A free software tool that required no additional equipment, it became popular in the early 1990s with both amateurs and professionals, allowing for sample-based music in the MOD file format.

[1] Protracker allows the user to create sequences of notes called "patterns", which are chained together to form a complete song.

It was initially developed for the Amiga line of computers, but was later made available for other platforms such as the Atari ST.[2] The Protracker was among other trackers, the descendant of the Soundtracker (1988/1987).

Building upon the features of previous trackers such as Ultimate Soundtracker and NoiseTracker (of which Protracker's code is based on), Protracker came equipped with a built-in sample editor and a keyboard split function to assign multiple instruments to different regions of the keyboard.

Protracker is capable of playing back music at the correct speed on both NTSC and PAL computers.