The PC tracker scene 1995–98, as it saw itself

What traxweekly's writers said about where tracking came from, how music moved around, who judged it and where it was going. This is the scene's own narrative, mostly written by teenagers in an afternoon; for checked release dates of the trackers see s-tracker-history-notes and the tool pages (protracker, scream-tracker-3, fasttracker-2, impulse-tracker).

Origins, told from #trax#

• Ganja Man's "potted history" (July 1996): the C64 → copy protection turns traders into crackers → cracktros grow text, then music → "the demo scene was born"; the same people move to Amiga and Atari ST, "both had support for four channels of SAMPLED sound … MODs were born"; at first they "continued to write tunes very similar to those they had on the C64, what we now know as 'chip' tunes", then discovered they "could actually have any instrument they wanted"; on the PC future-crew and renaissance wrote demos and "the tracking scene moved primarily to the PC" — 8 or 16 channels "pre-GUS infiltration". He also passes on the legend that gabber was born from a corrupted OctaMED file with 909 samples (source: s-tw064-potted-tracking-history).
• Behemoth's founding myth is the same in one sentence: "when the first track was written way back on the C64 by some unknown, chances were that person didn't spread it around too much or tried to sell it" (source: s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate).
• How #trax itself began, per Jeremy Rice (1997): "the #coders people wanted all the musicians to stop flooding the channel with music talk and [they] created #trax"; khyron was there (source: s-tw111-interview-khyron). perisoft found it by channel-hopping (#3dland → #gfx → #coders → #trax) in 1994, big-jim through a UK PC magazine article about #coders in August 1994 (sources: s-tw011-interview-perisoft, s-tw013-interview-big-jim). By October 1995 it was "more of a place to hang out" than a tracking channel (luv-kohli) (source: s-tw031-interview-luv-kohli).

How people started, 1993–95 (from the interviews)#

• Beginner ladders. Composer 669 → MultiTracker → ST3 (stalker, from December 1993) (source: s-tw004-interview-stalker); MODEDIT 2.0 with ripped Amiga samples → MultiTracker (thehacker, from August 1993) (source: s-tw005-interview-thehacker); KingMod → ModEdit → ST3 (beaner, 1994) (source: s-tw011-interview-beaner); ModEdit/KingMod → ST3 → FT2 (claim) (source: s-tw015-interview-claim); Whacker Tracker (ryan-cramer) (source: s-tw007-interview-ryan-cramer); Amiga AudioMaster III / ProTracker rules → Extreme's Tracker / FT2 (leinad) (source: s-tw002-interview-leinad). Other pre-ST3 tools in use: Scream Tracker 2.23, ModEdit 1.0/2.0, MMEDIT, X-Tracker (D-Lusion), MultiTracker/MTM, Tetra Compositor (Bram Graveland, 1993), Whacker Tracker (1992), TCB Tracker (Atari ST), Music Construction Set (C64), ModPlay with home-built D/A converters (sources: s-tw042-interview-balrog, s-tw052-interview-daedalus, s-tw054-interview-scirocco, s-tw054-interview-quantam-porcupine, s-tw052-interview-ganja-man, s-tw055-interview-clef, s-tw041-interview-shawnm).
• How people found groups. BBSs — The Sun State Fun BBS (Stalker → OTM), The Sound Barrier in New York (TheHacker → KLF; Ryan Cramer → renaissance, calling long-distance) (sources: s-tw004-interview-stalker, s-tw005-interview-thehacker, s-tw007-interview-ryan-cramer); master-of-darkness came in via b0bby of Mazurka's "BIGTIME music board in Toronto" and the Mazurka disk (December 1994) (source: s-tw027-faces-in-the-crowd-master-of-darkness). populus's ISP cost rose from C$30 to C$51 a month for 40 hours (source: s-tw016-interview-populus).
• Author-prefixed filenames were a 1995 convention: fdn-, V-, fred-, l-, ZNC- (sources: s-tw030-interview-ender, s-tw031-interview-vicious, s-tw031-interview-fred, s-tw035-interview-loki).
• Game commissions. Scene musicians working on games in 1995: nemesis (Red Sector), Stalker (a PC/3DO/Jaguar title), Leinad (MAGE's Iron Plague), C.C.Catch (Epic MegaGames) (sources: s-tw004-interview-nemesis, s-tw004-interview-stalker, s-tw002-interview-leinad); mesonyx got Xixit by begging in #coders (source: s-tw028-faces-in-the-crowd-mesonyx). See commercial-tracking.

