I really need to carve out some time to look at this and compare to Renoise. The in-line representation of automation/effects look absolutely killer to me as I usually have to manage a lot of that in my head when working.
Does Logic Pro or Ableton Live not fit your bill? Not a pointed question, I’m genuinely curious. I don’t know enough about trackers mainly coming from a sequencer background.
Ableton Live lives close to my heart, but I am not a fan of their inventory system for project assets (name is blanking on me, not the samples, but the... -- INSTRUMENT RACK!), it's not conducive to natural flow, hard to see, and even harder to tell minute differences in melodies and variations, and gets confusing the more layers you go. Logic Pro being the same.
FL Studios handles this far differently for better and infinitely far worse, but it gets closer to the 'tracker' feel.
Ableton (and the similar) all suffer from a minimalist point of view, while on the effect side Ableton (and Bitwig) reign supreme and can get incredibly complex in its sound design stage with stacking effects, its still minimal in the linear fashion that you just 'stack' effects on each other, the instrument rack and the melody system forces you to streamline and keep your project minimal in assets, doesn't allow for incredible variation, changes, etc, keeping your assets smaller and smaller to make it manageable.
Trackers on the other hand force you to always want to expand, to try new things, not usually on effects, but on advanced melodies, tighter control, and always adding just one more thing, to cut and mix and get funky and experimental with it. It's just the way the system is designed, its made to be controlled and expanded.
Ableton is made to be minimal, streamlined, a philosophy in their design and UX forces you to keep everything just... smaller, because if you grow to big, too experimental, make too many changes, have too many samples, too many melodies, sounds, variations, then it becomes impossible to do _anything_ without a cognitive overhead of 'fuck... where is that?' and 'damn, it sounds better, but if i do that I will have to rework _everything_ to make it fit, and i've already done that three times and I didn't even like it at the end last time' as your project assets grows in size.
Trackers are just easier to understand all the moving parts, and this is where FL Studios loop system for instruments is better and more akin to trackers, they bind multiple instruments to one 'loop' or melody.
Ableton (and the similar): Instruments are the primary grouping, melodies are bound to the instrument. You can only have 'one' instrument on any melody, if you want multiple instruments to take part in a melody, you have to manually align them in your composition, and duplicate. If you make any changes to that melody on an instrument, then you might need to rework the other 10 instruments that are supposed to work together, and then rework all those parts together in your composition.
FL Studios / Trackers: Loops are a primary grouping. Instruments are secondary. Every 'loop melody' contains a self-contained instrument rack, so you can have 15 instruments, 15 sounds _be_ your melody. Instead of melodies being from a single instrument by default, melodies (or loops) can be made up from 15 different instruments. Then, when you get to the composition, you can place that grouping together, and if you make changes, it affects all of the usage. You can then have multiple melodies (or loops) that are stacked on top of each other, adding variation.
Now where FL Studios diverges from trackers is 1) horizontal loop creation and 2) less control and organization. FL can get messy with the _amount_ of loops you have, duplication, etc. If you're not careful it can get confusing (but less so compared to Ableton with the same amount of melodies/loops/instruments).
Trackers, are, well trackers, meaning they are controlled, they are tracked. If you make a core loop (multiple instruments, sounds, in tandem as a 'set'), and then you need to create a variation, most of the popular ones, most used ones, ReNoise for example, will automatically create a sort of 5D Dimensional Chess kind of layout to help you easily see where the variations and changes occurred. It's kind of a tree-like structure of historical confirmed changes, what you deemed 'good enough' with a full collection of ancestral and descendant transformations 'that lived' long enought o be of note.
FL can get unwieldy with so many loops and variations, since they don't do that, its mostly just a list, and grouping being secondary. So, this philosophy forces you to experiment (duplicate an existing melody loop, try something new, don't like it? delete it). Whereas with trackers, you tend to experiment, have it always available, become a scratchpad of a million variations, always saved.
Sure, you could 'save' your project a thousand times with 'PROJECT 1 (2) - BETTER MELODY - SHORT BASS - TRIPPLETE VARIATION THING (SECOND VERSION) - WONKY TIMESCALE (3) (4) (481562342).ext' and import, but then you get lost, and ideas are lost forever, so its easier to try something for a split second, don't like it? delete it, losing that knowledge or attempt that could be worth something.
