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[Carnivac]

I love tracker mods too.  In fact most of my favorite game music came from the Amiga in various module (or similar) formats, and whenever I've heard attempts to update them with more real sounding instruments and glossier production work in mp3/ogg formats it just has never had the same appeal to me.  Even most of my favorite recent game music has come from various indie games using the format, especially Return to Sector 9 by Pug Fugly (Am addicted to that Rescue tune in particular)

Used to make them myself and still got all my lil attempts from the 90's.  I was never very good at making full tunes, just catchy little demos but I found tracking so easy to do it was hugely enjoyable, especially since although owning an electric guitar for 9 years and a keyboard for two, I can't play a damn instrument (though I'm getting ok with the harmonica which I bought after watching Once Upon A Time In The West ).  I listen to my stuff now and then though I'm fairly sure everyone else would think they a bit crappy.

Anyways yeah, definitely a huge fan of tracker mods and I use them for my more post-8-bit looking projects (whereas I'm using NSF and AY for the 8-bit style games, lucky for me I have a musician friend who can do all those).

[BenH]

I'm a big fan of mod music, used to listen to Nectarine until the unfortunate hacker incident

I loved listening to Chris Huelsbeck's music on the Amiga

[FishyBoy]

Very well put.

I really like MOD music, but it's just ridiculously complex for anyone new to get in to it. I managed to figure out FamiTracker, but that's about it, and I still can't use it very well.

There is absolutely no reason not to add an option to make it more useable. If anyone seriously believes that shuffling through numbers one note at a time is an effective and better way to make music, and that the music made will lose quality because the author wasn't banging his/her head on the desk constantly in frustration, well...

you should probably punch yourself in the throat.

[battlerager]

the music made will lose quality because the author wasn't banging his/her head on the desk constantly in frustration

HAHAHAHAHAHA  :D

Well said.

[Souseiseki]

I'm SO getting into tracker + low-bitrate samples to get that wonderful SNES:y sound. (sans awesome delay echo of course)

oh yes, snes MODs can be very convincingly SNES (and there's some cases where the delay echo could be faked within 8 channels). My sister can track well.

[mjau]

I love modules and chiptunes and such.  Been trying to get into tracking, but gotta agree with the others here, it's so ridiculously unintuitive.  pxtone is nice and visual but a bit limited.  If you want something to repeat you have to copy it etc.

[Bad Sector]

it doesnt have module suppporrt cant believe your one of them one of those purists. there's nothing remotely intuitive about scantrons and i dont have acess to midi keyboard to write song on so its like zero fun trying to do that.

In the classic vertical tracker view you basically set up the computer to play a tune. You make the tune by saying when a note will play, for how long, etc. Basically you make a musical timeline.

I'm not sure about the "other" method you suggested. I thought it was some sort of replace the letters with keyboard keys or something. I haven't tried Pxtone, but from what i've seen the way you make notes isn't really different: the major difference is that notes are written from left to right in a 'chart' way and you edit a single instrument a time with an order list for each instrument, where in a tracker the notes are written from up to down using letters and you use channels to say when an instrument is used in time. Also in trackers time is relative to the pattern instead of to the song and you use a separate one dimensional order list for the patters (this is done to save space for repeating patterns probably).

I'm not purist, there are things i would like to change in a tracker (like getting rid of the order list and using a "grand pattern" screen where you put single or multi-column patterns in it), but i would keep the method you use to enter notes since i'm used to it.

Basically i think that's the trick: what you're used to.

Note that the fruity loops comment was because earlier versions of fruity loops worked similar to a tracker but instead of using vertical columns with letters they used horizontal rows with piano keyboards.

[FishyBoy]

But in trackers, at least the ones I've used, you don't use the mouse. You use the arrow keys to move a cursor about, and when you place a note it's position on the chart just adjusts it's time. You need to press certain keys to adjust the pitch. If you screw up, you need to scroll on back and readjust it. It's just an unintuitive method overall.

[Bad Sector]

Depends on how to look at it. If you look at it as playing music, yes it is unintuitive. However if you think about it, you're not playing music but instructing your computer to play music. In other words, you're editing the music score, much like how you would edit a text in your word processor for an article by adding bold, italic, underline, changing fonts, etc so the printer will know how to produce what you want (basically "instructing the word processor how to show your text").

Also not every tracker is keyboard based. In fact, the most known tracker, Fast Tracker II, and it's multiplatform remake, MilkyTracker, use the mouse for almost everything (except adding notes - for this you do use the typing keyboard or a MIDI keyboard).