How music moved: CD-ROM → BBS → Internet#

• Popcorn (May 1995): .MODs first met on a Night Owl shareware CD-ROM, played through a PC speaker on a 286; then a modem and a Gravis Ultrasound; musicdisks (Chaotic Mind, Nothing On) on a local BBS; Internet from December 1994 and 200 MB of modules by May 1995. The addresses of the day: ftp.mpoli.fi/starport/music, kosmic.wit.com/kosmic/songs (kosmic's complete output), the Aminet mirror netnet2.netnet.net/pub/aminet/mods (already with a /chip directory), and ftp.cdrom.com/pub/demos/music/ with disks/classic and songs/ (source: s-tw011-how-to-enhance-your-music-collection).
• The same sequence in Behemoth's words: sharing "with the BBS, then IRC, then FTP, then WWW" (source: s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate).
• Volume by January 1996: "over 30 megabytes of music are uploaded every two weeks, on average" to hornet's archive, which is why it rated everything (source: s-tw044-hornet-ratings).
• Players in March 1996: Cubic Player, CapaMod, Inertia Player (GLX or ModPlay 2.19a on an 8088); listeners studied songs by muting channels and playing with panning (source: s-tw051-how-to-listen-to-tracked-music).
• Kosmic's whole distribution relied on its FTP site by July 1995 — "bbses suck now"; defiance had two sites (source: s-tw019-interview-quarex). balrog's mirrors in January 1996: ftp.cdrom.com, ftp.arosnet.se, kosmic.wit.com, ftp.germany.eu.net (source: s-tw042-interview-balrog). ST3 was found on AOL, and MODs came bundled with a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 (source: s-tw054-interview-quantam-porcupine). XDCC on #trax put ultrabeat's Lucid in 60–70 hands overnight (April 1996) (source: s-tw054-interview-injekted-and-subhuman).
• Grievances: u4ia stopped releasing in 1994 partly because CD-ROM sellers were "whipping stuff off ftp sites and selling it" and he got 30–40 demanding e-mails a day; his 1996 F8 comeback was a deliberate hype experiment on obscure FTP sites (source: s-tw067-interview-u4ia); liam-the-lemming's early uploads to ftp.brad.ac.uk spread against his wishes (source: s-tw066-interview-liam-the-lemming).
• Live to the net: mental-floss's POTS RealAudio concert, 24 January 1998, had about 120 online listeners (source: s-tw119-interview-mental-floss; see live-tracking).
• MP3 arrives: in December 1997 Blayd Zro proposed releasing songs as MP3 to stop sample and pattern ripping; Jesper Pedersen answered that seeing the patterns — soloing channels "to admire it … to learn" — is what makes tracked music special (source: s-tw118-tracking-the-format).

• Local against online, as a Vancouver-area DJ put it in January 1996: the local scene is small and "everyone knows everyone" at about the same level, while the Internet holds "masses of wicked stuff and masses of crap" — the trade the move online made (acidfrog of Radiance; source: s-tw044-interview-acidfrog).

Who judged: ratings and compos#

• Hornet's Demonews gave stars in the newsletter and in the archive's 00index files; fewer than 10 songs in thousands got five stars; raters were "other musicians and composers"; Light of Kosmic (January 1996) argued the stars crushed newcomers, Hornet that they were "a service … completely subjective" (source: s-tw044-hornet-ratings).
• The IRC compo: the 20-minute-chip-compo ran weekly from September 1995 (20 KB, 4 channels, a shared sample pack, 20 minutes), had 22–23 contestants per round by October, stopped after Christmas 1995 amid complaints about a flood of bad chiptunes, and returned bi-weekly in March 1996 (source: s-tw032-20-minute-chip-compo). See compos for the format and the feedback culture around it.
• The musicians' verdicts on the stars: kal-zakath — a *** rating "hardly guarantees that people will give it a listen", people FTP only big names (source: s-tw026-faces-in-the-crowd-intro); smeghead — "four guys voting … ain't exactly a precise measurement", though one star is right 90 % of the time (source: s-tw029-faces-in-the-crowd-smeghead); Populus — the new Demonews "has no style anymore" (source: s-tw016-interview-populus). More on hornet.
• Blackwolf's 1996 map of the scene's "teams": USA, Finland ("the Finnish World Domination"), Canada, UK, Germany, France, Greece, Australia, the Netherlands (source: s-tw065-tracking-as-an-olympic-sport).

