20 Years of Impulse Tracker, Part 2 | Hacker News Reader

20 Years of Impulse Tracker, Part 2

roartindon.blogspot.sg

59 pointsbane27 comments

> PC Speaker driver. Probably no one ever used this, but making the PC speaker play proper digital audio was something fun. DOSBox even emulates this quite well! This code was also responsible for the single worst bug I had during the entire IT development. When I was writing this driver, I mismatched the PUSHes and POPs in the interrupt handler; which then had a bad interaction with Microsoft's SmartDrive disk cache. The net result of this was SmartDrive trashed my hard drive and I lost over a week of work on IT and university assignments.

What a horrible and funny bug. Reminds me of Linus attempting to write AT commands to his modem, but redirecting them to the wrong /dev file and accidentally replacing the boot record of his disk drive with a Hayes command.

We used to have these tracking "competitions" for fun on IRC #trax.

Someone would create an empty .IT file containing only a bunch of samples. Then he'd DCC it to everyone that wanted to take part in the tracking compo. You then had something like 60 minutes to crate a track from those samples. Everyone would then DCC it back at the end of the time limit, he'd zip it up and DCC it back to everyone else and you could listen to what the other guys wrote. After this everyone would vote on which track they thought was the coolest. .IT files were really small back then, typically between 200k and 500k. Those were really fun times.

Ooo HN #trax virtual meetup! Which irc network were you on? Nickname? I was eggbird on IRCnet. Organized my own fair share of those fastcompos.

For those wondering what Impulse Tracker is: "Impulse Tracker is a multi-track digital sound tracker (music sequencer). It was one of the last tracker programs for the DOS platform. It was authored by Jeffrey 'Pulse Lim, and example music was provided by Jeffrey Lim and Chris Jarvis. The first released version is from year 1995 and the last version, v2.14 Patch #5, was released April 8, 1999. On February 16, 2014, Jeffrey Lim announced that he would release the complete source code of Impulse Tracker as part of its 20 year anniversary." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_Tracker

Impulse Tracker was used for more than just music.

Quite some time ago I did rotoscoping work on a high school Star Wars fan film. The movie's sound guy was an electronic musician, and he used Impulse Tracker (with the BPM set so that one tick in Impulse Tracker was one frame of video) to design the film's sound effects, which ended up being amazing.

Anybody who wants to see what Impulse tracker looked like when playing back might want to check out the following

Quick explanation: Top row left box shows the volume levels of each channel (or voice), middle box shows the name of the sample that's currently being played, right box shows the panning setting of the channel. This can get elaborate sometimes.

The middle row is the actual note, volume and effect (panning, pitch slide, etc.) data.

Bottom bit is a visualization just intended to look pretty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdXflwS4jE4

Here's another one, this time it's playback of a file from a different, older, tracker (Scream Tracker 3).

Similar setup, the very beginning shows the list of samples the composer would be working with. Composers would usually rename the samples to put a message to the listener, give credits etc. You'll notice Impulse Tracker showing a waveform of the sample in the middle right of the screen. I believe this was all textmode with custom fonts...mindblowing. There's all sorts of various playback settings you can use to tweak a sample, set loops, vibrator and even "tune" it. In effect you were building up the basic sounds for the song. There's a similar screen for describing instruments made up of these samples. It was probably on par or more sophisticate than more modern sound font technologies and you could be really craft a unique sound for an instrument from nothing more than just a short crappy 8-bit sample of a single note.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0TSCbpc2oU

Here's a tutorial on Impulse Tracker (using Schism Tracker, a modern 1:1 Impulse Tracker clone) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EdRRgxoP-g

I remember listening to fountain of sighs on IT over and over again in my youth. Jeffrey and the people who wrote the music were truly ahead of their time. Here's a link to the song: http://youtu.be/XLMqBVhZRWo

Link to download “fountain.mod”: http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&que...

My favorite MOD of all time: http://modarchive.org/module.php?68048

To me this MOD embodies all the nostalgia I have about games, programming and tech culture growing up in the late 80's and 90's.

And here I thought you were going to link to Run The Gauntlet: http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&que...

This is my favorite: http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&que...

I tried to track down author to find out if I could license it to use in my games, but failed. Anyone got advice how to do that? Maybe I should just use it and wait for the complaint?

