Ultimate Soundtracker
The Ultimate SoundTracker or SoundTracker is a step sequencer program for the Commodore Amiga and the first real tracker. It was developed by Karsten Obarski, a German software developer and musician. He created the software originally as an internal tool to even without programming skills on the Amiga can make music. At what company he worked at that time, it is unclear sources call both Reline Software and EAS.
History of development
The SoundTracker was initially a tool for the musical accompaniment of an Amiga game. He had techniques that have already been developed for the Commodore 64 by Rob Hubbard, and other precursors such as the sound monitor as a model. The program allowed for the first time a 4 -channel real-time hardware mixing on all Amiga computer types. Unlike later versions, the number of samples was limited to 15. The four channels were permanently assigned: Melody (main instrument), an accompanying instrument, bass and percussion instrument. The Soundtracker was able to export the tracks as a sequence of assembler instructions, but not yet as a tracker module.
The Soundtracker was published in mid-1987 for the purpose of sale. He was not a success as a general music development program, Reviews called it " illogical ", " difficult" and " moody ". It was gouged in this market of applications such as Aegis Sonix and Electronic Arts ' Deluxe Music Construction Set. However, it has become the standard for music games on the Amiga. The source code was later released as public domain, after which he manipulates, debugged and was distributed in the burgeoning Amiga underground and demo scene. A floppy disk with instrument samples (ST -01) was spread with. In 1989 the program by two Swedish programmers, Pex " Mahoney " Tufvesson and Anders " Kaktus " Berkeman was improved, which then published the result as NoiseTracker. This allowed already up to 32 instruments and was more flexible with respect to the channel utilization. Later versions of the program used the MOD file format that saved the Pictures both instrument samples and the sequence tracks in the same file. However, this version was not compatible with AmigaOS 2.0, which led to crashes. The Protracker was published in 1991 further followers who solved the stability problems and the graphical user interface further adapting.
More Books
- Anders Carlsson: Chip Music: Low Tech Data Music Sharing. In: Karen Collins ( ed.): From Pac- Man to pop music. Interactive audio in games and new media. Ashgate, Aldershot, inter alia, 2008, ISBN 978-0-7546-6211-2, pp. 153-162.
- Interview with Obarski on the Amiga Music Preservation website.