99 dont get a fraction of the recognition it deserves for that OST.
As someone who spent countless hours tinkering with more "modern" trackers in my high school days, this video is easily my favorite ever posted by this channel. Getting a comprehensive background into the history and scene is quite a treat. Absolutely ace content, man.
Literally just told my son to be quiet for 40 minutes whilst I am walked through a wonderful history of my past musical adventures and computer crashes. Great piece of documentary work. And thanks for featuring my work "U4ia - Take A Trip From Me". Makes me feel all fuzzy and warm to know I was part of history. Cheers.
Looks like your track was miscredited - It's listed in the video description as "U4ia - Take a Trip From Me".
Edit: Commenter updated his comment to change the song name. S'all good now.
Mind your son, fella.
hey man, i actually wanted to inform u about ur song being featured in this video...but seems u got here before i do so heheh
If I hadn't found Scream Tracker 3 on a BBS when I was a lad, I would never have considered that music was something I'd ever create. For years I spent hours at a time making tunes on Impulse Tracker. I still have a huge collection of module files that I converted to MP3 and listen to regularly.
Ahoy, you brought a tear to my eye with this video. Fantastic job!
You are doing the Tracker scene a HUGE justice, my dude. Here I thought I knew almost everything about the Tracker scene but boy was I wrong.
Really informative video and an awesome tribute to one of the most under-appreciated scenes in computer history.
Keep it up!
About 9 years ago I begged LHS Chiptunes (guy that makes Reloaded crack themes) to remix one of my songs, and he did. I thought it was as simple as providing him a .midi, and he'd be able to quickly make it sound chiptune. I was obviously ignorant, but he still did it for me. To this day I respect him and love his music more than any other artist.
I hope he gets more recognition through this video; I strongly suggest everybody to give LHS Chiptunes Palace Walls a listen.
It's quite possibly one of the best chiptune songs in existence.
"makes Reloaded crack themes" as in present tense? Pretty sure there haven't been any new games with RLD's name slapped on them in years
@@cannedbeverage7687
Hahaha, yeah I'm not too sure. I haven't torrented since my last computer, so 5+ years ago? Even then the game I torrented might have been older. But yeah, he isn't very active and even 9 years ago he wasn't. If you look up LHS Chiptunes Reloaded installer, you'll see whenever his last Reloaded crack theme was.
This man's content is a masterpiece. He should have like 10 million subscribers at least!
ye
Let make it happen!
Hard to do when you have 2 uploads a year haha
@@thaddeuscosse9527 You are right, but the depth and enjoyment is top notch!
100% 100 million
fearofdark is certainly my favorite current tracker musician, absolutely incredible what they're making
Motorway is one of my favs of his
I’m pretty sure fearofdark is the one of the best because not only does he introduce a lot of people to tracker music but he’s usually the only tracker musician people listen to
@@labfire8964 fr. fod got me into using famitracker
@@georckbread3403 Same never thought I’d be making music on a tracker that emulates famicon/nes music
couldnt have said it better myself brother
The pure joy one feels when Ahoy uploads a clip
I know, right???
LITERALLY
Yeeahhhhh
Godly feeling
All the feelings at once
Really awesome episode mate, thanks for making it :) .
Oh hey
Where review.jpg
Hey! who knew old keyboard mate was into such things.
Holy heck it's Chyros!
Thinking of it, makes sense that the music was so good, they had some great keyboards back then!
That ZX Spectrum mention at the beginning was an instant reminder.
It's so wild to see the extreme evolution of ahoys content. I remember watching the MW2 guides and now we're here 11 years later with documentary level production
Although I have been born in 2003, I was (and still are) fascinated by how old computers did stuff, from graphics to audio - and learning about the Amiga, trackers, MIDI and so on has basically molded the way I do some stuff or perceive it.
I like all of this retro computing gizmos, I watch demos all the time, either emulated or, if possible, on hardware. This video just fulfills that need to know more about the past of computing. Brings me back to an era I'd wish could live in.