The scene's self-image, 1995–97#

• Spring 1995. Music still filed as "computer music"/"tracker music" (nemesis); PC demos "outclassed by Amiga demos" and spoiled by animations (Nemesis); nothing had topped Second Reality and games were overtaking demos (Ryan Cramer); "1205473109571 little groups" and free distribution as the point (Claim); "a lot of releases … a lot of crap in it" but a rising level (blaze-runner) (sources: s-tw004-interview-nemesis, s-tw007-interview-ryan-cramer, s-tw015-interview-claim, s-tw008-interview-blaze-runner). renaissance was "not dead … serious coma" — coders Daredevil and Starscream inactive, C.C.Catch writing for Epic MegaGames, Ryan Cramer moving to Iguana "once Renaissance sort of got out of the demoscene" (sources: s-tw004-interview-nemesis, s-tw007-interview-ryan-cramer).
• The techno flood. First complained about by Populus in June 1995 (source: s-tw016-interview-populus); de Brienne of esper-division in October 1995: "50% of what's tracked out there basically sucks" because people start "without any musical background just because it seems easy" (source: s-tw029-faces-in-the-crowd-esper-division). Shawn (January 1996): the Internet, not the formats, multiplied good and bad music alike, and 16-bit/44 kHz will matter less than the jump from 4 to 16 channels did (source: s-tw041-interview-shawnm). vegas (1996): more jazz/symphonic composers, demo-techno waning (source: s-tw062-interview-vegas).
• Newcomers and elitism. "Hi, I'm new" got you kicked off #trax; big names ignored beginners; aim-higher was founded in response (source: s-tw027-faces-in-the-crowd-master-of-darkness); maelcum and quarex on admission standards versus "moronic affirmative action" (source: s-tw019-interview-quarex); #trax "too political" (source: s-tw029-faces-in-the-crowd-esper-division). From the newcomers' side: paganus's analysis of hero-worship, ender's and Luv Kohli's experiences (an AOL ban), Master of Darkness's confession of having bugged Necros and Basehead (sources: s-tw030-interview-paganus, s-tw030-interview-ender, s-tw031-interview-luv-kohli). daedalus: newcomers chase "Elite" status over quality; Balrog: newbies should stop releasing every song (sources: s-tw052-interview-daedalus, s-tw042-interview-balrog).
• Ages. Mesonyx 15, Quarex 16 — "the average age in the PC scene is getting lower and lower" (sources: s-tw028-faces-in-the-crowd-mesonyx, s-tw019-interview-quarex); Master of Darkness put the average composer at "about 15-26", but deus-ex was 30 and DefeX older (sources: s-tw032-fitc-complaints, s-tw034-interview-deus-ex).
• Rising standards. blackwolf — "Something I write now might rock the scene a year ago, but only be mediocre now"; zalt — winning tunes are "more like 'real' music now" (sources: s-tw040-interview-blackwolf, s-tw040-interview-zalt).
• Europe versus North America. Zalt (December 1995): Scandinavia has many great (and many bad) trackers and a far larger demoscene, the USA a few unique ones; Blackwolf: Imphobia #11's US-bashing "half right" (demos), North American music "more enjoyable", NAID '96 expected to deliver, "the last underground music scene where you can get things free" (sources: s-tw040-interview-zalt, s-tw040-interview-blackwolf). scirocco and zinc (April 1996): the gulf — "Those Euroz act like snobs sometimes to us NA's" (source: s-tw054-interview-scirocco). Kal Zakath (1996): "in finland or sweden … the demoscene is bigger than it is here in the us" (source: s-tw060-interview-rage).
• Mainstream notice. The Wired article on the demoscene, mid-1995, was "a start" (lord-pegasus) (source: s-tw018-interview-lord-pegasus).
• Growth and forecasts. ryan-sprott (1996) expected "a big population boom" of trackers, most without staying power; Vegas: "flooded with musicians" and short of coders and artists; fisherman: "the skilled musicians will prevail"; Khyron (1997): more good and far more bad music (sources: s-tw063-interview-ryan-sprott, s-tw062-interview-vegas, s-tw060-interview-fisherman, s-tw111-interview-khyron). mikmak (June 1997): DOS forgotten within two years, "people will be releasing mp3 (mp4?) music instead of mods", demos on DirectX/OpenGL and 3D hardware (source: s-tw103-interview-mikmak).
• Parties as seen by one traveller (liam-the-lemming): The Party 5 (guitar tunes the trend; "Organizing? BLAH") and NAID '96 (lyrics the trend) (source: s-tw066-interview-liam-the-lemming; see compos).

