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Tracker Music On The Arc
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  A couple of years ago, on the A*i*a, a PD Sound Track Editor came
out, allowing people to easily write music, by playing samples at
different frequencies over it's four channel sound chip, it was
possible to play notes. As time went by, they became better and had
more features, and they became a joy to use. Then, people developed
ways for the A*i*a to playeight samples at the same time (I believe
this program was called OctaMed, but I may be wrong). Then Alt_Man
(Hugo Fiennes) created the Tracker Module to allow the Archimedes to
play the sound trackers off the A*i*a. They were then ported across
to the Arc and people used them in demos e.t.c. and the Arc was
looking up musically. Then, various Tracker editors came onto the
Arc, like Tracker and Desktop Tracker. These allowed Archimedes
owners to write music just as easily as A*i*a owners. This was fine,
but the program cost around 70, which was expensive, but was it
worth the money? I've never actually seen these Tracker programs to
answer that question, but considering you can now get PD programs to
do just the same for around 1, I don't think that it is worth it.

  Tracker programs are now much cheaper, and there are also quite a
few PD Tracker editors, my favourite being !APTracker, but there is
now a new version of that, which should be a lot better (even though
it's near perfect) and !Coconizer, which is really good. I have
version 1.36 and version 1.38, and there are a few bugs in v1.36,
like it sometimes asks for the wrong sample discs, etc. which are
fixed in v1.38. But! Version 1.38 crashes all the time on my 3010, so
I've stopped using that most excellent program.

  Now, there is Digital Symphony on the Arc, a more highly superior
program than any other Tracker program seen before, which has many
new improved features. You can play your music through MIDI or by
Arc Samples, and you can make longer songs (memory permitting)
because unlike Tracker which (I think) allows you to enter 64 patterns,
Digital Symphony allows you to enter 4096. A vast improvement, but I
doubt you would need that many. It also has a sample editor built in
(like APTracker2). Digital Symphony also compresses songs that it
saves in its own format.

Next time... Getting started with Trackers

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