One of the biggest regrets I have as an adult is that the teenage me with a new Atari ST never encountered a tracker. I had other music software, and even a MIDI Korg piano module (which is still in my closet somewhere) but somehow the whole tracker scene passed me by.

I rediscovered it with the Polyend, and I can say that that’s the best piece of kit I’ve bought since my OP-1. I need to go back and check out some of the software trackers now, too — although I don’t see why; the Polyend is great and when I make music, I want to get away from the computer and use an instrument.

This is a great thread!!

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Way back, Atari ST owners were practically always the MIDI guys & girls, and Amiga people used trackers (there was OctaMED for those who used trackers AND had MIDI gear but…). So I suppose it’s understandable / natural that as a ST user one wouldn’t have stumbled upon trackers too easily, considering ST had a very good MIDI support, software and ports built in, whereas Amiga’s sound chip was excellent for sample playback and people tended to capitalize on those.

(I know there have been both trackers for ST and “proper” MIDI sequencers for Amiga, but practically all MIDI studios I visited had a ST, and practically all demoscene / tracker musicians I knew had an Amiga and later possibly a PC with ST3/IT/FT2.)

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buzz was one of the best in terms of simplicity and possibilities

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Radium is worth mentioning as modern tracker. very innovative. has pd and faust embedded, expands on Buzz approach (modularity + trackerness)

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Buzz was incredible back in 2000-2004. I was like a kid in a candy store with my $75 pawn shop Pentium. The sample recorders in particular were way ahead of their time, basically like Octatrack flex recorders that could be sequenced for live sampling. And there were a ridiculous amount of synths and effects, too.

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Yeah. Not to hijack the thread, but I bought the Atari ST for two reasons: it had MIDI, and it was one of the personal computers with a whole megabyte of RAM built in, addressable in one go. Imagine that — a whole megabyte!

Back to the thread topic. :slight_smile: I am interested to hear about trackers on Android and iOS, too. Especially Android right now; I’ve swiped a Galaxy Tab from work for a couple of weeks, and want to see if the music production scene on it is any less bleak than the last time I used an Android tablet.

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Sunvox is quite good on an android with a big enough display, but I find unusable on a proper size mobile phone, and sold my tablet.

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Loved Buzz. Did you clock that all the Void instruments were Stijn Kuipers - who is developer of TINRS eurostuff?

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There have been like two or three surprises like that for me - I can’t remember them from the top of my head but much later after I stopped using Buzz, I went down the memory lane and realized some of the machines were made by people later very familiar from other products / projects…

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aaah no! didn’t know that! great!

Yea, you can record midi in in certain ways. I don’t know how deep that rabbit hole goes. But I’m sure Trash80 would be happy to answer any and all questions in the M8 discord. There were some folks doing a lot of midi in using midi enabled guitars.

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Thanks. That was $3.00 or something for the Android version; a reasonable impulse buy and a developer I’m happy to support at that price even if I don’t like the app. I also came across PixiTracker, which looked too cute to pass up, even if it’s not nearly as rich in terms of features. Will report back later this week, I hope.

One thing I’ve been meaning to dive into is making trackers within ORCA, and that’s actually already reasonably well-trod ground:


For my part, I’m interested in constructing a template for creating and generating sequences for transcription into the NerdSEQ, probably using ORCA’s project mode to inject different tracker patterns.

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You could come join the EZBOT discord, he’s the one who made this video. There’s a couple of tracker folks there and EZ uses a NerdSeq. He might have some thoughts on getting done what you wanna do.

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There are a lot of REAPER users on this forum. This is a free REAPER extension that adds a full tracker:

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Joined. Yeah I’m wanting to step up my ORCA game a bit, and a better union with my choice of tracker(s) seems like the obvious trajectory and a good set of bones to build off of.

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Linking Schism Tracker I haven’t spent much time with it but it’s worth a look. I need to learn it properly. I wish it was a little more intuitive though.

I am oldmature enough to have downloaded .mod file acid trance from BBS systems over 2.4kbps modem (upgraded to 14.4 Sportster later) and playing them with FastTracker2 and Impulse Tracker, but have to admit I never managed to have fun with trackers.

This thread, and the good work here on lines around Yggdrasil and tracker gadgets encourages me to try again.

Hmm maybe bring the fantasy computer TIC-80 tracker plus Compass on norns together to something like…

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Totally loving this!!!

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I’m new to the tracker workflow, via the Polyend Tracker, which I have been really really clicking with. I was watching Knxwledge’s twitch stream yesterday and he had this tracker up for a bit, does anyone recognize what it is?