Thanks for the video, amazing production and great telling.
Good to see you back man!, looking forward to next year.
How is this 2 days ago?
@@betr8 he pre-ordered
@@TsunamisKid lmao
@@betr8 I guess patreon
He’s back! Liked the video before listening to it, Ahoy never disappoints anyway. The quality is just insane
Me too! I liked it before it started!
same here...same here...=)
Me too, I shared it to friends before watching it
The quality is beyond insanity :)
Can I just say that this is one of my favorite videos you’ve done so far. I’m actually blown away by all the new things I’ve learned from it and have an even greater appreciation for the Amiga now.
1 day?
1 day ago in nov19 ?
@@arctic215 yehr. lol. was 50 seconds live and got 99 comments. I guess he uploaded it, set it on private and has a small review by a core audience.
@@arctic215 patreon supporter
"Bergsmätaren lever" by Mattis has to be one of my all time favourite tracker tunes. So much good music came out from these tools, but this one stands out.
You may like my enhanced version of that masterpiece, then:
th-cam.com/video/s5aiuNTe2bQ/w-d-xo.html
Hope you enjoy. 😉
@@GYTCommnts Thanks! I've listened to that one many times as well. It's great! However, nothing beats the original. :)
@@ShizukanaEntertainment Of course! It's just an enhanced version, not even a Remix. The original is the work of art here. 😉
Seeing and hearing "Second Reality" still makes me shiver. Greetings from Finland.
Yooo I wrote music for the Reloaded cracktro at 0:34, thanks for featuring it hahaha
Edit: now that I've watched through the rest of it, excellent presentation! It's good to see something so graphically exciting also this well researched. The world of trackers is so much more varied than covered here, but I think you've given folks a good starting point if they want to know more.
very talented lol
this dude is the bomb when it comes to retry game documentary's
your music is pretty good btw
haha ive heard that song various times before!!! its really nice :D
Incredibly nostalgic for me, thank you
Nice:) I heard this track few times before , good work:)
As an user of Noisetracker 1 and 2 on the Amiga, and later Fasttracker II for DOS, this was an incredible history lesson. Back then, we just used whatever version we could get from a friend of a friend. This comprehensive overview was extremely interesting. Thank you for your incredible works on all your videos. Far apart, but damn the quality is worth the wait to put it mildly. No other TH-cam channel can comprise all my interests with such immaculate quality.
Damn, this was extremely informative and done in such a professional way with good narration. This could easily air on TV as a professional documentary.... Ps. "You killed me" with that Jesper Kyd info. I first heard his music in a Hitman and immediately fell in love with it, and wanted to know who is the composer.. and now i know a little bit of history there.
Inspirational as always! I remember the first time I popped open a .MOD file to see how one game dev managed to make their music files so small and without the use of .MID files, I was stunned at the sheer creativity and complexity of the medium. This just puts all of that into context!
boring checkmark comment pushed to the top by rigged comment section again
The bottom comment section will not be suppressed
A friend gave me three MOD files and the trackers to run them. AxelF, AllThatSheWants, and GirlFromIpenema. I remember opening AxelF first and jamming out to the sounds of Beverly Hills Cop. Sounded WAY better than any MIDI file I'd ever heard. Then I opened up AllThatSheWants and heard... vocals? As in, actual voice samples?!? I killed the program and checked. The file was small. Small enough to fit on the floppy along with the other two songs and the trackers. Absolutely *blew my mind* that a song that sounded like it came off the radio was playing on my computer.
My first experience with trackers was the ultimate sound tracker itself. I remember it crashing for no reason at all and it was an incredibly steep learning curve before I finally found out how to load a song because it was so finicky to use. It did not save mods at all.
When I got a tracker that could save mods, I kept saving as songs still, because of space issues. I eventually started to save as mods so that is the only songs that I made that I can actually faithfully listen to.
