Tracker - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Trackers are a class of music sequencer

Music sequencer

The music sequencer is a device or computer software to record, edit, play back the music, by handling note and performance information in several forms, typically :...

software used to create and edit module file

Module file

Module files are a family of music file formats originating from the MOD file format on Amiga systems used in late 1980s...

s; they allow the user to arrange notes (pitch-shifted sound samples from the module) stepwise on a timeline across several monophonic

Monaural

Monaural or monophonic sound reproduction is single-channel. Typically there is only one microphone, one loudspeaker, or channels are fed from a common signal path...

channels

Channel (communications)

In telecommunications and computer networking, a communication channel, or channel, refers either to a physical transmission medium such as a wire, or to a logical connection over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel...

.

A tracker's musical interface is traditionally numeric: both notes and parameter changes, effects and other commands are entered with the keyboard into a grid of fixed time slots as codes consisting of letters, numbers and hexadecimal

Hexadecimal

In mathematics and computer science, hexadecimal is a positional numeral system with a radix, or base, of 16. It uses sixteen distinct symbols, most often the symbols 0–9 to represent values zero to nine, and A, B, C, D, E, F to represent values ten to fifteen...

digits.
Separate patterns have independent timelines; a complete song consists of a master list of repeated and concatenated patterns.

Recent trackers have departed from module file limitations and advantages, adding other options both to the sound synthesis (hosting generic synthesizers and effects or MIDI output) and to the sequencing (MIDI input and recording), effectively becoming general purpose sequencers with a peculiar user interface.

Characteristics

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

A sample
Sampling (music)
In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song or piece. Sampling was originally developed by experimental musicians working with musique concrète and electroacoustic music, who physically...

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

Sustain

In music, sustain is a parameter of musical sound over time. As its name implies, it denotes the period of time during which the sound remains before it becomes inaudible, or silent.Additionally, sustain is the third of the four segments in an ADSR envelope...

of a note.

A note
Note
In music, the term note has two primary meanings:#A sign used in musical notation to represent the relative duration and pitch of a sound;#A pitched sound itself....

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

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

Portamento

Portamento is a musical term originated from the Italian expression "portamento della voce" , denoting from the beginning of the 17th century a vocal slide between two pitches and its emulation by members of the violin family and certain wind instruments, and is sometimes used...

, vibrato

Vibrato

Vibrato is a musical effect consisting of a regular, pulsating change of pitch. It is used to add expression to vocal and instrumental music. Vibrato is typically characterised in terms of two factors: the amount of pitch variation and the speed with which the pitch is varied .-Vibrato and...

, retrigger

Retrigger

Retriggering is a tracker technique in which a sample is replayed a set number of times within a certain timeframe.-Basic theory of tracker time:...

, and arpeggio

Arpeggio

An arpeggio is a musical technique where notes in a chord are played or sung in sequence, one after the other, rather than ringing out simultaneously...

.

A track (or channel) is a space where one sample is played back at a time. Whereas the original Amiga

Amiga

The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...

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

A basic drum set could thus be arranged by putting a bass drum at rows 0, 4, 8, 12 etc. of one track and putting some hihat at rows 2, 6, 10, 14 etc. of a second track. Of course bass and hats could be interleaved on the same track, if the samples are short enough. If not, the previous sample is usually stopped when the next one begins. Some modern trackers simulate polyphony

Polyphony (instrument)

Polyphony Instruments that are not capable of polyphony are monophonic.-Synthesizer:Most of early synthesizers were monophonic musical instruments which can play only one note at a time, and are often called monosynth as opposed to polysynth...

in a single track by setting the "new note action" of each instrument to cut, continue, fade

Fade (audio engineering)

In audio engineering, a fade is a gradual increase or decrease in the level of an audio signal. The term can also be used for film cinematography or theater lighting, in much the same way ....

out, or release, opening new mixing channels as necessary.

A pattern is a group of simultaneously played tracks that represents a full section of the song. A pattern usually represents an even number of measures

Bar (music)

In musical notation, a bar is a segment of time defined by a given number of beats of a given duration. Typically, a piece consists of several bars of the same length, and in modern musical notation the number of beats in each bar is specified at the beginning of the score by the top number of a...

of music composition.

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

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

Tracker music is typically stored in module file

Module file

Module files are a family of music file formats originating from the MOD file format on Amiga systems used in late 1980s...

s where the song data and samples are encapsulated in a single file. Several module file formats are supported by popular music player programs such as Winamp

Winamp

Winamp is a media player for Windows-based PCs and Android devices, written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of AOL. It is proprietary freeware/shareware, multi-format, extensible with plug-ins and skins, and is noted for its graphical sound visualization, playlist, and media library features.Winamp...

or XMMS

XMMS

The X Multimedia System is a free audio player for Unix-like systems.-History:XMMS was originally written as X11Amp by Peter and Mikael Alm in November 1997. The player was made to resemble Winamp, which was first released in May that year. As such, XMMS has supported Winamp 2 "classic" skins...

