MilkyTracker is an open source, multi-platform music application for creating .MOD and .XM module files. It attempts to recreate the module replay and user experience of the popular DOS program Fasttracker II, with special playback modes available for improved Amiga ProTracker 2/3 compatibility.
I can personally vouch for Renoise, having put more than 800 hours into the program. Stable, FAST and very, very versatile. Together with the tracker view you get a mixing panel per channel and you can attach multiple effects, sends and whatnot, just like you would in any other modern DAW's mixing console.
... but unfortunately .mod playback is more of a niche as it is not very compatible with protracker functionality (Travolta's condom corruption [State of the Art], e-On, and a whole bunch of others do not playback correctly). It is however good at chip-based tracking
I love MilkyTracker for its minimalist Amiga tracker-esque experience, but have been frustrated by its instability on macOS. You really do have to save your work very frequently in order to avoid losing it so I've found myself gravitating towards Renoise, even though it's paid and - very recently - Deflemask (I also like that it supports SID tracking, which is what I've been playing with).
I’ve had to use MilkyTracker on my Mac for creating .mod files for Game Boy development over the past couple of years. I’ve learned workarounds for nearly everything and gotten really good at using it, but I keep telling myself I’m going to fork it and try and make some improvements. Maybe one day if I ever get time.
What could be the chances of watching the video "Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit" by Ahoy for 15 minutes while browsing HN and reading this message by coincidence?
I really love what Ahoy is doing, it's very well done and full of great information.
That's an amazing looking website. Best I've seen in years and easy to see and reach a lot of information. I wish the internet would be more like this.
The fascinating thing about Psycle is that there's a guy doing steady development on the SVN trunk https://sourceforge.net/p/psycle/code/HEAD/tree/ while the community has mostly moved from the ~2005 era styled web bulletin board to Facebook.
Trackers like MilkyTracker, OpenMPT, and Famitracker are trying to mostly enable people who use trackers to continue writing music for specific formats (and the specific limitations of those formats).
There are much more modern trackers as well. As far as I know, the absolute state of the art is Renoise. There are some other alternatives like SunVOX.
The downside of the modern trackers is that you very much have to replay the songs in the tracker themselves, with all of the same plugins and settings. The older formats have lots of playback targets and tend to be very resource light for a very good sound.
Is there a good library of mod/s3m files? The first time I heard Metallica's "The Call of Ktulu" was an s3m file that did a really good job sounding like the original, I've been looking (very casually) for that file for a while now.
I don't know about good, but there's modarchive.org. Pretty large and you can listen in the browser to see if you like it. I'd also say archive.org probably has some.
I've played around with MT a lot, but I can't do music in any program.. But there is this one that shipped with it, Raina - Slumberjack, which is just amazingly beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnrHH_Sy1_k
Also of interest might be this 1:1 remake of FastTracker 2: https://16-bits.org/ft2.php. I’ve only played around briefly but it was exactly as I remember it!
FT2 was pretty much my intro to making music, it came on a PC Format magazine cover CD with a a bunch of XM/MOD files and it blew my mind that I could open up these songs and see how they were made!
I never got particularly good with it but had some fun making tracks with a friend, we later graduated to MadTracker on Windows which added some useful things like filters and effects. Buzz was the last tracker I used, really awesome modular tracker which sadly got mostly abandoned. I am a big fan of Elektron hardware which is pretty tracker inspired though!
Yup, 8bitbubsy's FT2 clone completely replaced Milky for me. I was never a huge user of it but I used it as a scratchpad for DOS music when I wasn't near my DOS laptop.
It compiles perfectly well on my Pinebook Pro, so now I have with me all the time, along with the equally fantastic PT2 clone: https://16-bits.org/pt2.php
I agree that you could reduce the lines of code by modernizing, and get more reliable code (the current codebase has cases of UB that they neglected pull requests to fix for a year and counting, see https://github.com/milkytracker/MilkyTracker/pull/255 and https://github.com/milkytracker/MilkyTracker/pull/256). But MilkyTracker is uniquely fast in compiling, I think because of avoiding STL and heavyweight headers. My hope is that in the future we can have container niceties and lightning-fast compilation (perhaps modules over headers, concepts over SFINAE, or using STL alternative containers designed to be lightweight like EASTL or Corrade, or jumping ship from C++ entirely to Zig or Nim or so).