The other songs I don’t have the instrument disks any more, so it is a bit more challenging to recreate those songs, but I did some research on them once. I think the songs have the exact same structure as mods, except the sample part at the end is cut off.
They are also compressed, but it is not hard to find the algorithm in any of the tracker source codes.
@@AverageAlien just out of curiosity, could you explain why this is a problem. I see comments from modern vintage gamer and medlife crisis in here as well. Please inform an ignorant me.
Edit: I noticed the next comment indicating that it suppressed other people’s viewpoints. I have personally not found that to be a problem. Maybe if you only read the first 5 comments.
39:03 "In essence, trackers are a performance -- it's the sound of 16-bit."
very well put! I agree :)
Your work is simply amazing and unique. You are an inspiration to anyone who creates videos on the internet.
Much love from Brazil!
Huehuehuehue
Gibe moni plox
Hello random man I have decided I love you
É sempre bom encontrar um criador nos comentários de outro criador
Also he put a list of all the music used in the description...!! 😍
Sudden Brasileiro out of nowhere
Sempre adorei seu conteúdo, nunca pare por favor
This is a real "Why did I first discover this fantastic channel now?"-channel. I am really impressed by all the footage, all the knowledge, how well it is presented... Instant subscribe.
The great thing about trackers is the unique workflow (with all its limitations) that makes you come up with different kind of music that you'd normally produce. One reason to use them in the 90s was that PCs were pretty terrible at recording multitrack demos. This meant that a lot of song-writers used trackers to sketch out their songs even when they would later record it "properly". Many people also used trackers to create drum tracks for their otherwise traditional recordings. So trackers had a lot of impact in many genres that aren't typically associated with them.
I got into trackers in the late 90's and used them to create backing tracks for my guitar playing. Although I eventually abandoned trackers for that purpose, I still have fond memories of the countless hours I spent programming music with them.
I love UT 1999's soundtrack. Ever since my dad showed me it in 2012 I fell in love with the game and the music sounds like nothing else, so I encourage anyone to give the game a try.
I played it non-stop when I was a kid! The sounds are so nostalgic to me now
I code to it all the time.
When you were dismissing the usefulness of trackers in comparison to CD audio, you missed one crucial and arguably unique advantage:
When a CD track is finally rendered, it can never ever change, it is static, it plays back the exact same way on all devices. Sounds like a great advantage right?
So what happens when you want to incorporate dynamic music in your game that responds to the state of play ?
That's right, you have to re-invent a "Tracker" like setup to break your music into chunks that can be assembled dynamically.
That alone makes statically recorded music an evolutionary dead end, as far as computer games are concerned.
yup, tracker-style music is VERY useful in making incidental music for games
The people behind Unreal Engine 1.0 understood this and both Unreal itself and Deus Ex, among other UEngine games, heavily utilize this feature of modules. You can use these same samples to compose a soothing ambient song and a frantic combat track in one file and switch between these on the fly via playback from a chosen pattern. Having the song loop at a certain point (ie. after the intro is over) is also useful for games.
Microsoft thought that, and created DirectMusic as nextrunner of DirectSound. As you know, it failed unknown.
Gamers didn't want sophisticated low resolution(generated in their machine) sound rather than high quality prerecorded sound.
Future sound generation might be more neural and procedural, not assemblic.
Change of mood needs transition, not reconstruction.
@@marksmithcollins Modern computers are more than powerful enough to fully generate high quality audio in real time. This has nothing to do with a tradeoff of quality AT ALL.
I played so many apogee games on a PC with 1 bit sound, so it blew my mind years later to discover that they had MUSIC and that sometimes the characters would actually SPEAK.
One thing that might have been worth adding is that the most widely-used audio library/middleware for games - Fmod - started out as a module player in the demoscene.
Not in a million years would I think that I'd want to watch a video about the music from the demos before my pirated Amiga games when I was eight. But here we are.
Great job as usual.