. Well-known formats include MOD

MOD (file format)

MOD is a computer file format used primarily to represent music, and was the first module file format. MOD files use the “.MOD” file extension, except on the Amiga where the original trackers instead use a “mod.” prefix scheme, e.g. “mod.echoing”...

, MED

OctaMED

OctaMED is a popular sound tracker for the Commodore Amiga, written by Teijo Kinnunen. The first version, 1.12, was released in 1989 under the name MED, which stands for Music EDitor. In April 1990, version 2.00 was released with MIDI support as the main improvement...

, S3M

S3M (file format)

The S3M format is an advanced module format, and is the successor to the STM format used by the original Scream Tracker. Both formats are based on the original MOD format used on the Commodore Amiga computer....

, XM

XM (file format)

XM, standing for "extended module", is an audio file type introduced by Triton's Fast Tracker 2. XM introduced multisampling-capable instruments with volume and panning envelopes, and basic pattern compression...

and IT.

History

The term tracker derives from Ultimate Soundtracker
Ultimate Soundtracker
Ultimate Soundtracker, or Soundtracker for short, is a music tracker program for the Commodore Amiga. It is the creation of Karsten Obarski, a German software developer and composer at a game development company; sources differ as to the name of the company, recorded it as reLINE, whereas ...

; the first tracker software. Ultimate Soundtracker was written by Karsten Obarski and released in 1987 by EAS Computer Technik for the Commodore Amiga. Ultimate Soundtracker was a commercial product, but soon shareware clones such as NoiseTracker appeared as well. The general concept of step-sequencing samples numerically, as used in trackers, is also found in the Fairlight CMI

Fairlight CMI

The Fairlight CMI is a digital sampling synthesizer. It was designed in 1979 by the founders of Fairlight, Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, and based on a dual-6800 microprocessor computer designed by Tony Furse in Sydney, Australia...

sampling workstation of the early 1980s. Some early tracker-like programs appeared for the Commodore 64

Commodore 64

The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...

, such as Sound Monitor, but these did not feature sample playback, instead playing notes on the computer's internal synthesizer.

The first trackers supported only four channels of 8-bit PCM

Pulse-code modulation

Pulse-code modulation is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form for digital audio in computers and various Blu-ray, Compact Disc and DVD formats, as well as other uses such as digital telephone systems...

samples, a limitation derived from the Amiga's Paula audio chipset and the commonplace 8SVX

8SVX

8SVX is a subformat of the Interchange File Format. The subformat is for 8-bit sampled sounds, supports both mono and stereo streams as well as loops; commonly used as a basic audio sample format on Amiga computers for many years...

format used to store sampled sound. However, since the notes were samples, the limitation was less important than those of synthesizing music chips.

1990s and the PC

During the 1990s, tracker musicians gravitated to the PC. Although the IBM and compatibles initially lacked the hardware sound processing capabilities of the Amiga, with the advent of the Sound Blaster

Sound Blaster

The Sound Blaster family of sound cards was the de facto standard for consumer audio on the IBM PC compatible system platform, until the widespread transition to Microsoft Windows 95, which standardized the programming interface at application level , and the evolution in PC design led to onboard...

line from Creative

Creative Technology

Creative Technology Ltd. is a Singapore-based global company headquartered in Jurong East, Singapore. The principal activities of the company and its subsidiaries consist of the design, manufacture and distribution of digitized sound and video boards, computers and related multimedia, and personal...

, PC audio slowly began to approach CD Quality (44.1 kHz/16-bit/Stereo) with the release of the SoundBlaster 16.

Another soundcard popular on the PC tracker scene was the Gravis Ultrasound

Gravis Ultrasound

Gravis UltraSound or GUS is a sound card for the IBM PC compatible system platform, made by Canada-based Advanced Gravis Computer Technology Ltd...

, which continued the hardware mixing tradition, with 32 internal channels and onboard memory for sample storage. For a time, it offered unparalleled sound quality and became the choice of discerning tracker musicians. Understanding that the support of the tracker/demo-scene

Demoscene

The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer...

would benefit sales, Gravis gave away some 6000 GUS cards to participants. Coupled with excellent developer documentation, this gesture quickly prompted the GUS to become an integral component of many tracking programs and demos. Inevitably, the balance was largely redressed with the introduction of the Sound Blaster AWE32

Sound Blaster AWE32

Sound Blaster AWE32 is an ISA sound card from Creative Technology. It is an expansion board for PCs. The Sound Blaster AWE32, introduced in March 1994, was a near full-length ISA sound card, measuring 14 inches in length, due to the number of features included.-MIDI capability:The Sound Blaster...

and its successors, which also featured on-board RAM and wavetable mixing.

