Introduction

Tracker 4.44

# Chapter 1: Introduction

``Soundtracker'' is a family of music composition programs that exist on the Amiga. The resulting data files (modules) have been appearing on ftp sites for some time now.

For a machine with sufficient horsepower and some audio capability, it is possible to emulate the Amiga audio hardware in real time, and play those modules. How close to an actual Amiga the resulting rendition will sound depends only upon your machine's CPU and audio abilities.

The Soundtracker format originated on the Amiga about ten years ago, with the original sound tracker, written by Karsten Obarsky. There have been numerous variants built upon it, including the many versions of Protracker (see The Protracker format).

A Soundtracker module is a binary format that mixes audio samples with sequencing orders, making it possible to play rather long pieces of digital music with reasonably good quality.

Tracker is a portable player for these modules. Its main features are

- faithful rendition of all Protracker tunes. [1]
- portability. All the code is written in C.
- support of efficient compression methods.

The Protracker format is historically limited by the Amiga audio hardware, namely

- no more than four tracks.
- somewhat poor sample rendition.

There have been some attempts to override these limitations, and some offsprings of Soundtracker on other platforms that support 6 or 8 channels modules. Tracker tries its best to support these variant formats.

Liam Corner (see Credits) had the original idea of writing a Soundtracker player for the Sunstation. His program, though imperfect, proved it was possible [2]. I wouldn't have thought of writing it myself, but armed with his original code, I used my knowledge of the Amiga tracker format to `add some improvements'. Of course, I ended up rewriting the whole code. At that point, it ran on Silicon Graphics Indigos and Suns.

After that point, lots of people (see Credits) found that tracker was reasonably easy to port to their machines though quite buggy still. These days, some two years later, tracker looks as if it works on many more machines, though that may simply be a deceptive illusion.

If you want to modify tracker or make it run on another machine, or correct problems, please do so. Just try to keep in touch with me (Marc.Espie@ens.fr ).

There are more architectures supported all the time. Check the ``Makefile`' for this version or see Installation. Your machine should be able to produce sounds, that goes without saying. You also need tunes to play (module files). Some are available on `nic.funet.fi` or check aminet, for instance.

Most Soundtracker/Noiseplayer/Protracker modules should play out ok. Due to various disagreements between all the Soundtracker versions (never forget Soundtracker is a horrible hack, a big kludge), it is a real nightmare to try and make some commands work. What you have is my best effort at trying to outguess every Soundtracker composer in existence... Obviously, I haven't completely succeeded.

med, s3m, or xm support I've thought of, but don't forget, to make tracker work, I need to reverse-engineer assembly routines coded like spaghetti, and transform it into more or less human-readable, normal C code. So up till now, I haven't had time enough to support these. Teijo's code is not exactly limpid, `MEDplayer` itself tends to change from release to release, but maybe one day...

Actually, if you know other player programs, you will notice that tracker is better at the compatibility game than most of them.

[1] Well almost all. Since there are several distinct protracker in existence, it is difficult to be compatible with all. I estimate that more than 99% of modules are output correctly

[2] This is the original `str15`/`str31` that might still be available on some sites, even though it is hopelessly outdated.