Music tracker
A music tracker (sometimes referred to as just tracker for short) is a type of music sequencer software for creating music. The music is represented as discrete musical notes positioned in several channels at chronological positions on a vertical timeline.[1] A music tracker's user interface is traditionally number based. 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.[2] Separate patterns have independent timelines; a complete song consists of a master list of repeated patterns.
Later trackers departed from solely using module files, adding other options both to the sound synthesis (hosting generic synthesizers and effects or MIDI output) and to the sequencing (MIDI input and recording), effectively becoming general purpose sequencers with a different user interface.
In the 2010s, tracker music is still featured in demoscene products for old hardware platforms and demoparties have often separate tracker music competitions. Tracker music may also be used in games which borrow aesthetics from past decades.
Hardware[edit]
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.[13] Keeping in theme with this philosophy, a few "hardware trackers" have emerged: specialized hardware designed specifically to host tracker software, in turn designed to exploit the hardware of the machine. These hardware trackers are largely inspired by LittleSoundDJ,[14][15] a tracker created for the original Nintendo Game Boy.
The first such hardware tracker released was the NerdSeq in 2018, a hybrid tracker-sequencer for Eurorack systems. 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.
The first standalone hardware tracker released was the Polyend Tracker in 2020, a USB-powered device with all the functions of a software tracker. It was met with mostly positive critical reception,[16][17] with critics citing a modest price point, standalone all-in-one capability, and intuitive controls.