pouët.net

Also, back then not every PC could even play MP3s properly, especially in the background, and without using 100% of the CPU :) You would usually have to decode it to WAV first, and a single track would take about 40 MB of precious HD space.

Besides that, trackers were great for beginners at the time because your sample library grew with every module you downloaded :)

If you chose a MIDI sequencer instead of a tracker, you would need a good sound card and a large soundfont library. And imho, MIDI editors back then did not give you the same freedom to work with samples as trackers did. Getting a non-MIDI-like sound was not easy at all.

This. 100%. You could go and download electronic sounding music that were just less than some hundreds of kbs, download a whole EP from NOiSE that was nothing in size and yet great in music. It was a really practical format for sharing your own music.



No. No no no. Same. You had these compos, chiptune and mad BattleOfTheBits people, the #fromage people too, who flex their skills are composing and using trackers but you had people just not caring and still using trackers and releasing their music as albums/ep/singles on netlabels. Late 90s/Early 2000s was the time of Merck records and Monotonik, Miasmah and I don't know how many net groups/labels which were all about music. It was the same, period.

This is the same now, there's still a group of foks who want to use trackers because, well, Venetian Snares… some other who want to use trackers because, well, again, Bogdan Raczynski; some people just use trackers and you – in the demoscene – probably never heard of them because they don't make their whole persona about "using trackers". There's this "that guy" (we all know "that guy") who want to make ambient or beatless sweet tracks using a tracker.

If anything, I find it's much less niche than before, I find there's a lot more people using trackers because of how it has broken into many other scenes and how Real Artists Who Make Money With Their Music are showing their studios with Renoise as a center piece to it.
Hell, get the "Dilla Time" book and you'll see a mention (w/ screenshot) of modplug tracker in there.

Well, composing music for platforms like that already implies that you’re a geek :)

I agree. I’d say that before FruityLoops and Reason, trackers were the best and easiest, if not the only means of cheap music making. Also it seemed to 25 year old me back then that the tracking scene was huuuge, which I guess only proves that bubbles/echochambers were starting to be a thing even back then. I remember bugging the local computer mag like “why thef*ck are you ignoring this huge part of computer culture?”

No, since there is this!

If anything I’ve seen trackermusic picking up popularity in the vapor wave and mallcore scenes. We also do boozedrome twice a year!

🎀𝓀𝒶𝓃𝑒𝑒𝓁🎀:

Honestly, I don’t consider everything that was made using some program with a tracker-style pattern view to be tracker music.

I know that some pop bands used trackers just for sketches, and in some cases even for production. I myself recorded a few instrumental tracks (with real solos and keyboards), where I did the drums and arrangement in MilkyTracker, then exported everything track by track and mixed it later in a separate audio editor. But I don’t consider that tracker music :)

And composing music in MPT or Renoise using VSTs and huge samples, and then releasing it as MP3/FLAC - that’s also, damn it, not “tracker music” :)

To me, it feels like the topic starter means using trackers to create tracker music in the classic sense, and releasing it in MOD/S3M/XM/IT formats, the way it’s still done on the demoscene today.

Wait, and forgive me for being ignoramus about music genres, isn’t vaporwave that slowed down and/or pitchshifted old tunes with crapload of reverb over them? Isn’t a tracker a little ill-suited tool for that job?

Breakcore, there's like this new tracker group (tracker corps) that's all about breakcore, the year is 2025 ahahah



True, but I don't think OP had a real sense of what's under the iceberg when it comes to "tracker" and the "tracker scene". It's not helping that most of the YT docos that are made are doing a great job at forgetting everything that has happened outside of their little circle and they only show the nerdy cheesy tracks that were made in the 90s.

or focus on cracktro music / chiptune

Why now? There's more to making music than how it's made. The context it lives in, for a start.

Actually, 100% what I meant.

i think the number of people who used a tracker to make music in ~95-05 was at least several tenfolds higher than all the musicians listed on e.g. modland. i mean, the amounts of modules that never reached further than some school friends must have been very high :) like, just the amount of random (usually really bad) .s3ms of .xms by random people i don't even know that i accidentally downloaded in BBS days or got via swapping modules with friends. way too many bert en ernie remixes for example! :D

and yes, early ~2000s FruityLoops became the go-to for such friends-making-music-for/with-friends kinda music, or that horrible fake DAW/sequencer+sample CD that was gifted for free by a Dutch bank if you opened a young adult account there (but that's a typical Dutch phenomenon :P)

Rest of the world got equally horrible Magix Music Maker.