I wrote music exclusively in Impulse Tracker 2 for well over 10 years (and it's been at least that much time since I last wrote anything). Lost all my source files not too long ago, I literally cried over it (over 500 tracks...). My backblaze backup downloaded fine, and I proceeded to resync (which wipes out the original backblaze backup on their servers), only to be faced with a corrupt zip where each file was 0 bytes :( At least I have mp3 renders, still have it all up: http://www.theoryoftrance.com/

Good old times, i used FastTracker to play around with music in my BBS days in the 90ies.

We had a really talented guy on the local BBS who made awesome music at the time (and was one of the best Duke3D players in my country), some of it is still up here:

http://www.c-eagle.de/?action=music_mods

Impulse Tracker was used for the soundtrack in a number of computer games too, right? I know for a fact that Deus Ex used .IT files for the music (and that game has a very interesting soundtrack), but I'm sure there are others as well. Deus Ex was ~2000, so we are talking after the dawn of MP3 at least.

There was a short window where games needed lots of music, but had enough other art assets that CDs wouldn't have worked. Low quality digital samples of the music sounded terrible, and the alternatives like FM-Synth (ad-lib) weren't good enough and MP3s were still too computationally intensive to decode while rendering a game.

It turns out that this type of music technology, first invented to work in the low memory environment of the original Amiga, and then advanced considerably since then, offered a great alternative. Digital samples of individual instruments were played back at different rates to simulate different notes and the note data itself was incredibly small.

While almost all Amiga (and a large number of Atari ST games) used a 4-channel version of this technique, notable games that used this kind of technology in the PC era include the original Unreal, Jazz Jackrabbit, Hitman, Deus Ex, Pinball Dreams, etc.

I can't say if Impulse Tracker was used in the production of all of these. There were custom trackers, and other popular tracking software at the time, but the basic technique was very popular during this time. It's likely that Impulse Tracker was less used than people think though as for a long time accurate playback of some of the advanced effects (filters, NNAs) outside of Impulse Tracker was pretty rare.

Quite a few video game music designers got their start writing music in this kind of environment because it was incredibly cheap to get up and running and producing music. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Brandon

Back then most trackers were free, or like Impulse Tracker, basically free except for 1 or 2 major features and you could simply rip the samples out of other songs to reuse in your own music. Since you could also "read" other people's music files, you could also learn a lot about how to construct music. Different techniques, music theory, rhythm and percussion, etc. It's kind of like open source music in a sense.

see more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

Jazz Jackrabbit and Epic Pinball were created by people from the demogroup Future Crew; I'm pretty sure those games used Future Crew's Scream Tracker 3, the tracker that IT dethroned.

It's also worth noting that the original 4-channel MOD format was almost entirely designed around exposing the capabilities of the Amiga's stock audio hardware; it was a grand day when PCs grew powerful enough to do in software what the Amiga had been doing in hardware all along.

And trackers still exist today ! Check for example MODPlug Tracker and Renoise.

I have used trackers for years, and although I use mainly modern DAWs to make music today, I have never been able to be as much prolific with them as with trackers.

Impulse Tracker. That takes me back. Fast Tracker 2 was my tracker of choice back in college. I'd use that to compose stuff in my dorm when I didn't have access to the MIDI lab.

So much nostalgia. I still have my old .it music files from way back. I look at them and it's amazing what the limitations used to do for creativity.

You wouldn't happen to be either of these Leviathans?

https://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/artist/1696/

https://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/artist/661/

Good old times!

Huge database of mod, xm, it, s3m, etc: http://www.modarchive.com/

Another really well organized one here

http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Modland

I'll add another link: https://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/.

Not the same, but nevertheless a great source of music. I lost the count of how many times I was hearing a song and though "wow, I NEED this", going immediately to modarchive searching for it.

Anybody interested in listening to loads of this kind of music should check out https://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/ which has a crowd sourced radio station. Some of the music is incredibly good (lots of it is so-so, but hey, it's group participatory radio!)

Ahh, the GUS (Gravis Ultrasound), Mode X, Borland compiler and Slackware days. When just getting Linux installed was a chore.

So much great music. I wonder how much of that is essentially lost culture these days..

You can still get most of it from ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/

Tracked music will always be inexplicably linked to the demoscene for me. If you didn't live through that era then it probably won't have any meaning to you. Much like the Amiga scene means nothing to me because I was never a part of it. Much like this guy I'll forever remember seeing Second Reality for the first time and thinking it was the most amazing thing ever created for PC at the time.

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