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Latest version is v0.5.4 (29-Apr-2000)

What is SoundTracker?

SoundTracker is a music tracking tool for Unix / X11 similar in design to the DOS program FastTracker and the Amiga legend ProTracker. The name of the program is a tribute to Karsten Obarski, who released his SoundTracker program for the Amiga in 1987 and thus unknowingly founded the basis of a huge free music movement which developed in the following years and which is still going strong.

The basic concept is simple: you have a number of sound samples, and you can arrange them on so-called tracks. A track (or channel) can not play more than one sample at the same time. Whereas the original Amiga trackers only provided four tracks (this was the hardware limit), modern trackers can theoretically mix an unlimited number of channels into one sound stream.

A set of tracks which are played at the same time is called a pattern. A pattern typically has 64 entries per track; these entries are cycled through at equidistant time intervals. A basic drum set could thus be arranged by putting a bass drum at entries 0, 4, 8, 12 etc. of one track and putting some hihat at entries 2, 6, 10, 14 etc. of a second track. Of course you can also interleave bass and hats on the same track, if the samples are short enough -- they can't overlap, otherwise the previous sample is stopped when the next one sets in (look at the screen shots for a more visual explanation). Finally, a module is a compact file containing various patterns and samples, including a position list which specifies playback order of the patterns, forming a song. SoundTracker works with modules of the XM and MOD formats.

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