So, Trackers are great for experimentation, it's how you get things like Breakcore, or other highly experimental music types, sounds that have never existed before, songs that break convention, experimental sounds that are _yours_, that reward creativity and trying new things. Plus, real-estate wise, you can see (and use, and edit) a lot more of your instruments and melodies on the screen in a linear state, especially if you don't use a piano roll type system and just use the note labels (A, B, C#, D, etcetra etc &c). They're great to _synchronize_ sounds and sequences together. This is great for MIDI melodies, less so stellar for _sound samples_ that rely on waveforms for visuals since its not easy to align them (and see them) and how they fit against such a tight control system, and this is where composition layering is important.
Aside: Ableton for example is wonderful at dealing with _sound waveform_ samples/files, because you can visually see the waveform in line with the MIDI instruments, and you can use the automation guides and visually modify the sound itself with them, helping make them fit against a piano roll style system. But again, have a sample but want to experiment? need 20 different variations? have fun with that and the reworking...
But, trackers take their concept of tight spreadsheet-like control too far and extend it to the composition layering, where the composition is _sequenced_ just like a loop, so a loop in a loop, where the loops are the instruments with play/stop commands, and the actual placing and design of the different loops and melodies (and tracks) together. They require _a lot_ of work to create deep compositions, as stacking and modulating existing loops together is harder, and since most don't feature a composition timeline with 'track channels' like Ableton, or FL, or Reaper, etc, you end up looping... a lot, and where your loops could be experimental and fresh and interesting, the actual composition becomes focused on the individual loops, and not on the layering and actual composition of the song itself.
So, trackers: groups by sequenced loops (multiple, sounds, instruments in one), and then for composition they sequence the loops
Example: Loop 1 plays 5 times, Loop 2 starts playing on second repeat, Loop 1 begins fade out on the fourth repeat, Loop 3 fades in for for one play, Loop 4 takes over at full volume for 16 repeats, Loop 3 returns for 4 cycles on the 12th repeat of Loop 4, Loop 2 continues looping until END.
|>>> Of course, not written like that, they are sequenced, and it makes it hard to keep track and layer loops on each other. <<<|
But DAWs (Ableton/FL/BitWig/Reaper/Logic): group by 'lanes' in a visual format, drag and drop, layer 15 deep, or 1 deep, select all sounds playing on four lanes, and move them an inch over, automation guides as an overlay on the lanes, or under the lanes. This makes composition incredibly easy to experiment, to move things around, combine sounds.
So combining the two? Close to perfection. For melody design: extremely experimental and inspired creativity through tight control and automatic history/management on loops from tracker style loops. For composition - a relaxed sound design playground, a place to combine, shift, change, and easily modify sounds through effects and modulation. It's visual, its less rigid, it's playdoh, its malleable. It's a mosaic, or a collage of sounds. You cut the defined designs from magazines, and you warp and change them, not to change the core of the sound, but to make it into something new, to add effect variations or filters on defined sounds.
This became a bit more long winded than I had intended, but I hope it helps to understand, especially considering you mentioned coming from a sequencer background.
Neither have anything remotely similar to a tracker interface. The closest "current" DAW would be something like ReNoise, but it lacks a bunch of the ideas that Radium uses, like working graphically inside the tracker UI.
Voting on HN is not a like, it is about getting the good posts which produce good discussion at the top of the thread so we do not have to scroll through pedantry and nitpicking to get to the content. These posts offering old content are handy things to have in a thread but rarely produce good discussion and the best place in a thread for them is at thee bottom of the worthwhile posts but before the garbage posts which is where a single downvote should get it in an ideal world but people probably just downvote such posts in an attempt to counter the upvotes such posts always get.
HN has been Eternal Septembered for years. The behaviors and tastes of the userbase have evolved in a different direction from what the guidelines prescribe, and there is no going back.
Cakewalk has been scripted with a LISP (CAL) from the early days, at least through the 90s. I see hints that it still is but not sure with all the changes from Bandlab.
never tried Radium, but in Apple's Logic Pro you can write Javascript to do stuff to the MIDI as it comes in or goes out. I've found it quite useful. I once wrote a small script (at the request of another Logic user) that turned a monosynth that only supported "low note priority" into "last note priority." I'd be interested to see what Radium can do.