[Tanner]

and we're saying, yes, that's nice and all, but why can't we enter notes without learning a hex system or whatever and use a piano roll?
it shouldn't be that hard to add. is it just because the tracker community is too "hardcore" and xenophobic to have an option for it? cause that's the vibe i've been getting.
i know this sounds inflammatory, and i'm not really directing this at you bad sector.

[Bad Sector]

But they are notes, not hex values.

In traditional music theory pitch classes are represented by the first seven letters of the Latin alphabet (A, B, C, D, E, F and G) (some countries use other names as in the table below).

(Full article with more details)

There are hex values, but those are the instrument numbers and effects. Some trackers (like ModPlug Tracker i think) provide combo boxes and more "nice looking" interfaces to edit these values, so this isn't an issue either. Using a piano roll is possible and in fact easy to implement i think (it'll eat more space in screen though). I believe that the fact that trackers don't use it is that its not asked much and most people who use trackers are familiar with using the letters.

[FishyBoy]

Depends on how to look at it. If you look at it as playing music, yes it is unintuitive. However if you think about it, you're not playing music but instructing your computer to play music.

I understand how it works.

What I don't understand is why the interface must be so very clumsy.

It's like if there was a version of Tetris which you controlled by hula hooping constantly. The problem is not my not understanding of how to win at Tetris, but that doing well takes way more effort than is truly neccesary.

[atuun]

I've been tracking on and off for a few years now, so I should probably refrain from commenting...but...I mean, after the throat punching comment, it's war, man.  :D

It's actually kind of interesting to read this thread, because to me, the piano roll is the needlessly complex way to implement music. I can do it to quantize and write simple stuff, but it's kind of a pain. You have to keep scrolling everywhere, particularly when you have lines that spread more than an octave. But if you zoom out, it gets harder to place notes accurately. It's like some weird riddle.

I think that your preference comes down to two factors in the end:

1. What kind of software you started with.
2. Whether you respond better to visual or textual stimulus.

When the first soundtracker was designed, it wasn't made to be as complex and hard to use as possible. No one makes software with obfuscation in mind (except Derek Smart zing). It was made to be fast yet methodical -- for those who know how to use it. Which means for those that don't, yes, it's unintuitive. But to those who have been tracking for a while, it makes perfect sense. Everything else becomes 'clumsy'.

So the most likely reason no one really adds a piano roll to their trackers is because it's basically adding a more inefficient way of doing something that the tracker can already do. It's not an attempt to be hardcore or whatever. Would you add a tracker interface to Cubase*? It would be awesome if people could add anything that would help new users out, but most trackers have been abandoned and aren't updated anymore.

So, long post short: some people find certain things easier than other people. I know it's hard to believe, but some of us really like writing music this way. People who like tracker interfaces flock to trackers, piano roll users to...piano rolls. You probably won't get much budging from either side to add the other feature to their program. Which certainly sucks for those of us stuck in the middle on either side. (Remember that *? Yeah.)

Sorry, that's long and totally lecture-ish. Everything was getting pretty inflammatory though, so I thought I should try and clarify one tracker's position and postulate on some of the rest so you had some more of the view from the other side. (And I should clarify that I don't represent the entire tracker community; couldn't be further from it.)

(And a small addendum for Annabelle and other Mac users: PlayerPro is a tracker that someone was nice enough to add a piano roll to...I think. Mac only, so I can't test it or vouch for it )

[Bad Sector]

Well, trackers are still being made and updated. Currently the most advanced one is probably Renoise, which adds a bunch of features to the tracker music. It is not free though. From the freeland, MilkyTracker is constantly updated, although their current goal is to produce a FastTracker II clone as close to the original as possible and once this is reached (according to a die-hard FT2 user i know, they seem to be already there or at least close enough so differences not being really noticable) they'll think about adding new features (ok this is not 100% because they already have some new features in place like generating waves).

[Nate Kling]

Atuun, Im glad you said something.  I too feel that piano rolls are clumsy.  I use milky tracker and I learned it very quickly its very easy to read and straight forward.  The only thing i could see as being a bit tricky is the codes for effects but the help guide provides an explanation and examples.  Another thing about tracking is that I believe its easier to line things up on beat especially when you are a beginner. When i first started messing with music in a piano roll i found it hard to line up the notes and keep everything on beat but trackers force you to place them into a system.  It seems much easier not to accidentally have things off beat.  I agree with Atunn though its really just comes down to preference and what you first learned.