FastTracker 2 (also referred to as FastTracker II) is a music tracker created by Fredrik "Mr. H" Huss and Magnus "Vogue" Högdahl, two members of the demogroup Triton (who later founded Starbreeze Studios) who set about releasing their own tracker after breaking into the scene in 1992 and winning several demo competitions.

Through 1994, the musicians in Triton released some songs in a new multichannel "XM" format, accompanied by a pre-release, standalone player.

[2] This version had a few new usability additions, such as the possibility to exit previously "stuck" windows by only using the mouse, but broke support for the Gravis Ultrasound card.

[3] After the announcement that support and development for FT2 would be stopped, Ruben Ramos Salvador (BakTery) started working on a FastTracker 3 that is now known as Skale Tracker, available for both Windows, Linux and online.

[3] In later years many other trackers tried to follow up on the legacy of FT2, a notable example being MilkyTracker,[4][5] with special playback modes available for improved Amiga Protracker 2/3 compatibility.

[7] On April 22, 2017, an alpha build of the FastTracker II clone was released on the author's homepage for Windows and macOS.

[7] In July 2018, he released the source code of his FT2 continuation, later under the 3-clause BSD license, along with compile instructions for Linux on his website.

Samples are raw PCM sound data to be played back at various frequencies, much the way normal musical samplers do.

The musicians are able to either record samples or load existing ones, manipulate them by cutting and/or pasting parts, or just draw them by hand.

Instruments support various loopable envelopes to be set on either the sound volume or the stereo panning, as well as built-in vibrato.

FT2 was popular with many musicians who didn't have MIDI-compatible keyboards as they could experience live recording without any equipment other than a PC running DOS.

For example, some trackers introduce undocumented effect commands used as triggers for software events, Text2Speech (TTS) metadata, watermarks and so on.

[10] FT2 ran with a custom made DOS 32-bit extender and it supports the Gravis Ultrasound, Sound Blaster, Covox, and the simple PC speaker.

Due to this, hardcore musicians who still want to use FT2 often build "old school" PCs with the optimal (and nowadays rather cheap) hardware for the tracker, just to be able to track with it again.

An alternative way of getting FT2 to run is by using DOSBox — this, however, as accurate as is, has speed and latency problems, and one needs quite a muscular PC to be able to use it as comfortably as on a native environment.

The FT2 inspired multiple later trackers in UX, design and technical capabilities and became therefore the starting point of a family of clones.

FastTracker 2 has also been used in the "dance" music scene of the 1990s and early 2000s:[16][17] Gabber, Speedcore and breakcore producers were using it, including Deadnoise, Noisekick,[18] Neophyte.