But in general use it feels slow and very unstable. I tried on Windows, as that was 'recommended'
I tried this with some of my own OctaMED files, and the experience has been ... well ... not pleasant. None of them load.
Note: I used MED, OctaMED 4, OctaMED SoundStudio, Protracker, before moving to Renoise, Reaper and Bitwig. Also used Samplitude and Sonar for a long time. Amiga user with a large collection of modules and samples I created over the decades. I like trackers and hate pianorolls. I like the Korg Gadget interface, but want a tracker for MIDI.
Renoise is probably your best option for a midi tracker, Radium (and most trackers) are meant to be stand alone and they always seem to have issues or irritating limitations when it comes to midi.
Have you ever found anything which loads & plays *MED files properly? Specifically MMD2 format files from SoundStudio. I've also got loads I created back in the Amiga days, and I've still got SS itself running on an old laptop but would prefer something that could play/render them to WAV on macOS.
I had a Windows version of SoundStudio, but can now only find the demo. Lost my copy a long time ago, so not really. I use emulation, like WinUAE/FS-UAE for this.
For those asking how this is different than other non-tracker DAWs, the answer is basically "this is a tracker".
For those not familiar, trackers are a type of music composition software that's been around in one form or another since maybe the mid-80s. [1]
Used very heavily in the demoscene, chiptune, and adjacent parts of game development scenes.
The power of trackers is in the workflow, which provides an incredibly fast interface for writing music compare to other interfaces like piano rolls, staves and notes, multi-track DAWs and so forth. They take a bit to get to used to, but allow you to compose basically as fast as you can type notes. This speeds up iteration in testing musical ideas substantially. The interface concept also lends itself to a very compact representation of multiple tracks allowing a composer to see what's happening elsewhere in their composition.
It can feel a lot like programming in many ways, and like you are working a level "below" almost all other composition software and closer to the music and instruments.
The format lends itself very well to compositions in 4/4 time, but most tracker software lets you change the time signature, tempo, and other things so that very complex compositions with weird rhythmic patterns are not too hard to pull off.
There are dedicated tracker software for all kinds of musical workflows: sample-based, chiptune, NES, MIDI, VST, modular synths, etc. and tracker software exists on pretty much every platform and targeting nearly every output audio device you could possibly imagine.
There are literally millions of tracked pieces of music in the world, covering an innumerable number of genres.
Best of all, most tracking software is free, or incredibly cheap, well documented with videos showing you how to do things and thousands to hundreds of thousands of examples you can open to see how a particular musician accomplished something.
2 - Here's a tracker I particularly like who works in a lot of styles, especially tracks "Living, again and again" (both mixes), "Accidental Ray of Sun (Piano Mix)", "Aurielis (lf box mix)", and "Transitory"
According to a comment, he did most of this in a tracker called "Impulse Tracker" which is now replicated for modern systems as "Schism Tracker" - a completely sample based tool.
> Information to warez groups: Since the source is open, it should be simple to turn the demo into a fully featured version. Please let me know of any problems.
Makes sense as their name suggests that they are affiliated with one of the original warez crews, Radium, who were around in the late 90s. Or that the name is an homage to Radium, who did a lot of massive releases that these developers may have grown up on.
Bummer about the reported Mac issues. Anybody have experience with it there?
I have Logic, so I will probably never devote the time to trying to fix this. But maybe if I understood the "tracker" interface it would be more appealing.
I would recommend trying sunvox if you want to dip into trackers. It is free on desktop and cheap on mobile and runs on most platforms. In fact, I have a 2012 iPad that runs it fine.
Trackers are just a different way of entering midi data and automation, literally typing in the values you want. They offer an unreal level of granular control, but at the expense of being able to visualize your melodies on a horizontal timeline.
Modern trackers are basically complete DAWs and sunvox is no exception. It contains a modular synthesis system that is amazing for sound design and creating your own reusable instruments and effect modules. I find myself writing less repetitive parts with a tracker, closer to what I would write if I was composing with staff paper.
I have a smaller tracker app that has similar problems on mac.
When you use the keyboard for navigation , holding down a key brings up the accent dialog thing. It also starts doing that “bllllllllllpppppp” noise like you’re doing something wrong.
If you try to add sandbox and harding the SDL timer seems to go nuts, loops too fast and crashes often.
Also, a lot of old tracker code uses 32 bit tricks that arm64 just doesn’t like and there doesn’t seem to be a nice way to force a 32 bit mode.
