Also, the amazing-but-curiously-absent-from-many-lists-of-trackers SunVox. Some of the demo tunes I've listened to over and over!
https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/
Almost all the software on Alexander Zolotov / NightRadio's site is worth checking out, both free and paid. Virtual ANS in particular is amazing for making old-school Doctor Who-style background noises.
Fun tip for Virtual ANS (it's basically just a spectrogram → audio): if you record yourself talking, look at what it looks like, then clear it out and make a bunch of little swipes and curves and stuff in the same region, you get fascinating alien speech!
Ditto! I don't think I've played that mod in 20+ years.
Back in the late 1990's I received a massive collection of MODs from a guy in the Netherlands, and those kept me entertained for years until MP3's took over.
The big unique selling point of MOD/XM/S3M is that it is essentially "open source" music. You can exactly see what the artist does and how it is done as well as access all used samples.
As an Amiga fanboi I was 99% sure this was going to be a mod-type music player in the vein of MED/OctaMED, Sound Tracker etc.
Then I remembered hearing about Milky tracker a long while back and was then 100% sure ;)
Coincidentally I was trying to compile this yesterday and it failed because it did not find the RTMIDI library, which INSTALL.md says is optional: “RtMidi/ALSA (optional, for Linux MIDI support)”.
The machine I’m using does not have that library nor any convenient way of installing it right this moment, so I just moved on. I don’t know whether there will be further snags.
I just had a quick look at the CMakeLists.txt file on github and I see
"find_package(RTMIDI "2.1.0" REQUIRED)" - maybe removing the REQUIRED would solve your issue?
I went ahead and compiled and installed the current version of RTMIDI, and now it fails with something else that looks like some file is not compatible with current CMake:
CMake Error at cmake/FindRTMIDI.cmake:51 (string):
string sub-command REGEX, mode REPLACE needs at least 6 arguments total to
command.
There might be issues even with normal linux boxes, just because of bit rot.
The original was “Ultimate Soundtracker,” and it was so influential that derivatives often named themselves ___tracker (noisetracker, screamtracker, impulsetracker)
The term probably arose from the naming, starting with the very first one: Soundtracker (1987) on the Amiga, obviously a play on the word soundtrack. From there we got Noisetracker, Startrekker, Protracker, Fasttracker (MS-DOS) and so on.
I can't say much about the early history, but trackers have a unique UI compared to other DAW software. Instead of a staff or piano-roll, the tracker UI looks more like a spreadsheet, with each column being a channel, each row being a step, and each cell containing a note or effect.
This representation meshed well with early demoscene music storage and code, and evolved into its own subculture in the late 80's and early 90's.
I have very fond memories of starting my music journey with trackers back in the 90's, but moving Scream/Impulse Tracker to Fruity Loops (as it was called at the time) was such a massive level up in terms of functionality and usability.
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Also, the amazing-but-curiously-absent-from-many-lists-of-trackers SunVox. Some of the demo tunes I've listened to over and over! https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ Almost all the software on Alexander Zolotov / NightRadio's site is worth checking out, both free and paid. Virtual ANS in particular is amazing for making old-school Doctor Who-style background noises.
Back in the late 1990's I received a massive collection of MODs from a guy in the Netherlands, and those kept me entertained for years until MP3's took over.
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renoise
I've done this with it: https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/twothousandseventeen-feat-m...
The machine I’m using does not have that library nor any convenient way of installing it right this moment, so I just moved on. I don’t know whether there will be further snags.
Ahoy on YouTube has a great video about tracker music, https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw
EDIT : Wikipedia says the first one was called Ultimate Soundtracker so probably from that
[1] Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
This representation meshed well with early demoscene music storage and code, and evolved into its own subculture in the late 80's and early 90's.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker