Explore the museum
Explore the extensive and ever-growing collection of trackers for each platform, featuring detailed information.
Explore the extensive and ever-growing collection of trackers for each platform, featuring detailed information.
SoundTracker is a music tracking tool for Unix / X11 similar in design to the DOS program FastTracker and the Amiga legend ProTracker. Samples can be lined up on tracks and patterns which are then arranged to a song. Supported module formats are XM and MOD; the player code is the one from OpenCP. A basic sample recorder and editor is also included. SoundTracker is free ("open source") software, licensed under the GNU GPL.
The name of the program is a tribute to Karsten Obarski, who released his Ultimate Soundtracker program for the Amiga in 1987 and thus unknowingly founded the basis of a huge free-music movement.
The basic concept is very simple: you have a number of sound samples, and you can arrange them on so-called tracks. A track (also called "channel") can not play more than one sample at the same time. Whereas the original Amiga trackers only provided four tracks (this was the hardware limit), modern trackers can mix a virtually unlimited number of channels into one sound stream, applying various effects to the samples used.