If you dont build with sandbox or harding it behaves better, but then of course you can’t validate or distribute it.
I have not had a single crash on linux, but I did compile it myself. If you did compile it, did you do the release or just clone the repo? it says in the readme that the repo tends to be very unstable and you should always build from the latest release.
This DAW has been in development for a long while but it's never been stable enough to be used seriously. I thought the project was dead until five minutes ago. Worth giving a try again, maybe.
Around a decade ago I used it for about a year, don't recall any stability issues on linux. So far no issues with my first few hours of use since reinstalling.
This is almost exactly what I've been dreaming of: a tracker with a linear composition timeline and automation/modulation effect guides.
Last year I even thought of just making my own, then got sidetracked. Hope this works as well as I dream.
Not sure how I've never come across this one before.
>Not sure how I've never come across this one before.
From what I can tell, he has never put any real effort into making it known, it is primarily a personal project.
I really need to carve out some time to look at this and compare to Renoise. The in-line representation of automation/effects look absolutely killer to me as I usually have to manage a lot of that in my head when working.
It's not well-known, but there's a free plugin for REAPER called Hackey-Trackey that's quite solid:
https://github.com/JoepVanlier/Hackey-Trackey
REAPER is available on Windows/Mac/Linux as well.
Does Logic Pro or Ableton Live not fit your bill? Not a pointed question, I’m genuinely curious. I don’t know enough about trackers mainly coming from a sequencer background.
I put an answer here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44505703
Ableton Live lives close to my heart, but I am not a fan of their inventory system for project assets (name is blanking on me, not the samples, but the... -- INSTRUMENT RACK!), it's not conducive to natural flow, hard to see, and even harder to tell minute differences in melodies and variations, and gets confusing the more layers you go. Logic Pro being the same.
FL Studios handles this far differently for better and infinitely far worse, but it gets closer to the 'tracker' feel.
Ableton (and the similar) all suffer from a minimalist point of view, while on the effect side Ableton (and Bitwig) reign supreme and can get incredibly complex in its sound design stage with stacking effects, its still minimal in the linear fashion that you just 'stack' effects on each other, the instrument rack and the melody system forces you to streamline and keep your project minimal in assets, doesn't allow for incredible variation, changes, etc, keeping your assets smaller and smaller to make it manageable.
Trackers on the other hand force you to always want to expand, to try new things, not usually on effects, but on advanced melodies, tighter control, and always adding just one more thing, to cut and mix and get funky and experimental with it. It's just the way the system is designed, its made to be controlled and expanded.
Ableton is made to be minimal, streamlined, a philosophy in their design and UX forces you to keep everything just... smaller, because if you grow to big, too experimental, make too many changes, have too many samples, too many melodies, sounds, variations, then it becomes impossible to do _anything_ without a cognitive overhead of 'fuck... where is that?' and 'damn, it sounds better, but if i do that I will have to rework _everything_ to make it fit, and i've already done that three times and I didn't even like it at the end last time' as your project assets grows in size.
Trackers are just easier to understand all the moving parts, and this is where FL Studios loop system for instruments is better and more akin to trackers, they bind multiple instruments to one 'loop' or melody.
Ableton (and the similar): Instruments are the primary grouping, melodies are bound to the instrument. You can only have 'one' instrument on any melody, if you want multiple instruments to take part in a melody, you have to manually align them in your composition, and duplicate. If you make any changes to that melody on an instrument, then you might need to rework the other 10 instruments that are supposed to work together, and then rework all those parts together in your composition.
FL Studios / Trackers: Loops are a primary grouping. Instruments are secondary. Every 'loop melody' contains a self-contained instrument rack, so you can have 15 instruments, 15 sounds _be_ your melody. Instead of melodies being from a single instrument by default, melodies (or loops) can be made up from 15 different instruments. Then, when you get to the composition, you can place that grouping together, and if you make changes, it affects all of the usage. You can then have multiple melodies (or loops) that are stacked on top of each other, adding variation.
Now where FL Studios diverges from trackers is 1) horizontal loop creation and 2) less control and organization. FL can get messy with the _amount_ of loops you have, duplication, etc. If you're not careful it can get confusing (but less so compared to Ableton with the same amount of melodies/loops/instruments).
