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Comment by Theizestooke | Hacker News Reader

What's the best tracker currently for Windows or Linux? Googling I found OpenMPT (https://openmpt.org/), would be curious about others.

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If you fancy the retro vibe, someone has ported Fast Tracker 2 to modern OS's: https://16-bits.org/ft2.php. From what I've heard, Renoise is the most "modern" tracker. Buzz is another interesting one, not sure what the status of that is these days.

> Buzz is another interesting one, not sure what the status of that is these days.

Buzz is great software, the modular concept was fantastic. I don't think Oskari has worked on it since 2016 - http://jeskola.net/buzz/beta/files/changelog.txt

It still works though, and there is something of a community - http://forums.jeskola.net/

The other well known, working and portable ones would be MilkyTracker, Schism Tracker and Renoise.

MilkyTracker is UI compatible with FastTracker 2, Schism Tracker is UI compatible with Impulse Tracker and Scream Tracker.

Renoise is more of a crossover of digital audio workstation with a tracker.

Also Sunvox is pretty good and very portable. https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

I've recently tried to get back into tracking and I've found OpenMPT to be one of the worst modern trackers. Yes, it adds lots of modern features but its very poorly documented, there are barely any tutorials and what few do exist are more focused on "drawing" samples than actually using the program to make music. I also dislike that I can't quickly go through my samples directory and try a melody on each sample like I could with the trackers of yore.

So far, Schism Tracker is more usable I've found, but it feels like running Impulse Tracker in DOSBox, which, granted, it not necessarily a bad thing.

In the end, I may just suck it up and pay for Renoise.

Madtracker is a bit better imho. https://www.madtracker.org/about.php Has full .xm fasttracker 2 compatibility, plus a more powerful .mt2 format that supports vsti/vst and built-in effects, automation etc.

Renoise is the kitchen sink, its probably the most powerful tracker you can get, a bit overwhelming even to someone like me that spent over 10 years every day using them: https://www.renoise.com/

I used ModPlug Player (https://www.modplug.com/), the predecessor of OpenMPT, years ago. I was pretty pleased with it back then, although the alternatives mentioned by the others may be more modern/better nowadays (wow, the latest version of ModPlug Player is from 2002!). I still have an archive of MOD files somewhere in the depths of my hard disk, maybe I should try to find them and indulge in some nostalgia...

SchismTracker is a somewhat maintained GPL ImpulseTracker clone that runs on Mac/Win/Linux (SDL).

https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker

I recommend you to look at SunVox - https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

It's multi platform tracker with modular synthesizer functionality.

+1, sunvox is awesome. Also available for iOS/Android, it works perfectly on my Moto G8 Plus, even with the more complex examples provided.

It only needs that sf2 compatibility to reach absolute perfection.

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