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Discussion (21 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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!
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
This was in '93 or thereabouts and they were really expensive and through that very sparse where I was.
Maybe SoundBlaster being short was a little earlier? I didn't have a PC before 1995, so...
By early 2000 you were seeing a lot of Ensoniq and other sort of "Windows Sound Source" crap in most consumer-grade PCs and if you wanted an AWE32 or AWE64 you had to specify you wanted a good sound card.
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.
https://github.com/juho/ft2-plugin
It's absolutely a tracker, and absolutely part of the demoscene and quite a capable piece of software - but if you have the muscle memory for ProTracker (or FastTracker 2, as I do) keyboard shortcuts, it is not the same.
MilkyTracker does have an option for FT2-style shortcuts.