MilkyTracker 1.04 | Hacker News Reader

MilkyTracker 1.04

milkytracker.org

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If you want to try out a tracker in your web browser, there's BassoonTracker: https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/

Also, the amazing-but-curiously-absent-from-many-lists-of-trackers SunVox. Some of the demo tunes I've listened to over and over! https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ Almost all the software on Alexander Zolotov / NightRadio's site is worth checking out, both free and paid. Virtual ANS in particular is amazing for making old-school Doctor Who-style background noises.

Fun tip for Virtual ANS (it's basically just a spectrogram → audio): if you record yourself talking, look at what it looks like, then clear it out and make a bunch of little swipes and curves and stuff in the same region, you get fascinating alien speech!

Nice, they even have Guitar Slinger (GSLINGER.MOD from my memory) as a loadable example. Brings back memories...

Ditto! I don't think I've played that mod in 20+ years.

Back in the late 1990's I received a massive collection of MODs from a guy in the Netherlands, and those kept me entertained for years until MP3's took over.

The second half was so good.

SunVox is an amazing blend between tracker/sequencer and analog synth emulator.

yeah, SunVox is legitimately amazing. I wish I had enough musical skills to use it.

If you're interested in seeing a modern, full-featured tracker, check out Renoise.[1]

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renoise

I own Renoise and have played around with it for the last 12 years, and I can attest that it is better than sliced bread.

I've done this with it: https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/twothousandseventeen-feat-m...

That is really cool, thanks for sharing! I really like the intro guitar riff trill thing.

That's very cool! Back in the 90s when my computer wasn't able to play MP3's yet, MODs and XMs were the best sounding music that it could produce.

The big unique selling point of MOD/XM/S3M is that it is essentially "open source" music. You can exactly see what the artist does and how it is done as well as access all used samples.

2004's Bejeweled 2 soundtrack ([available in IT and MO3](http://www.futurecrew.com/skaven/index2.html)) was my gateway drug.

As an astrophotographer I was 100% sure I was about to discover a milky-way tracker software until I opened the link :)

As just some random person, I was about 98.7% sure this was going to be milky-way tracker software.

As an Amiga fanboi I was 99% sure this was going to be a mod-type music player in the vein of MED/OctaMED, Sound Tracker etc. Then I remembered hearing about Milky tracker a long while back and was then 100% sure ;)

Coincidentally I was trying to compile this yesterday and it failed because it did not find the RTMIDI library, which INSTALL.md says is optional: “RtMidi/ALSA (optional, for Linux MIDI support)”.

The machine I’m using does not have that library nor any convenient way of installing it right this moment, so I just moved on. I don’t know whether there will be further snags.

I just had a quick look at the CMakeLists.txt file on github and I see "find_package(RTMIDI "2.1.0" REQUIRED)" - maybe removing the REQUIRED would solve your issue?

Thanks, after doing that it still fails in the same way as when installing RTMIDI from source:

    CMake Error at cmake/FindRTMIDI.cmake:51 (string):
      string sub-command REGEX, mode REPLACE needs at least 6 arguments total to
      command.

I’ll see if I find some way of either compiling this one, or finding another one that does.

I guess they assume people gonna compile that on normal linux box

I went ahead and compiled and installed the current version of RTMIDI, and now it fails with something else that looks like some file is not compatible with current CMake:

    CMake Error at cmake/FindRTMIDI.cmake:51 (string):
      string sub-command REGEX, mode REPLACE needs at least 6 arguments total to
      command.

There might be issues even with normal linux boxes, just because of bit rot.

Oh yeah, that's bad. I guess that's why you want tests running from time to time on <current stable> even if the software itself doesn't change.

I always wondered, why are these called trackers? It's tracking the notes from a file?

The original was “Ultimate Soundtracker,” and it was so influential that derivatives often named themselves ___tracker (noisetracker, screamtracker, impulsetracker)

Ahoy on YouTube has a great video about tracker music, https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw

The term probably arose from the naming, starting with the very first one: Soundtracker (1987) on the Amiga, obviously a play on the word soundtrack. From there we got Noisetracker, Startrekker, Protracker, Fasttracker (MS-DOS) and so on.