Unreal Tournament is still the best possible representation of what mid-90's PC gaming sounded like. A phenomenal soundtrack indeed.
Thanks. I was part of the Demoscene long years ago. This video just gets it on point. Please keep making videos on the style of this. Awesome!
As a 90ies kid - this kind of music has a special place in my heart. Thank you for the trip down the memory lane
Even developers outside of the Amiga were in on the tracker music action. I loved Shadow Wraith, Souls in the Sytem, and Candy Crisis on the Mac, Tempest 2000 on the Jaguar and Iridion 3D in the Game Boy Advance all used tracker music. That was a great era for computer music!
I used a Octamed for years, even did most of my GSCE Music coursework with it. It was absolutely awesome.
These days, despite having a fancy DAW setup, I still play with Renoise frequently, and use Deflemask to make music for the Megadrive.
Trackers will always have a very special place in my heart.
I like how the A in the "PAULA" acronym has no meaning, which means they could've called it PAUL but someone intentionally went out of their way to make this microchip a female.
There's also chips named Agnus and Denise. Apparently the dev team behind the Amiga and its custom chips had a habit from their days at Atari for codenaming chips after their girlfriends; the idea being that outsiders wouldn't have any idea what they were talking about.
While I don't know if the Amiga's chips followed the naming theme of developer girlfriends as well, the codename for what eventually became the Amiga was Lorraine; which at the time of the project's beginning was the name of the company president's wife. Also Amiga is the female counterpart of the Spanish "amigo", of course.
@@LonelySpaceDetective oh thats interresting!
I remember sitting for hours listening to demo music as a teenager, making my own mixes on octa-med.
At the time I had no idea about the stories behind all this. It's fascinating to learn all this years later..
Great video that brought back a lot of memories. I do have a little addition though. A big advantage of using tracker music in Unreal was the ability to seamlessly change the type of music based on what was happening, making the soundtrack much more dynamic and immersive.
Totally agree
The dynamic music changes in Unreal always impressed me. The MIDI based counterpart that comes to mind is Lucasfilm's iMUSE system, used to great effect on classics such as TIE Fighter. It was a truly sad day when simple CD audio became the norm in games.
This concept first appeared in Monkey Island 2 via the iMuse technology. Though after that it became quite widespread and many games incorporated this concept into their games.
Even to this very day. A good example of a modern game incorporating this concept is DOOM Eternal, famous for not having a traditional soundtrack, just parts that seamlessly changed depending in what the player was doing and where the player was.
Infamously Bethesda (and others) edited these parts into a soundtrack that could be commercially sold. This angered Mick Gordon (Sound composer for the game) and allegedly he vowed to never work on a DOOM game again because of this.
Always a good day when you upload, sir.
oh hey look it's the longman
The thought of the longman himself fangirling over Ahoy like the rest of us makes me giggle.
Always a good YEAR when the man uploads.
He covered a whole topic in 40 minutes, so I hope you came here to learn
Oh hey it’s you. The objective reviewer. Will you do a 5 hour response stream to the video?
One more cool feature, which you aaaallllmost touched on at the end by likening mod playback to a "performance", is that the player software had a bit of control over the music too!
In some players at least, the user can turn individual channels on and off, like a real-time "remix" that simply wouldn't be possible if the whole tune was pre-rendered to a monolithic stream. It's handy for stuff like picking out morse code hidden in the music, because you can just isolate that part so it's easier to pick out.
And completely absent but I think very important, is pattern looping. You showed how a song can be pattern 1-2-3-2-3-4 for instance, but being able to seamlessly loop 1-2-3-2-3-2-3- for as long as you're in the menu, and then break the loop and let 3 transition to 4 which nicely wraps the menu song as the game loads, isn't possible with any other format that I'm aware of.
