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Comment by harel | Hacker News Reader

I graduated from Amiga trackers to a full fledged studio, with hardware mixers, synths, effect racks etc. And then, years later, back again to just a computer. Full circle.

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I messed around with the Amiga trackers back in the day. When I look at the software available today, e.g. on my iPad, I have a hard time getting anything useful out of it. Which software are you using now?

SunVox is a fantastic modern tracker that runs on pretty much anything.

True, but SunVox is so much more than just a tracker. In my experience with (PC) trackers they rely mostly on modifying pre-recorded samples. SV on the other hand allows you to chain together a crazy array of synth modules to produce sounds "from scratch".

True. I think SunVox is a superset of what normal trackers can do: you're fully able to limit yourself to samples.

Well there's Renoise, there's Jeskola's Buzz (the changelog starts at 2008 but I'm sure I used it well before that), Noise Trekker had a synth as early as 1999. Adlib Tracker? You're still right in that for the most part, for a long time, tracking on the PC meant FastTracker or ScreamTracker, and those just used samples. But we've come a long way since then in the early 2000s.

Buzz was around in 1999 (I think - I first used it in 2000/2001) but circa 2001 the coder had a hard disk crash and lost his code, and finally resumed work on it in 2008 from a much older codebase or possibly from scratch. I assume that's part of why the changelog starts in 2008.

I miss the 1998-era softsynth with built-in tracker Analogic, later called AXS (or was it the other way round?). http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=11012&page=1

I personally have left trackers. They are fun but the learning curve! I use Waveform 9 from Tracktion. (Tracktion open sourced the engine and it works on Linux, Win and Mac.

This is the fastest DAW from nothing to something like a song, and for people just starting it has pretty much everything you need to make some kind of song. https://www.tracktion.com/products/waveform

My favorite tracker-like DAW is Renoise: https://www.renoise.com/

Cross-platform, can use VSTs and samples, lively community, lua scriptability. It's pretty awesome all the way around.

Post trackers, I've been using Cubase since it was delivered on a single Floppy disk. Had about 13 years of silence (sold my gear, had kids) and then got back to it a couple years ago (shameless plug: https://soundcloud.com/earlofwoffington).

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