Trackers, are, well trackers, meaning they are controlled, they are tracked. If you make a core loop (multiple instruments, sounds, in tandem as a 'set'), and then you need to create a variation, most of the popular ones, most used ones, ReNoise for example, will automatically create a sort of 5D Dimensional Chess kind of layout to help you easily see where the variations and changes occurred. It's kind of a tree-like structure of historical confirmed changes, what you deemed 'good enough' with a full collection of ancestral and descendant transformations 'that lived' long enought o be of note.
FL can get unwieldy with so many loops and variations, since they don't do that, its mostly just a list, and grouping being secondary. So, this philosophy forces you to experiment (duplicate an existing melody loop, try something new, don't like it? delete it). Whereas with trackers, you tend to experiment, have it always available, become a scratchpad of a million variations, always saved.
Sure, you could 'save' your project a thousand times with 'PROJECT 1 (2) - BETTER MELODY - SHORT BASS - TRIPPLETE VARIATION THING (SECOND VERSION) - WONKY TIMESCALE (3) (4) (481562342).ext' and import, but then you get lost, and ideas are lost forever, so its easier to try something for a split second, don't like it? delete it, losing that knowledge or attempt that could be worth something.
So, Trackers are great for experimentation, it's how you get things like Breakcore, or other highly experimental music types, sounds that have never existed before, songs that break convention, experimental sounds that are _yours_, that reward creativity and trying new things. Plus, real-estate wise, you can see (and use, and edit) a lot more of your instruments and melodies on the screen in a linear state, especially if you don't use a piano roll type system and just use the note labels (A, B, C#, D, etcetra etc &c). They're great to _synchronize_ sounds and sequences together. This is great for MIDI melodies, less so stellar for _sound samples_ that rely on waveforms for visuals since its not easy to align them (and see them) and how they fit against such a tight control system, and this is where composition layering is important.
Aside: Ableton for example is wonderful at dealing with _sound waveform_ samples/files, because you can visually see the waveform in line with the MIDI instruments, and you can use the automation guides and visually modify the sound itself with them, helping make them fit against a piano roll style system. But again, have a sample but want to experiment? need 20 different variations? have fun with that and the reworking...
But, trackers take their concept of tight spreadsheet-like control too far and extend it to the composition layering, where the composition is _sequenced_ just like a loop, so a loop in a loop, where the loops are the instruments with play/stop commands, and the actual placing and design of the different loops and melodies (and tracks) together. They require _a lot_ of work to create deep compositions, as stacking and modulating existing loops together is harder, and since most don't feature a composition timeline with 'track channels' like Ableton, or FL, or Reaper, etc, you end up looping... a lot, and where your loops could be experimental and fresh and interesting, the actual composition becomes focused on the individual loops, and not on the layering and actual composition of the song itself.
So, trackers: groups by sequenced loops (multiple, sounds, instruments in one), and then for composition they sequence the loops
Example: Loop 1 plays 5 times, Loop 2 starts playing on second repeat, Loop 1 begins fade out on the fourth repeat, Loop 3 fades in for for one play, Loop 4 takes over at full volume for 16 repeats, Loop 3 returns for 4 cycles on the 12th repeat of Loop 4, Loop 2 continues looping until END.
|>>> Of course, not written like that, they are sequenced, and it makes it hard to keep track and layer loops on each other. <<<|
But DAWs (Ableton/FL/BitWig/Reaper/Logic): group by 'lanes' in a visual format, drag and drop, layer 15 deep, or 1 deep, select all sounds playing on four lanes, and move them an inch over, automation guides as an overlay on the lanes, or under the lanes. This makes composition incredibly easy to experiment, to move things around, combine sounds.
So combining the two? Close to perfection. For melody design: extremely experimental and inspired creativity through tight control and automatic history/management on loops from tracker style loops. For composition - a relaxed sound design playground, a place to combine, shift, change, and easily modify sounds through effects and modulation. It's visual, its less rigid, it's playdoh, its malleable. It's a mosaic, or a collage of sounds. You cut the defined designs from magazines, and you warp and change them, not to change the core of the sound, but to make it into something new, to add effect variations or filters on defined sounds.
This became a bit more long winded than I had intended, but I hope it helps to understand, especially considering you mentioned coming from a sequencer background.
