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

My ears! (Don't worry, I'm classically-trained as well and I couldn't track worth a damn either)

Here's one of my favorite tracked tunes, from someone with both musical skill as well as "working around your 4-channel limitations" skills:


It takes someone who is both technical and creative to track a really fantastic tune with only 4 channels. There are likely less than a thousand such individuals on the planet.
 
Of course, if you have many more channels, you can make more graceful stuff. Here's a favorite using a tracker that runs on any 386 or higher, although there are way too many channels and samples in use in this tune to actually play back on a 386 as it's not fast enough:


This seems much more complicated but is actually the same concepts: You can play a single sample per track, and can manipulate it's volume or pitch. You just have more tracks to play with. There are no fancy VST instruments in use here (which, admittedly, puts more burden on the composer).
 
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So do some of these trackers allow you to take wavetable sound and construct an MP3 not in real-time? i.e., take 4 hours of computation per minute of sound, say? If so, there must be some very fine manipulation possible.
 
Yes. I used OctaMED Soundstudio for this a lot. I made it generate IFF-16SVX, and by script ran LAME to convert it (without my intervention).

@Trixster Yes, the more channels the more graceful, but the less impressive. :D

I sure remember Banana Split. I had 100s if not 1000 Mods even before I bought those compilation CDs from Schatzruhe!

Incidentally, Weird Revolution wasn't really intended to be a song. It was just me connecting a MIDI controller to OctaMED for the first time, not trying to play anything at all. It got copy-and-pasted into a long song for filler material for an EP that the publisher wanted to be ten tracks!
 
High-quality digitized samples, skillful tracking, and a player with good anti-aliasing and a touch of reverb on playback can go a long way towards turning a 4-channel MOD file into something that could pass for a Muzak version of Genesis. :)

 
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Trixter said:
Here's one of my favorite tracked tunes, from someone with both musical skill as well as "working around your 4-channel limitations" skills:
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One of my all-time favourite classic 4ch Amiga mods is Space Debris by Captain (he is now in a band called Poets of the Fall, and you may have heard their music in a version of 3DMark, and in Max Payne).

 
Scali said:
One of my all-time favourite classic 4ch Amiga mods is Space Debris by Captain (he is now in a band called Poets of the Fall, and you may have heard their music in a version of 3DMark, and in Max Payne).

Click to expand...
That song itself was played in some PC video game in recent years. I don't know much about modern games but overheard it when someone was playing one. I couldn't believe it.
 
KC9UDX said:
That song itself was played in some PC video game in recent years. I don't know much about modern games but overheard it when someone was playing one. I couldn't believe it.
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Yup, it was remixed for Rochard, that may be where you heard it:
 
Trixter said:
Here's a favorite using a tracker that runs on any 386 or higher, although there are way too many channels and samples in use in this tune to actually play back on a 386 as it's not fast enough
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Even when using a GUS to offload the mixing to hardware?

By the way, that song is the soundtrack to Haujobb's Channel 5 Sequence:
 
Trixter said:
Not with that song, since it uses 15MB of samples, far more than any GUS has in onboard RAM. (There is an Interwave-based card that has 16MB on it but I don't think FT2 supports that much RAM on a GUS.)
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Yea, I suppose that one is way beyond the GUS era anyway (in fact, I didn't know it was tracked).
This is a classic multichannel track that DOES run on GUS:
 
Trixter said:
Not with that song, since it uses 15MB of samples, far more than any GUS has in onboard RAM. (There is an Interwave-based card that has 16MB on it but I don't think FT2 supports that much RAM on a GUS.)
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I gotta ask... what is the point of creating a module file that's larger than an MP3? Just to see the fancy display of a tracker program as it plays? :p Is the CPU load of playing such a complex module file really any lower than playing an MP3 file?
 
vwestlife said:
I gotta ask... what is the point of creating a module file that's larger than an MP3? Just to see the fancy display of a tracker program as it plays? :p Is the CPU load of playing such a complex module file really any lower than playing an MP3 file?
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The CPU load is much lower.
Also, trackers predate the whole mp3 technology by a few years. Playing back mp3s on a PC didn't really take off until around 1997 or so, when fast Pentiums could play them back in the background. A 486-66 isn't fast enough to play a 128 kbps mp3 file at all.
Other advantages of tracker music over mp3 can be that the pattern data can also be used to trigger visual effects/synchronization.
 
And it can be edited, rearranged, and modified on-the-fly.

Oh and of course it's almost mandatory to rip samples from them. :)
 
vwestlife said:
It could play if you downsampled it to 22 kHz. Or you could try MP2 or even MP1, which have lower CPU requirements than MP3.
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Well, there's your answer... You need to downsample to even get it playing, at 100% CPU.
A 486 can easily play a mod with 8 or more channels at 44 KHz, with 10-20% CPU, which will sound better than a downsampled mp3 file.
 
vwestlife said:
I gotta ask... what is the point of creating a module file that's larger than an MP3? Just to see the fancy display of a tracker program as it plays? :p Is the CPU load of playing such a complex module file really any lower than playing an MP3 file?
Click to expand...

That's an excellent question. With a 32-instrument, 15MB file .xm, the composer wasn't going for size or efficiency, but rather was just making music using a tool he was familiar with. mp3s were not common when he distributed that song, so he just distributed the .xm module. He is still active, and his stuff is mp3s on bandcamp just like everyone else :) rather than the ableton/protools/reason/etc. project files that created them.

IIRC, it takes a 486-100 with a special optimized DOS player to play back MP3s at 44KHz, and you're right about a 486-66 being able to play back at 22KHz. The deficiencies are because of the floating-point speed, which had increased dramatically in the Pentium. Any Pentium at any period-accurate speed should be able to play any mp3 just fine.

I have no idea if a 486-66 is enough power to mix 32 16-bit tracks @ 44.1KHz realtime, but that would be very easy for someone to verify, and cool to know. Were someone to perform this test, I'd load up the song, set the playback rate to 11Khz, start playing, seek to the section that has the most channels going at once, then start bumping up the sample rate (you can do this while it is playing in Fasttracker 2) and see what samplerate it croaks at. If you get up to 44.1KHz, start upping the mixing quality (but once you hit "sinc" it may crap out because sinc interpolation uses floating point IIRC).
 
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