Someone Is Stealing Tracker Songs and Selling Them | Hacker News Reader

Someone Is Stealing Tracker Songs and Selling Them

erikmcclure.com

148 pointsblackhole34 comments

Am i the only one who has no clue what a "Tracker Song" is?

The article barely touches on this, saying vaguely "The songs that were stolen were often used in keygen cracking software that was popular in the 2000s to pirate software" -- so the music was used as a key for the keygen? Or was it just included for giggles? Or is it a fingerprint intended for actual tracking?

edit: thanks for all the replies, some really great info below!

Keygen cracking software would sometimes play music while the software was open. It was just for giggles AFAIK.

Great for waking up your parents, too!

I think they were just artistic flourishes added by the tracker groups, crackers, etc.

I think "Tracker" is the name for a service that keeps track of p2p links. Some trackers are/were extremely exclusive and tight-knit with interviews and quizes to get in. You also had to work hard to maintain an upload/download ratio. Some, like thepiratebay are open and simply highlight quality downloads.

What.CD was a legendary private tracker if you want to look further into it.

Nope, it’s about a type of music software rooted in the demo scene, with overlaps with the cracking scene: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

I think you and I posted this within seconds of each other :p

Wow, that's the first result on google. I've been noticing a trend of mental laziness in myself in the past few months.

Time to do something about it.

Actually it's a type of sequencer used to make music for sound chips.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

A "tracker" is a piece of music composition software, sort of a glorified spreadsheet. Imagine a virtual piano roll, with note and instrument data laid out over time.

The vast majority of tracker music was initially in a format called MOD, since it originated the format. MOD's specification was matched to the capabilities of the Amiga sound chip, which proved limiting as time went on, so other formats emerged. Formats and file extensions now include STM, S3M, XM, and countless more. The collective term "tracker music" is easier than trying to enumerate them all.

Trackers are differentiated from note-data formats like MIDI in that a tracker song includes the samples themselves, little snippets of WAV-like data which are played at sped-up or slowed-down sample rates according to the note data. Whereas a MIDI file only includes the notes and timing information, which gets sent to "instruments", which are responsible for translating those commands into sound. Different instruments may do it differently, so a MIDI can sound vastly different depending on what player you're using. A tracker song will sound roughly the same everywhere, barring bugs, with the only difference being that certain player software may have higher-quality math (higher CPU usage) for the sample-rate adjustment and mixing.

Because of their self-contained nature, containing only the sound samples actually used in a given song, tracked music was popular in video games and in the game cracking scene alike. (All the music in Star Control 2 is embedded MOD files, for instance.) And like anything else in what became the demo-scene, the mantra of doing more with less, making enjoyable music in just a few K of note data and samples combined, became its own factor to compete on.

Modarchive.org is the place to go to experience tracker music now; there are players that run in your browser. Click through the top couple songs and you'll get a feel for not just the format but also the era, since the heyday of MOD was the early 90s, much of it fits right into what we now nostalgically think of as 90s electronica.

Just to add that while most tracked music in the 90s was electronica, there were others who tried different genres. My favorite example is Leviathan's "Dust To Dust", a Scream Tracker 3 composition that tended towards jazz / soft rock with something like a saxophone sound for the lead - once it gets going about a minute in. You can even see briefly in the song notes at the start, Leviathan says "I hopefully will never be forced to return to the typical demomusic genre":

https://youtu.be/gFWrHFQdb7E

But even with the original MOD format, Bjorn Lynne / Dr Awesome wrote a lot of Prog Rock MODs inspired by Genesis and other bands.

Oh absolutely! And thank you -- I didn't mean to minimize the genre but I guess I did.

I think my favorite opposite-of-electronica would be Joegir Liljedahl's "Guitar Slinger", which he somehow manages to fit into a 4-track MOD, but it sounds like there's so much more going on.

Smallest-favorite would be "echoing", which is 43k uncompressed, and manages to be pretty listenable despite its simplicity. It's really fun to watch the rhythm track in a player that shows you the scrolling data...

