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- Hacker News
- Love FT2! I did some PlayStation/N64 soundtrack stuff (known if you know) and released a few "albums" with it back in the 90s (essentially unknown).
These days I use FL Studio but I'm always wanting in many ways to go back to tracking. Renoise is pretty cool but I do miss FT2, and yeah as someone mentioned there's also MilkyTracker.
Annnnnnd... now I want to go track something.
- > known if you know
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by gbraad - MilkyTracker exists and that uses SDL tooby tosti
- Schism Tracker as well: https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker/by rzzzt
- Someone also released an extension of this project but as a VST plugin, so you can integrate it with your modern DAW.by dintech
- Woot!? The project website link in the repository leads to Blamstrain's bandcamp - that's Juho Hietala, a Finnish musician whose album "Disfold" is among top ambient / dub techno albums of all times for me, in line with Fluxion - Vibrant Forms I/II, G.R.I.T. - Expanse and Yagya - Will I Dream During The Process?
Now, he also turns out to be a programmer, which I didn't know, and that he ported a clone of my fondly beloved FT2 to a VST plugin is just such a double hit!
Juho, if you happen to read this - thank you so much, man!!
by wartywhoa23 - I am glad they also cloned the snake game.
https://github.com/8bitbubsy/ft2-clone/blob/master/src/ft2_n...
by omoikane - Does anybody know why the site is called 16-bits? Aren't trackers an expression of the first 32-bit computers?by teo_zero
- My favorite mod player. Galaxy 2.12 (GLX212.ZIP on Simtel et al), runs on 8086's just fine.by myself248
- Fasttracker II was a 32-bit DOS executable, but trackers in general (and the MOD/XM formats) were born [1] during 16-bit Commodore Amiga era.by selcuka
- He also has a fantastic ProTracker clone as well as a bug fixed version of the Amiga ProTracker. Together, they make for a great way to write Amiga tunes that you can still edit and playback on real hardware.by jeffalyanak
- To slightly rephrase Gary Fisher: Anyone who has fond memories of FT2 is a friend of mine!
Kudos to everyone sharing a wealth of information about FT2 and other trackers and audio hardware of that time in this discussion :)
This is the HN I adore.
by wartywhoa23 - I might have 1 or 2 compositions in backup that I could load up...amazing! I love it too.by drummojg
- Tracker music and 1990s video game music needs to make a comeback in general.
Why is game music so boring and same-sounding nowadays? That damn wannabe-Hollywood-bug with the faux-orchestras and shit.
Just listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA95o7RNjqA
That's for a freakin SHOP scene, a single screen of static UI.
And THIS!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGe3gP9VY9A&list=PL8FB351987...
What's the last memorable game OST you can recall? I can only think of Elden Ring.
by Razengan - I agree. The limitations forced composers to be economical and creative.
As for modern OSTs, I like VA-11Hall-A. Never played it though
by montag - Oh darling. Stop playing AAA games, start playing real games from teams small enough to make unsafe choices.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD6ujQ0tHAv2qLS5FKH6B... - chopped beats, glitched words, everything you would expect in a love letter to Jet Set Radio
https://halberball.bandcamp.com/album/fragrance-point-soundt... - absolutely perfect noises for a game that looks like a 90s rave flier
https://supergiantgames.bandcamp.com/album/hades-original-so..., https://supergiantgames.bandcamp.com/album/hades-ii-original... - hades and its sequel shifts seamlessly between lutey-flutey strumming, hard rock, ballads, and sets the heck out of its mood
https://momojams.bandcamp.com/album/flipwitch-original-game-... - this horny metroidvania can fit so many electro-swing bangers in it
https://blackpantsgamestudio.bandcamp.com/album/tiny-big-sou... - sideways grooves and gloriously self-indulgent prog
https://polybius-ost.bandcamp.com/album/polybius-the-origina... - so much blissful techno to stare fixedly at blinking lights to, while the Welsh wizard who wrote it repeatedly insists that you are not being programmed by this experience in any way
by egypturnash - There are some great remixes to Kenny Chow's legendary intro to the amazing "One Must Fall 2097" that manage to retain and enhance the tracker feel:
- Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixf_NfKjXkA
- Chow's own remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvlVaQl7kEk
- SIDNIFY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Jf4i4jG4U
The original Deus Ex also had some great tracker music.
- How does FT2 relate to the ScreamTracker?
The latter had a printer port output option that, combined with 10 resistors and 5 minutes of soldering, yielded proper sound on any standalone speaker. In the era of chip tunes and inaccessible SoundBlaster cards, it was nothing short of magic.