Neither have anything remotely similar to a tracker interface. The closest "current" DAW would be something like ReNoise, but it lacks a bunch of the ideas that Radium uses, like working graphically inside the tracker UI.
Not OP but none of those have native linux support.
Bitwig does and it works really well. pretty much a replacement for live.
Bitwig is great, ... and works on Linux (flatpak!)
I'll second Bitwig. It's not often I pay $400 for something and regret nothing, let alone software. But Bitwig has proven its worth.
Note to Bitwig curious people. It currently has a sale, so it's $300 (300 euro's if you're in Europe).
During Black Friday they also seem to have a sale.
The music software industry tends to have these sales in general around these times.
I assume you've seen ReNoise.
Yes, and it's phenomenal as a tracker, but doesn't have the automation guides or the horizontal linear composition editor.
A thread in 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9493536
Why are you downvoted? I like how we can find past thread about the same topic
Voting on HN is not a like, it is about getting the good posts which produce good discussion at the top of the thread so we do not have to scroll through pedantry and nitpicking to get to the content. These posts offering old content are handy things to have in a thread but rarely produce good discussion and the best place in a thread for them is at thee bottom of the worthwhile posts but before the garbage posts which is where a single downvote should get it in an ideal world but people probably just downvote such posts in an attempt to counter the upvotes such posts always get.
HN has been Eternal Septembered for years. The behaviors and tastes of the userbase have evolved in a different direction from what the guidelines prescribe, and there is no going back.
For others curious to see how it works/is used:
- Its manual (text and graphics): https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/documentation/
- A video tutorial (unofficial source): https://youtu.be/9-ttkNfVqgk?si=Xz0D_nV3Jt6fVUKO
> Scripting in [...] Scheme
Interesting, does anyone have experience with this? How well does this work?
https://github.com/kmatheussen/radium/blob/master/api/protos... gives some clues as to what can be done with Scheme/python. I never tried the scripting back when I used it years ago but it looks pretty useful, on my list of things to explore.
Cakewalk has been scripted with a LISP (CAL) from the early days, at least through the 90s. I see hints that it still is but not sure with all the changes from Bandlab.
Wasn't there even some kind or arpeggiator script writen in CAL? I think it was circa 1997 or so.
never tried Radium, but in Apple's Logic Pro you can write Javascript to do stuff to the MIDI as it comes in or goes out. I've found it quite useful. I once wrote a small script (at the request of another Logic user) that turned a monosynth that only supported "low note priority" into "last note priority." I'd be interested to see what Radium can do.
This could be what I am looking for...
But in general use it feels slow and very unstable. I tried on Windows, as that was 'recommended'
I tried this with some of my own OctaMED files, and the experience has been ... well ... not pleasant. None of them load.
Note: I used MED, OctaMED 4, OctaMED SoundStudio, Protracker, before moving to Renoise, Reaper and Bitwig. Also used Samplitude and Sonar for a long time. Amiga user with a large collection of modules and samples I created over the decades. I like trackers and hate pianorolls. I like the Korg Gadget interface, but want a tracker for MIDI.
>but want a tracker for MIDI.
Renoise is probably your best option for a midi tracker, Radium (and most trackers) are meant to be stand alone and they always seem to have issues or irritating limitations when it comes to midi.
Have you ever found anything which loads & plays *MED files properly? Specifically MMD2 format files from SoundStudio. I've also got loads I created back in the Amiga days, and I've still got SS itself running on an old laptop but would prefer something that could play/render them to WAV on macOS.
I had a Windows version of SoundStudio, but can now only find the demo. Lost my copy a long time ago, so not really. I use emulation, like WinUAE/FS-UAE for this.
Playback can also be done with something like uade, but terminal only.
For those asking how this is different than other non-tracker DAWs, the answer is basically "this is a tracker".
For those not familiar, trackers are a type of music composition software that's been around in one form or another since maybe the mid-80s. [1]
Used very heavily in the demoscene, chiptune, and adjacent parts of game development scenes.
The power of trackers is in the workflow, which provides an incredibly fast interface for writing music compare to other interfaces like piano rolls, staves and notes, multi-track DAWs and so forth. They take a bit to get to used to, but allow you to compose basically as fast as you can type notes. This speeds up iteration in testing musical ideas substantially. The interface concept also lends itself to a very compact representation of multiple tracks allowing a composer to see what's happening elsewhere in their composition.
