The Ultimate Soundtracker

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The Ultimate Soundtracker
Basic data

Maintainer Karsten Obarski
developer EAS
Current  version 2.6
(1992)
operating system AmigaOS
category tracker
License proprietary / public domain
German speaking No

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 originally created the software as an internal tool in order to be able to make music on the Amiga even without programming skills. It is unclear which company he was working for at the time, sources name both Reline Software and EAS .

Development history

The SoundTracker was initially an aid to background music for an Amiga game. He had techniques that had already been developed by Rob Hubbard for the Commodore 64 , and other forerunners such as the sound monitor as a model. For the first time, the program enabled 4-channel real-time hardware mixing on all Amiga computer types. In contrast to later versions, the number of samples was limited to 15. The use of the four channels was intended or recommended as follows: melody (main instrument), accompanying instrument, bass and percussion instrument . (See also the labeling / titling of the channels in some versions.) The soundtracker was able to export the tracks as a sequence of assembler instructions, but not yet as a tracker module .

The soundtracker was released for sale in mid-1988. It was unsuccessful as a general music development program, with reviews calling it “illogical”, “difficult” and “moody”. It was outperformed in this market by applications such as Aegis Sonix and Electronic Arts ' Deluxe Music Construction Set . However, it became the standard for game music on the Amiga. The source code was later published as a public domain , after which it was manipulated, debugged and distributed in the burgeoning Amiga underground and demo scene . A disk with instrument samples (ST-01) was also distributed. In 1989 the program was improved by two Swedish programmers, Pex "Mahoney" Tufvesson and Anders "Kaktus" Berkeman, who then published the result as NoiseTracker . This already allowed up to 31 instruments and was more flexible with regard to the use of channels. Later versions of the program used the MOD file format , which saved both instrument samples and sequence tracks in the same file. However, this version was incompatible with AmigaOS 2.0, which led to crashes. The ProTracker was another successor released at the end of 1990, which solved the stability problems and further adapted the graphical user interface .

more books

  • Not so 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 et al. 2008, ISBN 978-0-7546-6211-2 , pp. 153-162.
  • Interview with Obarski on the Amiga Music Preservation website.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mat Broomfield: Soundtracker 2.6: music utility ( English ) CU Amiga. S. 139. October 1, 1992. Accessed February 21, 2011: " 83% "
  2. ^ Claudio Matsuoka: Tracker History Graphing Project . helllabs.org. November 4, 2007. Retrieved January 29, 2011: " Tracker History Graph "
  3. ↑ Driscoll, Kevin and Diaz, Joshua: Endless loop: A brief history of chiptunes . In: Transformative Works and Cultures . no.2, 2009. doi : 10.3983 / twc.2009.0096 . Retrieved February 13, 2011. “ Most importantly, Soundtracker provided an environment in which nonprogrammers could access the sophisticated music tools in their home computers without needing to learn a programming language. "
  4. ↑ a b c d e Karen Collins: Game sound: an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of video game music and sound design ( English ) MIT Press. S. 58. 2008. Retrieved February 11, 2011.
  5. ↑ a b c d e Mark Wright: Retrospective - Karsten Obarski ( English ) textfiles.com . March 1998. Retrieved February 11, 2011.
  6. ↑ Karen Collins: MIDI and MOD format ( English , PDF; 524 kB) gamessound.com. June 2007. Archived from the original on August 6, 2009. Retrieved February 11, 2011.
  7. ↑ Johan Kotlinski: Amiga Music Programs 1986-1995 . 2009. Archived from the original on July 8, 2011. Retrieved February 13, 2011.