And of course, better players give you this control too, so you can disable looping and just hear 1-2-3-4 once through, or turn it on for a while and turn it back off, or reveal "hidden patterns" that the author left in, knowing they'd only be heard by people with players (or trackers) capable of manipulating the patterns. So a given piece might go 1-2-3-7 if played normally, but if you turn off jumps while listening to 3, you can hear 4-5-6 as well, the little easter egg in the music. I think these are generally referred to as "hidden subsongs".
Beyond that, a single module can include a bunch of subsongs but only store the sample data once, so for instance 1-2-3-2-3-4 might be the menu, 5-6-7-6-7 might be the main gameplay, and 8-2-9-3-2-9-3-10 might be the high score screen, reusing some of the riffs from earlier. This takes up very little disk space since the samples tend to be quite large compared to the note data in the patterns themselves.
Oh damn. Point of Departure. Of all of Necros's (or any of the FM folks') classic tracks, that was the one that really left an impression on me. Happy to see so many share similar fond memories of different tracks they recognize here.
1:29 - ALLEY CAT! My god that took me back before I even realised what I was listening to.
Took me a few seconds but I recognised it too 😃
@@MR-vj8dn Same, took me a little at first to recognize the music, and I used to love playing Alley Cat, bit later though, late 80's, 89/90'ish
OMG! My brain triggered on that too! That brought me back to 1990s when playing on mom's work PC :)
took me zero seconds, haha
@@karakenio Awesome 😊
I may have known almost everything in the video already, but I still watched the whole thing with a big smile on my face :). I still listen to those old mod files almost every day, and I use Renoise exclusively these days to make my own music. The demoscene and modscene are an important part of computer history to me that I want to help share and keep alive, and this video is a well-made introduction to what that's all about.
Sup, SOC :)
haha omg hi Sol
I feel sad that I'm only 23 and never got to get into all this beautiful scene, or really experience too much of the old internet/old computers. :c
@@seronymus me too, at least we have these great videos to show us tje way
It's never too late! There are still demoparties out there, even if a lot of the big ones mostly converted to LAN parties. Any compo category can always use more entries!
I remember soldering my own soundcard (just looked it up, it was a Covox; some resistors and a parallel port) so I could listen to tracker music. What a change to the PC speaker :-)
It wasn't a soundcard, more like a DAC.
I made one too! Then I used screamtracker on my 10Mhz pc to make music. That computer was too slow to t playback the samples correctly... so I got a different sound out of that computer than others :)
An interesting usage of tracker music which didn't get mentioned in the video was when IGS (a Taiwanese company specializing in arcade hardware) decided to release a Neo Geo competitor called the PolyGame Master, and for the soundchip they decided to use the ICS2115 (pretty much a dead ringer for the chip used in the Gravis Ultrasound). IGS themselves used this hardware of course, and they also licensed it out to Cave (one of the big 2D shooting game developers) for use in a few of their games as well, which resulted in some of the best and most unique soundtracks to ever grace the world of Japanese arcade games. Also when it comes to contemporary trackers, Furnace is another option which has come out recently and it is -very- good for just about any kind of chip music imaginable, to the point of pretty much obsoleting most standalone trackers for chip music excepting ones like LSDJ which run natively on the hardware they're tracking for.
What an amazing indepth document about what we as "sceners" and us as early composers for games, demos and mentioned cracktros on all mentioned platforms lived through. It is fun to see it analysed in historic perspective. Thanks for this! 🙂
Because of this video that I discovered you have .XM library that equally great to your C64 tunes. Thank you for your works.
*Waves* ha! ;)
Bro the RoboCop 3 NES theme still lives rent-free in my head to this day.
I’ve lived through almost everything here. Still, to see it in a documentary like this is awesome
I haven't lived through most of this but it's still pretty damn cool!
I was never in the Amiga scene I was a PC guy being in the US but I do still remember the first time I saw Future Crew demos. Late 90s I was absolutely obsessed with the sound and demos of the time. Many late nights spent with a lot of these trackers still brings back wonderful memories.