Regions (1995–97)#

• Toronto. Mazurka (head: b0b, also of the earlier BBS group Atomic), the BBSes "bobby's World" ("Dedicated to Helping New Composers"), "the twisted tower" and Sight & Sound; aim-higher (Master of Darkness, Atlantic, Dynamic Harmony, Paganus, vicious; disks "Foundation" and "Unification", October 1995, XM/S3M/MTM); V.S.L (Vicious, from about April 1995, 14 members; pariah); DDT (folded); Chill Productions (Deus Ex, with a Netherlands HQ); Radical Rhythms ("chapter 8" disk); Da Club BBS — and the dance-versus-demo-music prejudice, which Master of Darkness blamed on FT2's sound quality bringing a wave of easy dance tunes (sources: s-tw030-interview-paganus, s-tw031-interview-vicious, s-tw034-interview-deus-ex, s-tw043-interview-pariah).
• Elsewhere in North America, 1995. Foundation (Albany NY, demo group), Empyrean (Virginia, two brothers, BBS distribution and the Freedom data CD), iNK (Kansas artist group starting demos), SPiCE / Happy Fetus Records (dj_moses), Radiance (British Columbia), esper-division (Montreal), NOISE (Quebec) (sources: s-tw030-interview-ender, s-tw031-interview-luv-kohli, s-tw032-fitc-complaints, s-tw031-interview-fred, s-tw035-interview-loki, s-tw029-faces-in-the-crowd-esper-division, s-tw041-interview-shawnm).
• Greece. amusic: OCT, an Athens Amiga group; a demo party in early 1995 and a big one planned for October 1995 (source: s-tw017-interview-amusic).
• Australia. "Growing fast" — Firelight, CB, Jedi, oz95 upcoming in August 1995 (jase) (source: s-tw022-interview-jase); Oz96 in Sydney, "Australia's first demo party", with a 16k music compo won by clef; Catch 22 (sources: s-tw041-interview-mick-rippon, s-tw055-interview-clef). The "Thai tracking scene" of 1996 was two Australians (source: s-tw060-interview-fisherman).
• UK. lok founded because no British groups were known (source: s-tw052-interview-ganja-man).
• Iceland. Mesonyx "not in contact with any scene" (source: s-tw028-faces-in-the-crowd-mesonyx).
• Russia. vadimvs of Simbirsk, ftp.bmsu.simbirsk.su (source: s-tw050-interview-vadimvs).
• Finland and Germany. "Everyone tries to make the big breakthrough" (rage) (source: s-tw060-interview-rage); the German scene of 1997 "sucks … the artware scene is to public" (Cosmic/RR) (source: s-tw090-interview-cosmic).

What musicians wanted from a tracker (late 1995)#

Jason Diamond's freeware-tracker wish list, collected through TraxWeekly's "Tracker Survey": an ST3-style keyboard-driven interface with user-definable hotkeys and presets for ST3/FT2, protected-mode "virtually unlimited" samples, Windows 95 and Linux, a sample browser that reads zips as folders, several songs open at once — and a new format with exact tick control of commands, several commands per event, stereo samples, multi-sample instruments and variable-length tracks (source: s-tw032-tracker-survey). impulse-tracker 1.00 shipped on 1995-12-25 with several of these (source: s-tracker-history-notes); the survey tracker itself never reappears in the archive.

Where it was going: the 1997–98 debates#

• Maz's list of what had been "revolutionary": Second Reality (1993), fasttracker-2's 16-bit samples and envelopes (1995), IT's NNAs (1996), MOD4WIN's native GUS support under NT (1996) — against ReBirth, DirectX plug-ins and sample-RAM wavetable cards outside the scene; Gravis had closed its soundcard division (source: s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate).
• The anonymous "perfect artform" piece (May 1997) names the scene's structural problem: "most of our music is heard by other musicians, and I think it's this that stops the scene growing" (source: s-tw099-why-tracking-is-the-perfect-artform).
• Whether tracked music could be sold or performed — Behemoth's five reasons and the replies — is on commercial-tracking and live-tracking.
• What the next decade did with the answer: scene-trained trackers took the music outward. goto80 released his first demoscene music in 1993 at the age of twelve and "at the turn of the millennium … was one of the first to bring chipmusic to a wider audience", then wrote the 2010 Lund thesis on chipmusic's methods and motivations — the scene's own historiography beginning inside it (source: s-wikipedia-goto80; biography on goto80).

