And whilst several open-source solutions already exist for parsing them, part of my motivation for this task was to peek behind the curtain and learn more about these formats I’d held dear. There are plentiful file formats which collectively form “tracker music”, and not all of them are what I’d personally call rigorously documented. The open-source nature of this music therefore made it very amenable to satisfying the curiosity itch that I held about sampling (see Part 1 for more about that) - whilst simultaneously making that task quite challenging.
The listener of a tracker song is not only presented with the very notes and articulations that construct a song, but may choose to do so with the very instrument from which it was born.
A tracker module lays its proverbial heart on its sleeve and bares those secrets for all to study and learn from. An MP3 may hold many minutes of great music, but offers no insight into how that music came to be. It extends beyond the music itself to the way it is constructed and presented to the listener. To say that one is a fan of ’tracker music’ becomes a hard thing to clarify when there’s such diversity about what that could represent. Composers migrated from tool to tool as successive programs presented them with more sophisticated abilities to realize the music in their head. File formats, too, were devised and revised - and sometimes even documented.
Composition programs were born, forked, cloned, abandoned and reborn. A whole ecosystem of music creation tools grew from the homebrew efforts of talented programmers and musicians. One of the fascinating aspects of tracker music is the way in which it has evolved over the last three decades.
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