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MOD Trackers or other useful music software that'll run on 286/10?

G

gyromatical

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Doesn't necessarily need to be sample based or anything elaborate, even a couple of channels is great.
The only tracker I located needs 286/12. It would be even more amazing if it supports Speech Thing :D
Any other suggestions for some decent music composition software is welcomed!
 
GSPLAY for MIDs.

SB diskettes have all kinds of sound utilities.

I forgot the names of trackers / editors I played around with in my youth on my 286-12.
 
There's tons of it, but not all just for playing music via a "soundcard".

I used to compose music on a PC/XT. I had a lot of stuff, including sample-based stuff. Unfortunately I don't remember much about any of it because eventually I wrote my own stuff which supported 16-bit stereo, which none of the available software that I could find at the time did.

The one package I can remember by name (because I still have disks for the demo version) was Sequencer Plus. It's still the best PC-based sequencer I've used up to the present day.
 
Wow, thanks for all the replies and sorry for the delay in responding. I'll definitely check all of the mentioned titles!

KC9UDX, since you mentioned they're not all for a soundcard - do you know of any titles in particular off hand which support Covox?
You don't happen to have your homebrew software anymore, do you? Sounds interesting.

I found Sequencer Plus on Vetusware, thanks for that suggestion - this should be fun. The older music software is great. I still compose MODs regularly and I have quite fond memories of using Triad and others on the C64 with a Sequential Circuits interface.
 
gyromatical said:
KC9UDX, since you mentioned they're not all for a soundcard - do you know of any titles in particular off hand which support Covox?
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No. I built something like that (if it wasn't exactly like it) but I think I wrote my own software.

You don't happen to have your homebrew software anymore, do you? Sounds interesting.
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I doubt it. If I do, it would take a long time to sort through it and find something useful, and figure out how to use it again. I lost an awful lot of it in 1994 when I had a hard drive crash. (Yeah I had a backup, but the backup was corrupt, go figure). All the good stuff was written specifically for the ATI Stereo*F/X card, and wouldn't work with anything else anyway.

I found Sequencer Plus on Vetusware, thanks for that suggestion - this should be fun. The older music software is great. I still compose MODs regularly and I have quite fond memories of using Triad and others on the C64 with a Sequential Circuits interface.
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I went to some kind of music trade show or something and remember Sequential Circuits having a booth showing off several goodies they had for the C64. I remember being in awe and wishing I could afford any of it!

My only gripe with Sequencer Plus was always that I found it impossible to time-sync it with anything that didn't use a MIDI clock. I don't remember the details about it, other than I seem to recall pressing the spacebar to start it playing, and there was a random delay after the spacebar was pressed. I did use it a lot though. I considered setting up to run it again recently until I got my Amiga working with Bars&Pipes.

I never really got the hang of MODs. I did write a few fifteen years ago or so, but nothing that really took advantage of them. I'm working on a project right now though in Bars&Pipes, that would have been a piece of cake in OctaMED Soundstudio (which I do have but haven't installed (again) yet).
 
gyromatical said:
Doesn't necessarily need to be sample based or anything elaborate, even a couple of channels is great.
The only tracker I located needs 286/12. It would be even more amazing if it supports Speech Thing :D
Any other suggestions for some decent music composition software is welcomed!
Click to expand...

Galaxy Player (GLX) is the "world's fastest MOD player" and should run perfectly on a 286-10 -- I had it playing 4-channel MOD files in stereo at 22 kHz and 8-channel MODs at 16 kHz through a Sound Blaster Pro on an 8 MHz 8086. I don't know if it supports the Speech Thing (parallel port DAC), but it's worth a shot:

https://files.scene.org/get/mirrors/scenesp.org/compilations/blastersound_bbs/sbprog/GLX212.ZIP
 
KC9UDX said:
I went to some kind of music trade show or something and remember Sequential Circuits having a booth showing off several goodies they had for the C64. I remember being in awe and wishing I could afford any of it!
Click to expand...

It was indeed. I didn't get my hands on one until the mid 90s, and even then it was around the $100 mark. It held it's value, seems they still go on eBay for around that if you can find one. At least the Amiga has more readily available hardware!

vwestlife said:
Galaxy Player (GLX) is the "world's fastest MOD player" and should run perfectly on a 286-10 -- I had it playing 4-channel MOD files in stereo at 22 kHz and 8-channel MODs at 16 kHz through a Sound Blaster Pro on an 8 MHz 8086. I don't know if it supports the Speech Thing (parallel port DAC), but it's worth a shot
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Thanks so much! Will give this a shot.

nestor said:
An awesome sequencer / tracker that runs in a 286 and has Speech Thing support is Sound Club
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In love! This is killer! Thanks a million :D
 
I always used ModPlay by Mark J Cox. Would work over PC Speaker, Covox, and any sound card. Written in assembly so it was blazing fast. I had no issues running it on any 286 that I ever tried - used to use it on a PS/2 Model 30-286 all the time (286-10), and I think we even managed to get it to run on an 8088 that had been upgraded with a V20 CPU.

http://www.awe.com/mark/dev/modplay.html

Sadly, I never had the Pro version of the software, and it seems that Mark lost his source years ago.