The responsibility for audio mixing

Audio mixing (recorded music)

In audio recording, audio mixing is the process by which multiple recorded sounds are combined into one or more channels, most commonly two-channel stereo. In the process, the source signals' level, frequency content, dynamics, and panoramic position are manipulated and effects such as reverb may...

passed from hardware to software (the main CPU), which gradually enabled the use of more and more channels. From the typical 4 MOD channels of the Amiga, the limit had moved to 7 with TFMX players and 8, first with Oktalyzer and later with the vastly more popular OctaMED

OctaMED

(all Amiga programs), 16 with ScreamTracker 3 on the PC, then 32 with FastTracker 2 and on to 64 with Impulse Tracker

Impulse Tracker

Impulse Tracker is a multi-track digital sound tracker . It was one of the last tracker programs for the DOS platform. It was authored by Jeffrey "Pulse" Lim, and example music was provided by Jeffrey Lim and Chris Jarvis...

.

As such, hardware mixing did not last. As processors got faster and acquired special multimedia processing abilities (e.g. MMX) and companies began to push Hardware Abstraction Layers, like DirectX, the AWE and GUS range became obsolete. DirectX

DirectX

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...

, WDM

WDM

WDM is a three-letter abbreviation with multiple meanings, as described below:* Warm dark matter* Warm dense matter* Wavelength-division multiplexing* wdm, the WINGs Display Manager* West Des Moines, Iowa* Western Development Museum of Saskatchewan...

and, now more commonly, ASIO, deliver high-quality sampled audio irrespective of hardware brand.

2000s

Tracker music could be found in computer games of the late 90s and early 00s, such as the Unreal series, Deus Ex
Deus Ex
Deus Ex is an action role-playing game developed by Ion Storm Inc. and published by Eidos Interactive in 2000, which combines gameplay elements of first-person shooters with those of role-playing video games...

and Hitman: Codename 47
Hitman: Codename 47
Hitman: Codename 47 is a stealth game developed by IO Interactive and published by Eidos Interactive. It is the first entry in the Hitman series, followed by Hitman 2: Silent Assassin....

. However, the easy availability of software samplers/synthesizers and sequencers has caused some professional musicians to adopt other music software. Nonetheless, tracker software continues to develop. Some of the early Amiga trackers such as ProTracker

Protracker

ProTracker is a popular freeware tracker created by Lars Hamre, Anders Hamre, Sven Vahsen and Rune Johnsrud for the Amiga platform. It is amongst the programs that first allowed for widespread creation of music without studio equipment...

, OctaMED

OctaMED

have received various updates, mostly for porting to other platforms. ProTracker

Protracker

having resumed development in 2004, with plans for releasing version 5 to Windows and AmigaOS

AmigaOS

AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000...

, but only version 4.0 beta 2 for AmigaOS has been released. Other cross-platform trackers include Renoise

Renoise

Renoise is a contemporary digital audio workstation based upon the heritage and development of tracker software. Its primary use is the composition of music using sound samples, soft synths, and effects plug-ins. It is also able to interface with MIDI and OSC equipment...

, MilkyTracker and SunVox

SunVox

SunVox is a compact cross-platform audio tracker with modular synthesizers.Features:* minimalistic scalable interface for working on any video resolution;...

.

Buzz, ModPlug Tracker

ModPlug Tracker

OpenMPT is an open source audio module tracker for Windows. It was named by Computer Music as one of the top five free music trackers. It originally started out under the name ModPlug Tracker, and was developed by Olivier Lapicque in September 1997....

, Renoise

Renoise

, Psycle

Psycle

Psycle is a modular music production application to make music on Windows. Based on the tracker interface but featuring up-to-date features like VST compatibility and 96 kHz / 32bit wav rendering....

, and others offer features undreamed-of back in the day (improved signal-to-noise ratios, automation, VST

Virtual Studio Technology

Steinberg's Virtual Studio Technology is an interface for integrating software audio synthesizer and effect plugins with audio editors and hard-disk recording systems. VST and similar technologies use digital signal processing to simulate traditional recording studio hardware with software...

support, internal DSP

Digital signal processing

Digital signal processing is concerned with the representation of discrete time signals by a sequence of numbers or symbols and the processing of these signals. Digital signal processing and analog signal processing are subfields of signal processing...

s and multi-effects, multi I/O cards support etc.).

Current State
During 2007, Renoise

Renoise

and Modplug Tracker

ModPlug Tracker

(OpenMPT) were presented in the Computer Music Magazine as professional and inexpensive alternative to other music production software. In the Winter of 2008, Jeskola Buzz

Jeskola Buzz

Jeskola Buzz is a freeware modular software music studio environment designed to run on Microsoft Windows via Microsoft .NET. It is centered around a modular plugin-based machine view and a multiple pattern sequencer tracker .Buzz consists of a plugin architecture that allows the audio to be routed...

Modular also returned to a heavy developmental state.

As of year 2010, Renoise

Renoise

and Modplug Tracker

ModPlug Tracker

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

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

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

Characteristics

History

See also