Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video]

#51

Post by the_other » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 11:12 AM UTC

pierrec wrote: post #15

Trackers are underrated. In a way, I'm a bit sad that most of the time I see them mentioned, it seems to be in a historical context. Modern production tools have mostly settled on the combination of pianoroll, automation curves, and visual placement of samples on the project timeline. That's great for some types of music, but becomes really awkward in other cases. As a basic example, making a breakbeat sequence makes…

I'm using Elektron instruments these days. They're very similar to trackers, but swap the column view for fixed, hardware step and track select buttons. Really tactile, very fast and fun.

Re: Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video]

#52

Post by sagamusix » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 11:13 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #39

Fun fact, VLC and ffmpeg have fantastic support for most classic tracker formats. This opens up literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of songs to listeners. I really wish modern media servers (e.g. Plex) that are built on ffmpeg would support tracker formats since it's basically "free" for them. Also modern musicians working with modern trackers like Renoise work very heavily with VSTi instead of just sampl…

Caution: VLC uses libmodplug on Windows (and probably macOS), which is barely maintained these days and plays many modules incorrectly. Many Linux distributions replace libmodplug with an emulation layer that lets libopenmpt do the actual decoding and playback, though, so module playback through VLC is much more accurate on those platforms.

Disclaimer: I'm developing OpenMPT and libopenmpt.

Re: Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video]

#53

Post by hnlmorg » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 11:27 AM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #43

laumars wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not taking anything away from trackers but DAWs are a lot easier to grok for the average musician. Take your breakbeat example, most DAWs also have a drum machine style layout which allows you to arrange samples in a more intuitive way than with a piano roll while still offering a visual layout that means something to the average musician. In fact ironically both the piano roll and drum machine layouts are older than…

The piano roll is not really "intuitive to the average musician", though. Most musicians would rather use ordinary sheet music notation, which was also supported in some trackers (like OctaMED Pro).

While that's true for some, I think you're overestimating the number of musicians that can read sheet music or underestimating the number of genres out there made up of self-taught musicians.

Quite frankly, if the piano roll was really that counter-intuitive as you make out, then it wouldn't be the norm in DAWs because the creative folk would naturally prefer to use Trackers or sheet music.

Re: Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video]

#54

Post by usrusr » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 11:52 AM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #45

usrusr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I missed in buzz was a way to apply tracker commands (shift, reverse, transpose and so on) to patterns, because I always toyed with the synths, hardly ever using samples at all (where tracker commands are traditionally applied to). I eventually dropped out of my music dabbling phase endlessly failing at building a parser/interpreter/editor for a text-based notation syntax (as an alternative to the spreadsheet of…

> add multiple levels of "notation controlling notation" for a deliberately quirky macro language Would something like Supercollider fit the deal there?

Quite possible that all or at least most of those are in there somewhere as a tiny little feature subset, I've never used it.

But at least example screenshots seem to be quite eager to dive down to the synthesis level. I'm sure that you could use it to just output midi events but the same could be said about e.g. Python or Java or Rust and I wouldn't call those notation syntax either. It would have been an attempt to retain as much of established tracker ergonomics as possible while abandoning the spreadsheet-lines-as-time metaphor.

Re: Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video]

#55

Post by hnlmorg » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 11:53 AM UTC

Good content. Covers the Amiga heavily, then naturally the PC. But it felt like Atari was massively glossed over. Sure they mentioned MIDI and Cubase, and sure the Amiga was a more powerful machine. However Atari was used heavily for music production as well and there were plenty of trackers available for that too.

Re: Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video]

#56

Post by dharma1 » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 11:59 AM UTC

Love to see this here, a very well researched video!

It was an awesome scene, I used to put out jungle and trip hop tracks on Mono211/Monotonik/Voodoo and a couple of other mod labels back in the day.

Everything was free, in an era where studio time and studio equipment was really expensive it was mind-blowing to be able to do it with just a PC, all in software. Lots of friendly competition between artists and the file format was such that you could open a mod and see exactly how it was put together, and reuse the samples if you wanted to. Gave birth to many people's careers in music and software!

Re: Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video]

#57

Post by motogpjimbo » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 12:07 PM UTC

kleiba wrote: post #3

In my younger days, I used to spend hours and hours playing with trackers on the Commodore Amiga. Over the years, I've always toyed with the idea of firing one up again but the one thing that's keeping me from doing that is the lack of sample banks. Admittedly, I've never spent too much time looking into it, so I might be wrong (I actually kind of hope it), but it seems to me that getting hold of a tracker program is…

Maybe not quite what you're after, but Bassoon Tracker is written in Javascript, runs in a webpage without installation and has access to thousands of mod files in modarchive and modules.pl, including their samples:

https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/

Re: Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video]

#58

Post by nuclx » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 3:42 PM UTC

dharma1 wrote: post #56

Love to see this here, a very well researched video! It was an awesome scene, I used to put out jungle and trip hop tracks on Mono211/Monotonik/Voodoo and a couple of other mod labels back in the day. Everything was free, in an era where studio time and studio equipment was really expensive it was mind-blowing to be able to do it with just a PC, all in software. Lots of friendly competition between artists and the fi…

Mono211 was such a quality netlabel.

I used to download all tracks they (and other labels such as TDR) released back in the days and listen to them while learning to code.

This shaped my taste in music as the only other influence in this pre-Kazaa era were rather boring mainstream radio broadcasts and MTV.

It felt like wizardry and names like distance, dune, falcon or mortimer twang still give me shivers.

Re: Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video]

#59

Post by wernsey » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

kleiba wrote: post #3

In my younger days, I used to spend hours and hours playing with trackers on the Commodore Amiga. Over the years, I've always toyed with the idea of firing one up again but the one thing that's keeping me from doing that is the lack of sample banks. Admittedly, I've never spent too much time looking into it, so I might be wrong (I actually kind of hope it), but it seems to me that getting hold of a tracker program is…

The MilkyTracker homepage's Downloads section has some links to sample archives in torrent form that I looked at last time I played with trackers.

https://milkytracker.org/downloads/

Re: Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video]

#60

Post by bane » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 11:41 PM UTC

sagamusix wrote: post #52

bane wrote: post #39

Fun fact, VLC and ffmpeg have fantastic support for most classic tracker formats. This opens up literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of songs to listeners. I really wish modern media servers (e.g. Plex) that are built on ffmpeg would support tracker formats since it's basically "free" for them. Also modern musicians working with modern trackers like Renoise work very heavily with VSTi instead of just sampl…

Caution: VLC uses libmodplug on Windows (and probably macOS), which is barely maintained these days and plays many modules incorrectly. Many Linux distributions replace libmodplug with an emulation layer that lets libopenmpt do the actual decoding and playback, though, so module playback through VLC is much more accurate on those platforms. Disclaimer: I'm developing OpenMPT and libopenmpt.

Thanks so much for the info! OpenMPT/libopenmpt has hands down the best rendering of these classic formats that I'm aware of. It's helped me recover "lost" songs many times.

Thank you so much for the great work!