Prehistory on the C64: Soundmonitor and the composer-programmers (1985–1988)#

• 1985: chris-huelsbeck writes his Musicmaster driver and composes in hex; February 1986 his shades wins the 64er contest; summer 1986 he writes soundmonitor as an editor for it, published as a type-in listing in 64'er 10/1986 — "the most popular Commodore 64 music editor in Europe of the late 1980s" (sources: s-vgmpf-chris-huelsbeck, s-64er-soundmonitor-article, s-vgmpf-soundmonitor-tfmx).
• April 1987: the scene's Rockmonitor adds samples; the sound "grew old, as many arrangers used the same instruments" and its songs "were always over 10 KB", so programmers modified the driver and "composers learned programming their own drivers" (source: s-vgmpf-soundmonitor-tfmx).
• Who started in it: jeroen-tel, Barry Leitch, Jason Page and Jonathan Dunn before their game careers; matt-gray, Georg Brandt, Ramiro Vaca, Peter Clarke and others on games; the three founders of maniacs-of-noise all arranged in Soundmonitor until charles-deenen wrote their own driver in 1987; Gray moved from Soundmonitor and "the Ariston driver" to his own player at codemasters' urging in late 1986 (sources: s-vgmpf-soundmonitor-tfmx, s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise, s-vgmpf-matt-gray, s-c64com-matt-gray-interview).
• 1988: Hülsbeck's tfmx adds a per-note script language; the format's editor stayed private and the scene wrote its own (Mastercomposer, Timecomposer, 1989–90) (source: s-vgmpf-soundmonitor-tfmx). On the lineage to the Amiga: "the Trackers on the Amiga used a similar format and they may have been inspired by my earlier tools" — Hülsbeck's own, hedged claim (source: s-emuwiki-huelsbeck-interview).

• Why the private players, from one of the people who wrote one: in 1987 "almost everyone was using a public domain editor called SoundMonitor", but "there was also an enormous prestige in using one's own player. At that time, I was among just two or three people in Denmark that could do this" (JCH, the other named being johannes-bjerregaard). Sounds from the shared tools went "trite" and marked the groups "that didn't have access to unique music in special players" — status, not convenience, is what produced the 1987–89 wave of private drivers. The same memoir shows how fast a composer moved between groups in that market: New Men → Galaxy (late 1987) → 2000 A.D. (February 1988) → INXS → Jewels (April 1988) → Wizax (June) → Dominators (August 1988) → Channel 42's new C64 division (1989) (source: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles).
• Where the C64 line parts from the Amiga line: JCH designed his editor in 1988 wanting "tracks to follow each other so that multiple voices could be compared easily", and rejected SoundTracker's model in which the voices are "fused together in the same pattern" — his three voices run side by side with independent sequences of any size. That difference, not the note grid, is what separates the C64 editors from the Amiga/PC tracker family, and it survives in cheesecutter and sid-factory-ii (orderlist; source: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles).

The C64 editors and players, 1983–1992 (SIDwave's memoir + SIDId's dates)#

• Before Soundmonitor: Master Composer (Paul Kleimeyer, Access, 1983 — a note-sheet editor, BOGG's Album 1/2 "the first music disk ever"), the Companion to the Commodore 64 type-in driver (1984), Electrosound (Orpheus, 1985 — a grid of dots per voice), SIDPLAYER from Compute!'s Gazette (Yip of Purebyte), MicroRhythm (1986, "essentially a drum-machine") (sources: s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid, s-sidid-player-list).
• 1986: soundmonitor — "now everybody can make music!"; Crack's Best with 50+ Soundmonitor tunes within months; the first sceners composing in Hubbard's ripped player (Red/Jeroen Kimmel). 1987: laxity, johannes-bjerregaard and Kim Jensen write their own routines; Ubik's Musik (Dave Korn, Firebird — "the first DUR editor"), the Ariston editor (Ian Crabtree) and rockmonitor (Dutch USA-Team); TMC's first MoN player. 1988: the Ariston Music Editor, Soedesoft's editor ("spread only to the elite"), future-composer (Finnish Gold, on the MoN player — "the largest share of unknown composer tunes are made with this"), Finnish Gold's WEMUSIC editor; Hülsbeck's tfmx. 1989–90: JCH's editor ("the gift to '90s, what Hülsbeck was to '80s"), Mastercomposer and Timecomposer for TFMX, Audiomaster on Bjerregaard's player. 1992: Noise-Mon V2 (sources: s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid, s-sidid-player-list).
• "It was always the same with SID business… 'THE EDITOR!!!', everybody is screaming for a magical tool that will make cool music, but it never arrives. You have to learn and code it yourself." The commercial C64 music business "died out in 1993, or perhaps even in 1990"; the scene kept inventing editors and tricks until PlaySID (1991) → SIDPLAY → goattracker (2002) "creates a new kind of composer", and sid-wizard brings a native editor with MIDI (source: s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid).
• The scene's own verdict on Soundmonitor: "not a scene release at all", kept on CSDb "due to its massive impact" (source: s-csdb-soundmonitor-and-shades); de.wikipedia's "origin of the tracker software later popular on Amiga and PC" is unsourced (unverified; source: s-soundmonitor-lineage-wikis).