Let me tell you my own story.
I had a demo I loved, back in the 90s, with the most amazing music. I would listen to it all the time, but I lost that PC so I had no idea where to find it again.
For years I was convinced it was an audio demo that was on one of the Soundblaster install discs, so I would trawl Internet archives for old SB disk zips to see if I could find it. Seeing this video, I now realize I was probably misremembering the "Soundblaster" association, which was actually a Soundtracker demo. I may or may not have acquired it with a mod player, since playing mods was still doing brisk business on the local BBSes in those times.
Anyway, as I was watching this, and my brain was putting the pieces together and solving that particular puzzle for me, as I was unfortunately realizing that it was even *less* likely I'd be able to find that demo again, I was shocked to hear the exact track I've been searching for for nearly 25 years, at 16:00: Banana's Echoing.
So double thanks from me for putting together this video. It's been a shot of nostalgia and I'm downloading a copy of Echoing as I type.
That one is a classic. Regarding modules included on audio card’s install disks, I do remember that Gravis Ultrasound came with a few, so some audio card makers did include modules with their driver installation.
Wooow. 25 whole years of searching, and you find it here.
How does it feel to have such an old lost friend finally found again? :D
Back in ~1994 when I still had my 286 with only a PC speaker my classmate in grade school gave me a disk. On this disk was a tracker program for DOS and a selection of MOD files. I didn't know anything about what a tracker or a MOD file was really. I doubt I even knew what an Amiga was living in Canada I knew no one that had one. But I knew I liked the music! Even on a PC speaker this program was able to playback the 4ch sample based electronic music. I don't know how. I'm sure the bit rate was terribly low and the CPU usage MAXED out but it worked! I can't remember the name of the program BUT it did have that vintage beige color like the original tracker program on the Amiga. I do also remember it had visualizations inc colored circled that light up to the beat based on the channel or maybe Bass/Treble etc. One of the included song files (on the disc he gave me at least) was the theme from Beverly Hills Cop. I played it over and over amazed this sound came from the PC speaker. IIRC Pinball Dreams could also play the music on PC speaker? Maybe?
Yesss finally a big youtuber covering trackers, they are some of my favorite kinds of daws especially when it comes to chiptunes which makes sense considering that's pretty much what they're made for especially there days with the likes of famitracker deflemask LSDJ etc though obviously you could get more fancy and use VSTS in openmpt or renoise or be in the middle and go purely sample based like milkytracker or protracker or impulse tracker, there are even super niche trackers like a tracker for specifically making music for earthbound rom hacks for example or trackers that can output general midi files instead of modules
I think my favorite part of this project was hearing the music evolve throughout the video. That was really cool.
Got actual goosebumps when I saw Second Reality show up! My father had some association with Future Crew at the time, and it's crazy to think that that demo was as major as it was. I always thought it was just a cool video with cooler music. Thanks for bringing niche subjects like this into the light, mod music deserves every bit of attention it can get.
It must have been amazing being in the demoscene around that time! Future Crew were truly a bunch of John Carmack level geniuses to manage to get something as technically incredible as Second Reality to function in MS-DOS PC's at all. From Fabien Sanglard's blog, iirc Second Reality actually emulates an Amiga sound chip (the PAULA) in order to sound as good as it does.
I saw a computer running Second Reality at the Midwest Gaming Classic convention a few weeks ago. Really hit me in the feels to see it again. My friends and I just marveled over the demo back in the day. Incredible music, scaling, rotation, distortions, and even 3d graphics! And let's not forget the _piece de la resistance_ - what appeared to be a real-time raytracing scene complete with reflections! Just amazing stuff.
I remember this demo being the turning point where I was willing to acknowledge that PC was about to take over from the Amiga regarding capabilities.
I was born in 1976. I went through this whole era. It's like a walk over memorylane.
Thanks for the video...