Probably you could speed up the build by consolidating it into a few files; linking is about the slowest thing compilers do, although mold could help, there.
Moving small things into headers might seem like it would slow down the build, but anything wholly defined in a header doesn't need to be linked.
Looking at your pull 256, a delegating constructor would seem to be right thing, but initializing in the class declaration is absolutely best. I wonder who still wants it pre-C++11.
I love trackers and still use to create some small songs or music ideas. After original FastTracker II, I used Skale Tracker, MilkyTracker and SunVox (this last one is one of the best music softwares I know).
Nowadays I use the new remake of FastTracker II https://16-bits.org/ft2.php. It's quite impresive how they copy almost identical the original one.
I used Milkytracker for many years, graduating from LSDJ and Famitracker. I eventually got my hands on a proper A500 and tracked on that for a while, before going back to the comfort of a modern PC running Renoise. These days it’s all Ableton for me, but I miss the days of using trackers like nothing else. I’m spoiled on Ableton, so can’t easily make the switch back to a tracker equivalent like Renoise, but there are still loads of things I miss about tracking. It is, for me, the most intuitive way to create the kind of music that I want to create with a computer.
Shameless self promo, but I released a tiny album of .xms using Milkytracker back in the day [0] on Disasterpeace’s (composer for Fez, among others) label, which I am still quite fond of. 4mat, of course, was, and is still, a huge influence.
I love trackers more than a piano-roll or bar. Renoise is my first choice, after this PT-clone, Furnace/DefleMask for chip sounds
It really depends on the compatibility as for me protracker functions are important. Renoise doesn't even do all but it's an overall great tool. Others are sunvox (crossplatform Jeskola Buzz-like), or even native on UAE/Amiga I would se OctaMED. I have to say, OpenMPT is also good, especially for playback.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 93.3 ms ] threadhttps://milkytracker.org/about/
https://www.renoise.com/
https://deflemask.net/
https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace
https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker
Here's a wee thing I knocked together very quickly a while back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G39Eupk72W0
I’ve seen hardware ones being used, though didn’t understand what they were.
There are much more modern trackers as well. As far as I know, the absolute state of the art is Renoise. There are some other alternatives like SunVOX.
The downside of the modern trackers is that you very much have to replay the songs in the tracker themselves, with all of the same plugins and settings. The older formats have lots of playback targets and tend to be very resource light for a very good sound.
I somehow managed to miss it, and now I'm blown away.
Another 58,644 MOD/S3M/XM files show up in DiscMaster: http://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?family=music&formatid...
[1]https://modarchive.org/
FT2 was pretty much my intro to making music, it came on a PC Format magazine cover CD with a a bunch of XM/MOD files and it blew my mind that I could open up these songs and see how they were made!
I never got particularly good with it but had some fun making tracks with a friend, we later graduated to MadTracker on Windows which added some useful things like filters and effects. Buzz was the last tracker I used, really awesome modular tracker which sadly got mostly abandoned. I am a big fan of Elektron hardware which is pretty tracker inspired though!
It compiles perfectly well on my Pinebook Pro, so now I have with me all the time, along with the equally fantastic PT2 clone: https://16-bits.org/pt2.php
Modernizing, however many users it has would benefit immediately.
Probably you could speed up the build by consolidating it into a few files; linking is about the slowest thing compilers do, although mold could help, there.
Moving small things into headers might seem like it would slow down the build, but anything wholly defined in a header doesn't need to be linked.
Looking at your pull 256, a delegating constructor would seem to be right thing, but initializing in the class declaration is absolutely best. I wonder who still wants it pre-C++11.
Shameless self promo, but I released a tiny album of .xms using Milkytracker back in the day [0] on Disasterpeace’s (composer for Fez, among others) label, which I am still quite fond of. 4mat, of course, was, and is still, a huge influence.
[0]: https://jophish.bandcamp.com/album/distance
[1]https://dirtywave.com/
It really depends on the compatibility as for me protracker functions are important. Renoise doesn't even do all but it's an overall great tool. Others are sunvox (crossplatform Jeskola Buzz-like), or even native on UAE/Amiga I would se OctaMED. I have to say, OpenMPT is also good, especially for playback.