TW #32–#34 — Tracker Survey / New Tracker (Psibelius, Jason Diamond)
Not a survey of which trackers people used: TraxWeekly's two "Tracker Survey" notices asked readers to send feature wishes to Jason Diamond (diamond@deltanet.com, IRC nick mofochckn), who was writing "a totally new tracker for musicians", freeware, and in #34 he published his own feature list. No results were published in later issues (grep of the archive: the name appears only in #32–#34).
Key claims#
- psibelius's pitch: "many times, a tracker is built from the standpoint of a coder only, and thus creates inconveniences for the musician"; TW "embraced" the project and promised to publish results and credit contributors.
- Diamond's tracker wish list (#34): GUS and SB support; internal sampler; "ST3 style, no mouse needed" interface with all hotkeys user-definable and hotkey presets ("st3, ft2, mine, yours"); protected mode with "virtually unlimited sample sizes"; runs under Windows 95; extended ST3-style sample browser reading SMP/WAV/AU/AIF/IFF/VOC and zips as folders; definable colours; several songs loaded at once with cut and paste between them; a Linux port.
- A new, deliberately ProTracker-incompatible format ("time that we get out of the 80's and go beyond the protracker command set" — so not MTM/S3M/XM either): exact tick control over when a command happens, definable notes per "octave", more than one command per event, stereo samples, instruments with more than one sample, unlimited orders/patterns/tracks/instruments, variable-length tracks, tracks assignable to patterns "no more block copying", info fields.
- "It'll be a while, though, so don't stop tracking!" — whether it was ever released is not recorded in the archive.
Relevance#
A snapshot of what musicians on #trax wanted in late 1995, weeks before impulse-tracker 1.00 (released 1995-12-25; source: s-tracker-history-notes) delivered several of the same items (multi-sample instruments, an ST3-style interface). Useful for tracker-scene-history and as a footnote on tracker.