Music tracker
Notes, parameter changes, effects and other commands are entered with the keyboard into a grid of fixed time slots as codes consisting of letters, numbers and hexadecimal digits.
Some early tracker-like programs appeared for the MSX (Yamaha CX5M) and Commodore 64, before 1987, such as Chris Huelsbeck's SoundMonitor, but these did not feature sample playback, instead playing notes on the computer's internal synthesizer.
Another sound card popular on the PC tracker scene was the Gravis Ultrasound, which continued the hardware mixing tradition, with 32 internal channels and onboard memory for sample storage.
Understanding that the support of tracker music would benefit sales, Gravis gave away some 6000 GUS cards to participants.
Coupled with excellent developer documentation, this gesture quickly prompted the GUS to become an integral component of many tracking programs and software.
Inevitably, the balance was largely redressed with the introduction of the Sound Blaster AWE32 and its successors, which also featured on-board RAM and wavetable (or sample table) mixing.
As processors got faster and acquired special multimedia processing abilities (e.g. MMX) and companies began to push Hardware Abstraction Layers, like DirectX, the AWE and GUS range became obsolete.
DirectX, WDM and, now more commonly, ASIO, deliver high-quality sampled audio irrespective of hardware brand.
Jeskola Buzz is a modular music studio developed from 1997 to 2000 for Microsoft Windows using a tracker as its sequencer where the sounds were produced by virtual machines (Buzzmachines) such as signal generators, synthesizer emulators, drum computers, samplers, effects and control machines, that where connected in a modular setup.
Tracker music could be found in computer games of the late 1990s and early 2000s, such as the Unreal series, Deus Ex, Crusader: No Remorse, Jazz Jackrabbit and Uplink.
)), and SunVox[12] (Music Tracker with modular synth engine and a free form, dynamic length pattern timeline system) The earliest trackers existed to get closer to the hardware of a given machine, allowing memory-light playback of music ideal for games and similar programs.
As a module of said system, it cannot be used alone, and the "tracker" portion of the device is simply used as an interface to sequence, while the hardware is used to handle sampling and other functions.
By increasing or decreasing the playback speed of a digital sample, the pitch is raised or lowered, simulating instrumental notes (e.g., C, C#, D, etc.).
Some modern trackers simulate polyphony in a single track by setting the "new note action" of each instrument to cut, continue, fade out, or release, opening new mixing channels as necessary.
This also makes the self-teaching of music composition using trackers easier and allows to extract instruments for later use in own songs, which was very common.