Thumb up😊
Ahoy has graced us with another absolute diamond of computing history. Loved every second and had completely forgotten that DE had its origins in the Unreal franchise. They might be an interesting company to do a bio-pic of in the future
I remember the first time I opened Unreal's music files in Modplug and just marveling at the construction. Those were some epic samples, and the way they were mixed together was pure genius. And the Jazz Jackrabbit games, too. I learned so many neat tricks studying those files.
i´m sorry but .... "Those were some epic samples" ....
I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE xD
I was ecstatic to find that Epic utilized their own tracker format for Jazz Jackrabbit. After hearing that, I had the entire Christmas LGR OST on my cell phone... because Clint uses Holiday Hare songs during December for his LGR intros.
Speaking of. As somebody that doesn't use trackers. Is there a way to deconstruct those tracks and export the different channels? I want to make some remixes for myself using a DAW.
@@drifter402 if all else fails, you can just load the .MOD files into a tracker and render out each channel separately. tedious, but it'll work.
@@CerealKiller it's for unreal tournament
This was superb. I've been using trackers for 30 years, still do. They're an important part of electronic music history that largely gets ignored by people who never used them.
This is an amazing documentary. I grew up during this time and the music still has a place in my brain. I never thought I would get a historical breakdown like this!
Well researched and well produced!
Particularly great to see small, but important details like the true origin of the term "chiptune" put in.
I've been a follower of your channel for quite a while so to see a video pop up on a topic which I'm quite familiar with like this was very exciting and I think you did a fantastic job!
This. As someone who lived that era as a scener, I can confirm this video was *very* accurate on all counts.
Oh wow! ScreamTracker 3 and "Point of Departure" by Necros. I was surprised to see this one playing as you introduced ST3 (as it is still a favorite to this day). Impulse Tracker was the clear upgrade to ST3. What a time and not many probably know existed unless you were there. Five Musicians, Kosmic, NOiSE (New Objectives in Sound Exploration), etc.. there was so much talent in this scene.
Love NOiSE and KFMF, still have a lot of their stuff.
So. Much. Nostalgia. You cannot even imagine what it felt like to hear these gems fo the first time. My first PC was a 486 built by some college student who made money by building PCs in Lithuania. He preloaded my 1Gb drive with Windows 3.11, MS Office, Borland Pascal, random games, and mods. I had no clue of what the computer contained so it was a joy digging through the random folders on the drive. The tiny size of these things made me feel like there was an infinate amount of music on the PC with no internet...
this dude is an absolute legend
This video is a hidden gem on youtube for everybody with nostalgic feeling for retro pc gaming. I really enjoyed this high quality documentary and will definately watch it again!
SUPER rad touch with the computer displaying all the info upgrading to newer tech as the timeline goes on! ;)
Hell of a video! I guess this explains why all those trainers I used to download back in the late 00's had such rad music!
As someone in my early 30s who has spend the last 15 years researching and listening to tracker music. You pretty much summarised my music journey perfectly. Fair to say I knew every song featured in this video.
And yes. Unreal tournament music (UMX format) is the gold standard of tracker music.
Same, bit older, hitting 40 next year, but it's like a timeportal to my teenage years...still get the chills hearing some of them good old mods.
The songs are classical for those with the time when pirate bay was ongoing! I'm 33 and I have so many good memories of these installers
Always loved UT music.
Love it. Never really knew much about trackers, though I've played around with them over the years. Wonderful historical overview that really gives pride of place to the Amiga. If people think the Amiga never gave them anything but bad arcade ports, this is a video I would point them to.
Thank you for this. As a teen growing up in rural remote Oregon USA I was downloading these things on 1200 baud modem waiting for a local BBS to swap in a compilation CD with mods, trackers, and demos on certain nights on my family's 386. At points it was fun to shout out what was coming next in your video. The filling in of my gaps of knowledge with your great video was very entertaining. My and my few friends watching second reality were floored by it. We could not communicate this with others. It's nice to know we were not alone all these years later.