![]() ![]() One command can immediately perform several useful actions, as it consists of the following parts: For clarity, the teams are grouped according to the channels described above. The sequence is executed by the tracker from top to bottom. That is - something resembling an assembler program. Music is a sequence of commands for a sound chip. Since programmers wrote trackers, their logic seems extremely simple. MOS8364 Paula - the sound heart of an Amiga computer music written for an audio chip (although today emulators of well-known chips, or some kind of styling are most often used). This, by the way, explains the meaning of the popular chiptune trend. All parameters of the chip are completely controlled by the user. ![]() We see four hardware channels (columns), and a certain sequence of actions inside. Therefore, the interface of the first trackers is nothing more than a sound chip control panel, a presentation of computer musical composition at the lowest level. For example, taking a chord of three notes, we will have exactly one channel on which we need to manage to arrange the drums and bass. But four channels - not so many, when writing complex music you need to use them very carefully. In the computer's RAM there were several fragments of recorded sounds (samples) in PCM format 8-bit The Paula chip could play four such samples simultaneously, dynamically changing their volume and speed - this gave four independent channels (or tracks), each of which could play a certain sequence of samples. In particular, a Paula sound chip was installed on it - a real digital sampler. The Commodore Amiga had revolutionary hardware features for the home computer of the time. For example, a fairly popular clone called NoiseTracker looked like this:īut where does such a strange interface come from? Where is the stave and symbols familiar to musicians? Let's figure it out. The first tracker looked something like this:ĭespite the criticism, the program subsequently had an army of fans, the most advanced of which cracked the original code and based on it unofficially began to produce improved clones. She was called complex and devoid of logic. With her appearance, she scared a lot of classical musicians. The program was created primarily for writing music for games. The world's first tracker is considered to be the Ultimate SoundTracker program, written by German developer and composer Karsten Obarski in 1987 for a Commodore Amiga computer. ![]() What is the basis? And why are trackers popular to this day? I will try to answer these questions from the point of view of the developer of such programs. The phenomenon is almost 27 years old, but to this day the hacker number-letter representation of music is shrouded in an aura of mystery, because turning the “noise” on the screen into a beautiful composition is nothing more than magic. It seems that the topic of trackers has been disclosed in articles repeatedly. ![]()
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