I think Ahoy answers the question in this video [1]. I'm not sure and I'm watching it again to check

EDIT : Wikipedia says the first one was called Ultimate Soundtracker so probably from that

[1] Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw

I can't say much about the early history, but trackers have a unique UI compared to other DAW software. Instead of a staff or piano-roll, the tracker UI looks more like a spreadsheet, with each column being a channel, each row being a step, and each cell containing a note or effect.

This representation meshed well with early demoscene music storage and code, and evolved into its own subculture in the late 80's and early 90's.

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

Or because you use it to make soundtracks.

Ah, MilkyTracker! I loved using this guy all the time before eventually moving to Renoise. Still go back sometimes. Maybe now's one of those times!

I love the extremely high information density. I abhor the vast wasted space on most modern UIs.

I have very fond memories of starting my music journey with trackers back in the 90's, but moving Scream/Impulse Tracker to Fruity Loops (as it was called at the time) was such a massive level up in terms of functionality and usability.

I agree but its hard to read on mobile. Very small, lots of wasted space.

I believe @orangepurple was talking about the app UI, not the website

Ah, I suppose you are right. The text content is pretty dense on the site which definitely reminds me more of 90's era web, which is what I thought he was talking about.

there used to be excellent youtube tutorial videos for this by one brandon walsh, archived here:

https://archive.org/details/milky-tracker-tutorial/MilkyTrac...

Are there any resources for an absolute newbie to learn music production from? I really want to get into it but the dense UIs are intimidating and there doesn't seem to be a simple easy starting point.

Are video tutorials the way to go? Or should I start with music theory first? I checked out some videos but they seem to assume some music theory knowledge but I'm not sure if that's needed if all I want to do is make chiptune music.

Good news: you don't need music theory and I don't even recommend it. Bad news: it takes a lot of work to make one song. A lot.

I suggest you download Caustic for Windows (free, also runs on Linux with Wine) or Android ($10 I think): https://singlecellsoftware.com/

And just fiddle with it. You will get the hang of it. But you will see that building up an entire song takes a lot of time and effort.

Caustic is not good enough for serious business. You should aim for a DAW with plugins. But Caustic can be a very good start for someone who knows nothing. Some DAWs are easier than others. Tracktion Waveform has a very capable free version. Mulab also has a free version but with limitations.

The story people are commenting here is about a "tracker" type of DAW. I find those horribly difficult to use. I suggest you avoid them.

Coming from my perspective of having a basic understanding of major/minor scales and being able to name the notes on a piano keyboard, here’s what worked for me:

I chose a free DAW and limited myself to the built-in instruments, then I tried to recreate a song I liked from memory.

My memory and skill was bad enough that the result was nearly 100% different, but sounded good enough to me.

I just started with some percussion, then added a bass line, then added some melody on top, and finally played around with arranging it.

It took a lot of time, but was pretty fun. I hope to go back and learn how to make the song sound good outside of headphones someday!

some renoise tutorials will probably give you an idea whether you dig it enough to learn music composition

Learning music theory is a lot like learning programming (or really anything) in that you can't just frontload the "theory" and then hope to use it. Music theory is important in the sense that it helps you put a name to sounds you like, but it's much _less_ useful as a set of guiderails for composition.

That said, it's still _sort of_ useful in that sense, especially when you're getting started. My advice is to get only the very basics into your mind, and then as you start to branch out, learn what you need as you go. And don't be afraid to break the "rules" - most of the coolest stuff you will hear is stuff that upends some convention, and draws your interest by subverting your expectation.