Lots of online mod players

Here's the first one I found

https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/

So is tracker music related to chiptunes at all? That's the term I've always associated with the style of music commonly embedded in the cracking programs I used in my misbegotten youth.

Doesn't have to be. It is more related to the style of sequencing . Now there's even a hardware device that does this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQufJBVvAtY

It is something that was popular in 90's. XM and MOD formats were common in this neck of the woods at least (Estonia). That was before MP3 was a thing. Kind of like MIDI, but sample audio was also embedded in the file. Named after FastTracker 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastTracker_2

Correction. Not named after FastTracker 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

There is a great video on youtube that explains how it all works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs

He gets into the explanation of how the tracker software works about 8min 30seconds in.

Typically though if you got a cracked game at that time it would have the crackers group name and there would be a little graphical demo and some tracker music.

The way I understand the tracker scene, most don't care about restricting distribution of their tracks. But when others are actually selling, I'd think some authors might disagree with that.

The original authors can sue. And given the extensive documentation on these tracks, it would be an easy case. But whether there'd be any money to recover is unclear. Given the paltry damages you likely get when you're not selling yourself and tolerating copying anyway. Also the seller might be hard to reach legally, and you'd still have to actually sue, which comes with costs.

So the other route is sending notices to at least damage the business model.

Just a quick note because it's often confused: the fact that you tolerate infringement in one place will not affect a judgement in another. That will happen with trademark, but not copyright.

Yes, I didn't want to imply that not suing in other cases would change the legal options. And while I'm not deeply familiar with the topic, I just remember that determining damages depends in part on the price you charge for licences. So I think when you don't licence but tolerate unlicensed distribution, it becomes harder to argue for damages.

Though as another commenter has pointed out, in the U.S. at least there are statutory damages.

> Given the paltry damages you likely get when you're not selling yourself and tolerating copying anyway.

Aren't there statutory damages?

Yes, statutory damages of $150,000 for each work infringed. The fact that it was commercial infringement would be aggravating and more supportive of the full penalties if litigated.

But lawyers often repeat the phrase "you can't squeeze blood from a turnip." It's unlikely that whoever infringed the copyright would be able to afford a judgement like this, and so suing them would be pointless. DMCA would be an easier way for the actual copyright holders to take this down without bankrupting themselves on fruitless litigation.

A note to the OP: copyright infringement is not "stealing" because infringement does not deprive someone else of the use of the work. You wouldn't download a car.

Sure, but "you can't recover damages because the other person has no money to take" is a totally different argument from "you can't get damages because the other person didn't cause any harm".

Thanks for expanding on it. But just to be clear, statutory damages are "up to" $150,000 in the U.S. I don't think a court would award that much in this case. Do you know of comparable cases that got the maximum?

Is it possible that the original author of these tracks is the one who has uploaded them to DistroKid? In which case it's not stealing at all. I guess it's fairly unlikely, though.

It's possible but I doubt they would change their artist name. Usually when artists have multiple handles, for both legal and artistic reasons, they re-release a song using the original name.

The exception is when a solo artist wants to "cover" a song they wrote as part of a band.

Seems unlikely. The tracks that Erik was able to identify were by a wide enough range of artists that it's hard to imagine that they'd all collaborate on a CD release.

I believe Pud is on HN. He can perhaps provide the DistroKid response?

despicable.

i am curious what legal protections these kinds of art forms/music have?

There are people not only hijacking copyrights in this genre, but in every genre.

doesn't make it less disgusting, does it

Others among us find copyright off-puting.

There's some irony when people are complaining about music stolen from keygen cracking software. How dare they steal from us while we stole from others!

I believe the author just gave this as a popular example where tracker music can be found. Not a lot of people are fully aware of the "demoscene", where this music/tech is still quite popular. The cracker scene and demoscene have some common roots (and I think still some personnel overlaps), but I met/know plenty of people who aren't into stealing/distributing cracked software, but are very much into the demo scene, producing wonderful pieces of art without breaking any copyright or other laws ;-)

If you have no idea what I'm talking about (and mind that I'm not involved with either scene), check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

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