Scene drivers in their own source (2026-08-30)#

Four scene-written players survive as Turbo Assembler sources in the realdmx collection: Johannes Bjerregaard's (1989, bjerregaard-player), Red's "Red's music player (C) 1989 J.Kimmel" (jeroen-kimmel), Adam Bulka's "SOUND ROUTINE f 4.1.0" for FAME (dated 27.07.1988, 2.29 pm, with German comments — and a hard restart) and François Prijt's "zong player" v1/v2 for Audial Arts (1991, Dutch comments, a manual implied by "pak handleiding!"). They confirm SIDwave's picture of 1987–91 — scene coders writing their own routines with Hubbard-style drums and MoN-style tables — and add what the memoir does not: gate lengths in the instrument, staggered per-voice sequencing, accelerating pulse sweeps (sources: s-realdmx-bjerregaard-player, s-realdmx-fredgray-kimmel-whittaker, s-realdmx-audial-arts-fame-players).

The C64 editor scene in 2002 (SIDin)#

• The comp.sys.cbm argument of June 2002 over Steve Judd's iseq — horizontal note rows, composing "by ear" by single-stepping, CIA-timer tempos, no built-in effects — against the tracker camp's goattracker and OdinTracker, DMC-style keys and JCH-style keysets: Judd's "It's not 1990 anymore; why should I limit myself to yet another clone of a 10-15 year old music program/system?" versus Blackspawn's "I could never imagine using a system like yours"; Anders Carlsson's complaint that C64 editors were "hacks by demo groups" without documentation, SIDwinder excepted (source: s-sidin01-iseq).
• The same year lasse-oorni explained his own lineage — "Music driver, SadoTracker, Goattrk and Ninjatrk", each rewritten "for memory or speed (rastertime) gain" — and why GoatTracker's Amiga/PC-style patterns cost memory (source: s-sidin02-cadaver-interview); on the Plus/4 side, luca-carrafiello composed on a converted future-composer and then on Taki's SIDwinder as ported by TLC for the SIDcard (source: s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview).

The native C64 editors in 2004–05, per two SIDin interviews#

• jan-harries: "The editors have definitely improved over the years"; notation-based editors "are aged (1982–1986)"; "JCH and SDI (SID Duzz It, from SHAPE) are the best ones I've seen, and I now only use SDI"; Cybertracker from NoName is "a very good tracker for beginners" because it shows ADSR and filters graphically. And on his own move to the Amiga and PC: "I proved to be a much better composer on the PC/Amiga than on the C64! This was due to the fact that the TRACKER was invented by Karsten Obarski in 1987" (source: s-sidin06-harries-interview).
• dustbin: rockmonitor as "an ancestral" of .mod; C64 editors mean thinking in hex (SND.01 / DUR.0c / C-5 …) and tending arpeggio, filter and wave tables, built "keeping in mind the amount of memory, not a user friendly interface", against PC trackers' "ful control of every single note, at tick resolution"; Cybertracker and Odintracker are "user friendly", his own choice Sadotracker ("I don't have to remember a lot of keys"); on the Game Boy, Musicbox on real hardware versus a PC tracker with emulation (Paragon 5); on PC, Renoise (source: s-sidin07-dustbin-interview).
• New in 2004: asterion-sid-tracker by Asterion/Tinnitus, reviewed by Tognon as "similar for examples to Goattracker, Cybertracker" with one command byte per step (source: s-sidin06-asterion-sid-tracker).

Related#

chiptune · traxweekly · hornet · kosmic · compos · tracker · tracking-workflow · renaissance · aim-higher · epinicion · commercial-tracking · live-tracking

Sources#

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