I think that the best introduction to music theory that you can use to help get you rolling is to learn the concept of the major scale and how to use it to build the diatonic chords of any given key. Signals Music Studio is a really great channel for this, and I would recommend his intro video on the diatonic chords and chord progressions to anyone who's interested in learning more about music theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8eItITv8QA

After this, you could try programming some of those chords into a simple tool like Google's "Song Maker" toy, and play with the basic ideas. This is maybe the lowest friction way to "play with music" that I can think of.

https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Song-Maker/

Here is an example where I just programmed a really basic chord progression (Cmaj, Fmaj, Amin, Gmaj): https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Song-Maker/song/52866...

Here's an example with the same progression, but with a little more interesting arrangement. I threw this together in just a few minutes. Nothing revolutionary, but fun to do! Most of this was not done with any theory in mind besides knowing which notes belonged in each chord of the progression. I also just drew random shit at certain points, and fiddled with it until I liked it. https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Song-Maker/song/49767...

If you find that you enjoy this kind of workflow, trackers are somewhat similar. You can also go a long way just hand-entering notes into the piano roll in GarageBand or whatever other DAW (Bandlab is a pretty cool online one that is fairly easy to get started with). Once you feel like keyboard/mouse entry of notes is limited, grab a cheap MIDI controller (i.e. a piano shaped computer peripheral for entering MIDI data) and go to town. You can go very far without ever buying any gear or software.

Above all, just be willing to experiment, play, have fun. And cram as much music as you can into your head. If you like something you hear, try to work out what it was that made it cool. See if you can ape that sound, steal it, twist it, etc. There's endless fun to be had in this pursuit and it doesn't take much to get started.

Lastly I just want to emphasize once more that music theory is a descriptive language, whose main use is to help you put names to sounds you like. I found this thing that Bill Wurtz (music youtuber) wrote to be a really great perspective on the use of theory and also a good example of how the game is not to "learn the rules" but rather to find stuff you like and pull it apart to see how it ticks: https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/8n7w5k/comment...

Cool, never heard of this one. Famitracker was kind of a pain to use back when I did some NESdev, so might try out this one just for some fun.

For anyone doing this seriously, you may also appreciate the music-as-code library Pently for smaller music sizes for ROMs, especially for new games that are using mappers with smaller bank sizes.

Is there a way to or has anyone been able to use milkytracker as a decoder for a music player or even as a standalone player with the usual amenities such as playlists? I quite like how it sounds, specially when you tweak some of its settings such as setting an appropriate resampling filters for each song.

It's not the right tool for that job. What you want is e.g. XMPlay/BASS (https://www.un4seen.com/) or MikMod (https://mikmod.sourceforge.net/).

I've used xmplay and modplug, but specially xmplay don't always produce the best sounding output. I've also seen a few modules just play corrupted on xmplay... I've also used stuff like audacious to play those files with wathever tracker decoder they provide, but they don't allow much flexibility in the playback settings nor associating an specific decoder to an specific module. They usually also lack a variety of different decoders..

That's the opposite of my experience. BASSMOD (XMPlay) is, second to actually running the original replayers on the Amiga, the most accurate MOD replayer I've ever come across. Unlike e.g. Milky~ and MikMod, it already ages ago managed all of the effect commands of the "NT2" MOD standard, including the curiosities of the Amiga's audio hardware, with 100% accuracy. It has a reputation of being just as accurate for FT2, ScreamTracker and ImpulseTracker etc., though I can't confirm it personally since I never got into either of those very much.

Or UADE[0].

0. https://zakalwe.fi/uade/

Yeah Delitracker is a great choice, too, since it runs practically every replay routine ever made.

For anyone familiar with ScreamTracker and ImpulseTracker from the MSDOS days, a cross-platform IT clone SchismTracker is still maintained and relatively recently transitioned from SDL1.2 to SDL2:

https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker

Fonts at 1920x1080 resolution are very small. Are you supposed to use it at half the resolution?

If it's too smol try PT2Clone and FT2Clone. Works very well and scales nice to my high res screen. https://16-bits.org/pt2.php

Try opening this file with it

https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

Pity that no one has packaged it for flatpak yet. I guess the AppImage will have to do.

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