Later, when S3M and 669 tracker files were becoming more ubiquitous, I started using a more high-end tracker program that required a fast 386. It had a great-looking UI and a LOT of bells and whistles. I can't for the life of me remember what it was called....
 
Can someone explain what "tracker" software for music does? The only music-related context in my wetware for "tracker" also includes "sticker" and "backfall". I'm pretty sure that that isn't it...
 
Trackers play sequences of samples. That's about it. Some are fancier than others, some do a lot of additional things.
 
nestor said:
An awesome sequencer / tracker that runs in a 286 and has Speech Thing support is Sound Club
Click to expand...

If the 286 in question has VGA, then Fasttracker is the "purest" solution (closely resembles protracker). Up to 8 channels. Uses a tweaked text mode but should be compatible with all VGA monitors.

Chuck(G) said:
Can someone explain what "tracker" software for music does? The only music-related context in my wetware for "tracker" also includes "sticker" and "backfall". I'm pretty sure that that isn't it...
Click to expand...

Hey, a subject I know more about than Chuck! I'd be happy to fill you in; it's the least I can do for all of the help you've given me.

Trackers were music composition programs that originated on the Amiga, and used the Amiga's native 4-channel soundchip. Trackers play samples entered into a spreadsheet-like interface, where each "track" can play a singe sample. Samples can be played at higher or lower speeds (pitch control), or have their amplitude adjusted (volume). There are some rudimentary effects you can apply to a track that adjust both of those parameters over time, like vibrato, tremolo, portamento, staccato, etc.

Trackers were decidedly non-musician-friendly (the reason for the "spreadsheet" interface and hex value input is because the program authors were primarily programmers and not musicians). They didn't use typical musical terms other than notes/octaves, and most didn't support MIDI input or features. The reason they took off is because 1. Free, 2. Wavetable instruments sound much better than synthetic ones, and 3. Game/Demo friendly because the timing of the music engine was tied to the video vertical retrace interrupt, so playing music didn't interfere with the display. (the downside is that changing the display refresh frequency altered the speed of playback)

Trackers eventually were ported to non-Amiga systems; on the PC, they mixed multiple channels realtime to output through a single sound device channel like a Sound Blaster or an LPT-connected DAC (or the PC speaker using crude pulse width modulation, if you were too cheap to buy or build a DAC). So you needed a then-beefy system to increase the output quality (mixing speed), unless you had a pure hardware wavetable card like the Awe32 or the Gravis Ultrasound which handled all the mixing and playback.
 
Trixter said:
Trackers were music composition programs that originated on the Amiga, and used the Amiga's native 4-channel soundchip.
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I would like to argue that the concept of trackers is older than the Amiga trackers, with Chris Huelsbeck's Soundmonitor on C64 being one of the first: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=61442
However, the most popular tracker format is the 'mod' file, and that indeed originated from the Amiga. It started with Karsten Obarski's SoundTracker (which may have been the first music program to use the name 'tracker'), then Mahoney and Kaktus' NoiseTracker, and eventually ProTracker.
You could say that the classic 4ch 'mod' file is to the Amiga what the SID file is to the C64, or the VGM file to SN76496 and similar soundchips: the 'native' format for a given soundchip/platform.
 
One of the first trackers was actually the Tandy 1000SL/TL's DeskMate music program, released in 1988, a year before the Amiga MOD format really took off with the release of NoiseTracker in 1989.

 
That's music composition software but not really a "tracker" IMO. There was plenty of earlier composition software, like Bank Street Music Writer (1985).
 
Plasma said:
That's music composition software but not really a "tracker" IMO. There was plenty of earlier composition software, like Bank Street Music Writer (1985).
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Agreed, I think what defines a 'tracker' is the use of a pattern- and channel-oriented approach, and using (hexadecimal) values in a time-based grid, rather than using staff-notation or similar 'traditional' notations.
 
By the way, if you want to see true 'virtuoso' tracking, check this out: https://youtu.be/E9ErmKpTcFA
They even have 'visual' effects in the pattern data, like the 'scratching' effects, the noise etc.
There's another song by H0ffman that even plays a whole pattern in reverse.
 
vwestlife said:
One of the first trackers was actually the Tandy 1000SL/TL's DeskMate music program, released in 1988, a year before the Amiga MOD format really took off with the release of NoiseTracker in 1989.
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As others have pointed out, that's not really a tracker, it's a traditional music composition program. Also, Karsten Obarski's SoundTracker was released in 1987. **HOWEVER** what you may have been trying to say but got your terminology mixed up (some people refer to player-only modplayers as trackers) is that the SL/TL's DeskMate music program was the first PC music program to mix multiple digital sounds together into a single output stream, much like PC modplayers did 1989 and later. And... I think that is actually correct. I don't know of any PC music player program that plays cpu-realtime-mixed audio before the 1988 DeskMate program.
 
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I have a great respect for Mod composers. I tried it in the 90s, and as a classically trained musician, just couldn't do it. Well, just couldn't do a good job of it, anyway.

 
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