Talk:Music tracker

About noisetracker
Was noisetracker shareware? I can't remember anything about that... Should it be changed to freeware?

Accourding to this website: http://www.exotica.org.uk/info/trackerhistory/SoundTrackerHistory1.05.txt, the copyright of NoiseTracker was SOLD to "the EAS company" so I believe there is a great chance it was. Someone I know also told me that before ProTracker was released, you had to pay for a Tracker.

-Fredrik "Eagle" Larsson

The german tracker page
Hey, look at the german wikipedia tracker page. It looks much better. Perhaps someone could translate it to english and include it here? http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker_(Musik)

Factual and Subjective Problems
In addition to the subjectivity issue mentioned above, there seem to be a number of factual problems with this article. Issues I can immediately spot are:


 * MIDI is a communications standard, not a method of reproducing or synthesizing sound.
 * The discussion of PC soundcards confuses software mixdown and hardware mixdown of multiple channels of sound down to stereo output. Problems with the first are generally associated with performance capacity of the general computing hardware, the second with the performance capacity of the sound card.

Since I'm not knowledgeable concerning the vanity demo scene described here, I'm not entirely sure how Tracker software is anything more than a subclass of general music sequencing software (the music sequencer article refers back to the tracker article, but the tracker article does not refer to the music sequencer article). --Superfami

Game Boy Advance: tracker music vs. built-in tone generators
"the Game Boy Advance has the processing power to support tracker music, and the quality is vastly superior to the built-in tone generators" They aren't just tone generators. They are 2 square pulsewave channels, 1 custom wave channel (using up to 2 samples at a time, depending on the software) and 1 noise channel. Comparing the GBA-only PCM channels to just "the built-in tone generators" (2 out of 4 channels) just doesn't make sense to me.

As well as saying the quality is better on GBA for tracker music than for hardware-synthesized music. We're talking analog output against so-so digital output! It ultimately depends on what one thinks 'quality' is, but I just think this sentence is just too long.

I would recommend: "the Game Boy Advance has the processing power to support tracker music."

Early PC MOD players and Sound Blaster info
Some information on early sound blaster cards:


 * Sound Blaster 1 supported 8bit playback in mono, microphone in, headphone out, line out also had a small onboard amp and volume controller on the face of the board.
 * Sound Blaster 1.5 in addition to everything the original card had this version was larger in size and included a line-in port.
 * Sound Blaster pro was the first 16bit stereo card.

Early mod programs for PC:


 * Modedit was the first MOD player for the PC, it supported standard MOD playback although effects did not work while playing inside Modedit, you could still place the effects in and they would be triggered on different players that supported effects.

ModEdit can be downloaded here: http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/programs/ModEdit/


 * DMP (Dual Module Player) - was one of the first multi module player for PC. Mod's could also be played via the PC speaker. Due to it's constant updating it became very popular for DOS.


 * Fast tracker 2 it should be noted was also the first tracker to support midi.


 * Screamtracker 3, it should be noted that it only supported 8bit samples.