* The adapter was a DIY version of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing
by eps - Tell us about the great Sound Blaster shortage! I thought they threw one after you each time you left a PC parts shop. (Could be a different time period.) The GUS on the other hand...by rzzzt
- As someone who was in the demoscene: FastTracker II was more of a successor to ProTracker on the Amiga than it was a successor to ScreamTracker 3. I say this because I used it for years; if you go by user interface and keyboard shortcuts the heritage is very visible.
That isn't to say that FT2 didn't build upon what ST3 (ScreamTracker 3) did; FT2 loaded ST3 files and played them just fine, as long as they were sample-based and not OPL3 (basically no one used the OPL3 functionality in #trax); and a lot of the concepts were brought along as well; per-channel panning (not the hard LRRL of the Paula) and an option for a Linear frequency table (instead of using the Amiga's). I think ST3 had ADSR envelopes; FT2 definitely does.
There were other trackers about like MultiTracker, which got some use - it had a fairly interesting per-track compression (not just pattern compression) that was transparent to the user. It was the original format for Kenny Chou's (CC Catch) soundtrack to One Must Fall 2097 (which is public domain; if anyone can send me FALL1.MTM {"Powerplant"} I'd love you for days; I only have that one after I converted it to XM and it lost all the panning information, as FT2 does not store per-channel panning information; only per-instrument and per-sample; you can't just set a channel pan and have it persist)
No one was really using .MTM in 1995 onward tho.
ImpulseTracker was a 'proper' successor to ScreamTracker 3, down to how the interfaces looked and the keyboard shortcuts. Both are DOS Terminal / "ANSI" looking. ncurses was a thing back then but this was DOS; but they weren't using it. IT is still around and has been open-sourced and I think SchismTracker is the current flag-bearer fork - unsure.
FT2 vs IT was a hot topic in #trax in the late 90's; most of the cool kids used Impulse but I stuck to FT2.
ModPlug Tracker was the first really successful Windows tracker, it is and was FLOSS, and it's still around, and was a pretty capable tracker in its day if you didn't mind light mode. I think a lot of the more 'modern' module output plugins for GStreamer et al are based off of ModPlug code, but again I can't prove it (there was also the MikMod library/players; and CubicPlayer, etc. Tons of libraries)
MilkyTracker is the spiritual successor to FT2 (down to the keyboard shortcuts!) and runs on pretty much anything modern these days. I got it to run on the OLPC XO-1, which was plenty capable because modules were being mixed on a 486 or so at 33MHz, and the XO-1's Geode was running at 433MHz, which is a good 10x faster. However my biggest problem with tracking on the XO-1 was all the times I'd get interrupted when people would ask me about the computer I was working on...
iirc FT2 also had a "Disney Sound Source" parallel port option but never used it. It did have MIDI output.
FT2 did have a really shitty PC speaker output option, because almost all of them are shitty, and a really good one didn't happen until 8088mph came out. It was capable enough to annoy people around you, but it was also capable enough that a friend and I made some 4/6-channel XM files that used basically square wave samples that sounded decent enough. They're on modarchive, look for Comp Sci Chip Tech, you'll find them.
by Benanov - It's unfortunate that the Turbo Pascal (with inline X86 asm) source code of FT2 written by Vogue and Mr H hasn't been released after all these years. It's so seminal to so many people from that era.
If I were to guess, they found the quality of the code too embarrassing, years later - they were kind of kids when they wrote it. I did see that they (supposedly) shared the source with someone on Vogons for the purpose of minor updates/bugfixes.
by lysace - This rocks. Such nostalgia.
FT2 was how I discovered anything about music making - I loved the euro dance music I heard on the radio as a 12 year old but had no idea about the scene or how electronic music was was made.
PC Format had FT2 plus hundreds of modules on its cover CD one month, I used to love exploring all the random stuff on there and opened it up and my mind was blown when I realised that there was music like I heard on the radio, but you could see all the individual bits that made it up.
It took a loooot of messing around to figure out how to do anything of value with it, pretty sure this was before we had internet at home, but it was the start of a life long fascination with electronic music making.
So thank you to the author for resurrecting this amazing and somewhat esoteric bit of software!
by tomduncalf - Very cool - can’t wait to try it. I made an impulse tracker clone for MIDI years ago that also uses SDL, though a mix of C and C++. It has been picked back up for dev again recently and we’re making good progress. https://github.com/m6502/ztrackerprime
The world could use more trackers. I’m really hoping the upcoming ableton live extension api will allow for direct access to the piano roll. I suspect many people include myself will use it to make tracker interfaces for ableton.
by cmicali - Renoise Redux is already shipping a feature complete tracker you can easily run in Ableton or Bitwig.by Teknomadix
- Nice, will have a look.
And yes, trackers are great tools and with a bit of integration, like program change message, they can even provide this experience to MIDI. I use a bunch of tools I created for music making, live performance etc. trackers are almost always at the center of this for me.
by gbraad