| ProTracker |

ProTracker - the History of a Legend

We write in the year 1999, and the Aminet is inundated like never before with MODs and more recently MP3s - these are small in number, but with quite remarkable filesizes however. But all-in-all, how is it that the MOD format, which was invented by deep-scene Coders (not wanting to put down anyone), still hang on? It's a long story, almost as old as the Commodore Amiga herself. And exactly 9 years ago, in May 1990, the ProTracker was born at last on the Amiga.

SoundTracker

In 1986 Karsten Obarski, whose trademark was as musician with "reLine" (Oil Imperium, Traders), found that chip tunes and sample loops really weren't the final solution for the insight of computer musicians, and began to develop a program on the basis of samples, which would make simple composition of music pieces possible, in that samples were used as instruments, with 4 channels (tracks, hence the word Tracker) available - with this, one could really make a start. The program SoundTracker V1.0 wasn't sold in as great the numbers as the number of copies that were around shortly thereafter - yeah, there were plenty of crackers, and why pay when you could get it by some other means?

Soon there were umpteen versions of this program around and in the end Karsten gave up developing the program further. Understandably, who still has any interest when your own program creation is not sold, but instead widely stolen and disassembled?

Even though by today's standard SoundTracker was anything but comfortable or usable, it quickyly obtained a high degree of popularity and the program became quite widespread. It could already load 15 instruments as samples and the format was suitable for the fundamentals of MODs of the time.

SoundTracker V1.1-V2.3 were the work of various groups, in particular the following: Dr. Mabuse/D.O.C., T.I.P./The New Masters (responsible for the TNM-Coder and probably also the Floppy Disk Destroyer) and MnemoTroN/Spreadpoint. At the same time as the mysterious "Version II Professional" SoundTracker from Marco Nelissen, which should be given no special meaning, Andreas Tadic (Team 17) attempted something with the Games Music Creator, which also stole a few ideas from SoundTracker.

Noise Tacker

Mahoney & Kaktus hit upon a huge success with their Noise Tracker, which was based on SoundTacker version 2.3. Firstly, you could work with 31 instruments, and there was a seperate screen for configuration. The popularity of NoiseTracker was so enormous that even MnemoTroN/Spreadpont couldn't make a comeback with newer versions of SoundTracker (V2.4 and V2.5).

ProTracker - Part I

While NoiseTracker was enjoying an ever-growing popularity, the still relatively unknown Amiga Freelancers began at that time to take apart and improve the code from SoundTracker - what eventuated was ProTracker, with numerous new bugs and (!) features, the consequnces of their work of which Mahoney und Kaktus had well only dared to dream. ProTracker now became the de facto standard, and you see once again that only products with many bugs and features do catch on! ;)

[ProTracker V1.3]

Despite all this, for the Amiga Freelancers it was at some time all too much, and they publicly released the source code to the Internet. That was at the end of 1991; later another two versions came out, but after this it was more or less the end (from the point of view of ProTracker).

Mushroom Studios/Noxious developed V1.3 further and corrected a huge amount of bugs, also added a few meaningful features to ProTracker, but gave up with it again relatively soon, when at the beginning of 1993 Cryptoburners came out with V3.0.

The Competition

Meanwhile, MnemoTroN/Spreadpoint tried to win us over with a new variant of SoundTracker (V2.6). The special feature of this version was that the patterns (sections of a module) comprised not of 4 tracks, but every track (channel) had its own pattern. IMHO an excellent idea that was often discussed in specialist circles but didn't find many supporters. Well, I'm no expert in this area, so I have nothing I can really say, but nevertheless I find this variant somewhat more flexible.

A short time later Exolon/Fairlight surprised the world of the Amiga Sound Wizards with their self-created StarTrekker, based on NoiseTracker V2.0, which permitted you to compose with eight (!) voices. Actually, Chris Hülsbeck and Jochen Hippel also did this quite nicely with the TFMX Sound System. Then there was also a special version of NoiseTracker (1.3D), which could compress, just like IceTracker (SoundTracker 2.6 offshoot), Audio Sculpture (StarTrekker successor), and at some stage trackers started to get worse and worse, in operation at least: OctaMED, QuadraComposer to name but two examples.

ProTracker - Part II

Back to the history of ProTracker. Mushroom Studios/Noxious gave up in the end, even though many people didn't want to know anything about the new ProTracker version from Cryptoburners. The main reason was really the change from PAL LoRes (320x256) to PAL HiRes (640x256). All a question of philosophy. Now we come to a point where ProTracker took different paths. Some prefer the version from the Amiga Freelancers and Noxious, others the version from Cryptoburners and Osiris. But we'll get to Osiris later.

At some stage the Crptoburners supposedly (!) placed the source code directly into the hands of MAW, who attempetd to acheive 14 bit quality with DYN samples. He also programmed an editor that supported more than 4 voices, sound synthesis and 16 bit samples! AFAIK he could't complete his work, and after a long, long delay, at last Tom Beyer, who himself alternated between both versions of ProTracker (the versions from Cryptoburners and Noxious), decided to program his own version.

In 1996, he made public a few versions under the title of Osiris, and in 1997 even attempted an 8 channel version with many new features, but it seems he may have given up in the meantime. For the time being, V3.61 remains the last official and non-beta release of the most popular tracker in the World. And that ends our little history lesson.

"...The use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments, which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard." -- John Cage

Appendix

We have archived ProTracker version V1.3B from the Amiga Freelancers and version V2.3A from Mushroom Studios/Noxious (AGA + config fix by The Duke/SYNTEX) with MODs and workshop for V1.3B, as well as further documentation from our archive. You want this package? Just send mail.

Bernhard Lukas
Steve Bowman

ProTracker 2.3D - Mushroom Studios / Noxious

ProTracker 3.15 - Cryptoburners

ProTracker 3.61 - Tom Beyer / Osiris

Useful PT docs (LHA; 16K)

PT version history (TXT; 4K)

ProTracker main screen (JPEG; 30K)

ProTracker sampler (JPEG; 27K)

Cryptoburner's file requester (JPEG; 29K)

Cryptoburner's sampler (JPEG; 25K)

Osiris' version of PT (JPEG; 29K)