It can feel a lot like programming in many ways, and like you are working a level "below" almost all other composition software and closer to the music and instruments.
The format lends itself very well to compositions in 4/4 time, but most tracker software lets you change the time signature, tempo, and other things so that very complex compositions with weird rhythmic patterns are not too hard to pull off.
There are dedicated tracker software for all kinds of musical workflows: sample-based, chiptune, NES, MIDI, VST, modular synths, etc. and tracker software exists on pretty much every platform and targeting nearly every output audio device you could possibly imagine.
There are literally millions of tracked pieces of music in the world, covering an innumerable number of genres.
Best of all, most tracking software is free, or incredibly cheap, well documented with videos showing you how to do things and thousands to hundreds of thousands of examples you can open to see how a particular musician accomplished something.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker
2 - Here's a tracker I particularly like who works in a lot of styles, especially tracks "Living, again and again" (both mixes), "Accidental Ray of Sun (Piano Mix)", "Aurielis (lf box mix)", and "Transitory"
https://soundcloud.com/elblanco5
According to a comment, he did most of this in a tracker called "Impulse Tracker" which is now replicated for modern systems as "Schism Tracker" - a completely sample based tool.
I use https://www.renoise.com/
It makes me happy to see s7 scheme making it into more programs -- It's a lovely tool for adding scriptability to any program
I'm familiar with Reaper but not this- can anyone who's used both give any color to the differences between this and a DAW like Reaper?
> Information to warez groups
Oh wow!
> Information to warez groups: Since the source is open, it should be simple to turn the demo into a fully featured version. Please let me know of any problems.
Makes sense as their name suggests that they are affiliated with one of the original warez crews, Radium, who were around in the late 90s. Or that the name is an homage to Radium, who did a lot of massive releases that these developers may have grown up on.
Yes, makes sense and I don't mind at all - was part of the same scene.
Oh wow, for someone who grew up with trackers and is now mostly a Reaper guy this sounds really interesting.
What on earth do they use LLVM for?
The Faust environment maybe?
Bummer about the reported Mac issues. Anybody have experience with it there?
I have Logic, so I will probably never devote the time to trying to fix this. But maybe if I understood the "tracker" interface it would be more appealing.
I would recommend trying sunvox if you want to dip into trackers. It is free on desktop and cheap on mobile and runs on most platforms. In fact, I have a 2012 iPad that runs it fine.
Trackers are just a different way of entering midi data and automation, literally typing in the values you want. They offer an unreal level of granular control, but at the expense of being able to visualize your melodies on a horizontal timeline.
Modern trackers are basically complete DAWs and sunvox is no exception. It contains a modular synthesis system that is amazing for sound design and creating your own reusable instruments and effect modules. I find myself writing less repetitive parts with a tracker, closer to what I would write if I was composing with staff paper.
I have a smaller tracker app that has similar problems on mac.
When you use the keyboard for navigation , holding down a key brings up the accent dialog thing. It also starts doing that “bllllllllllpppppp” noise like you’re doing something wrong.
If you try to add sandbox and harding the SDL timer seems to go nuts, loops too fast and crashes often.
Also, a lot of old tracker code uses 32 bit tricks that arm64 just doesn’t like and there doesn’t seem to be a nice way to force a 32 bit mode.
If you dont build with sandbox or harding it behaves better, but then of course you can’t validate or distribute it.
Thanks for the info!
Never heard of "harding" though.
“Hardening”[1] apologies.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/configuring-...
Ah, OK! Thanks.
I use it and love it. Worth the money!
... on which platform are you using it? It keeps crashing for me
I have not had a single crash on linux, but I did compile it myself. If you did compile it, did you do the release or just clone the repo? it says in the readme that the repo tends to be very unstable and you should always build from the latest release.
This DAW has been in development for a long while but it's never been stable enough to be used seriously. I thought the project was dead until five minutes ago. Worth giving a try again, maybe.
Around a decade ago I used it for about a year, don't recall any stability issues on linux. So far no issues with my first few hours of use since reinstalling.
How does this compare to Nodal ? https://nodalmusic.com
No comparison at all, but thanks! I've been looking for a good generative music tool for a while and this looks very interesting.
here is an alternative to nodal: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1727420/Midinous/
Hardly
the most popular one would be Renoise
https://youtu.be/dw4A97V8mhM
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