The Ultimate Soundtracker, or Soundtracker for short, is a

music tracker A music tracker (sometimes referred to as just tracker for short) is a type of music sequencer software for creating music. The music is represented as discrete musical notes positioned in several channels at discrete chronological positions on ...

program for the

Commodore Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

. It is the creation of Karsten Obarski, a German software developer and composer at a game development company EAS. The Ultimate Soundtracker was the first music tracker, and a pioneer of its software category.

History

Soundtracker started as a tool for game sound development for the Amiga. The program allowed for four-channel hardware mixing on all Amiga computers, but unlike subsequent versions, limited the number of samples/instruments in a song to 15. It allocated the four channels in strict fashion: melody (

lead Lead is a chemical element with the symbol Pb (from the Latin ) and atomic number 82. It is a heavy metal that is denser than most common materials. Lead is soft and malleable, and also has a relatively low melting point. When freshly cu ...

), accompaniment, bass, and

percussion A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Ex ...

. It could export the tracks as a sequence of

assembly Assembly may refer to: Organisations and meetings * Deliberative assembly, a gathering of members who use parliamentary procedure for making decisions * General assembly, an official meeting of the members of an organization or of their representa ...

instructions. A disk of instrument samples (ST-01) was distributed together with the program. Soundtracker was released as a commercial product in mid 1987. It did not enjoy success as a general music development software, with reviews calling it "illogical", "difficult" and "temperamental"; it was eclipsed in that market by programs such as Aegis' ''Sonix'' and

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted the ...

' '' Deluxe Music Construction Set''. However, the interface that The Ultimate Soundtracker pioneered became a standard for game sound production on the Amiga. Despite the original version's issues some computer enthusiasts saw its good ideas; the original code of Ultimate Soundtracker was quickly disassembled, and illicitly improved, with no consideration to Obarski's intellectual property. Soundtracker II were released by the scene group The Jungle Command, followed by a plethora of further illicit versions, by multiple different scene groups, with countless improvements compared to the official and legal commercial version. The modified versions of the program were spread across the burgeoning Amiga

warez scene The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene, is a worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups specializing in obtaining and illegally releasing digital media for free before their official sale date. The Scene distributes all fo ...

. In November 1988 Obarski released the last official release, The Ultimate Soundtracker 2. While much improved over his previous official release, it was outcompeted by the collective work of the scene groups, which at the end of 1988 had far surpassed the capabilities of the official commercial version. In 1989, the program was further improved upon by two Swedish programmers, Pex “Mahoney” Tufvesson and Anders “Kaktus” Berkeman, who released a version known as '' NoiseTracker''. Some versions turned out to be incompatible with the

Amiga OS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early versions ...

2.0, causing crashes. ProTracker was another successor, released in 1991, which solved the stability problems and made several changes to the user interface.

Notes

References

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External links

* {{youtube, 5ywaCR5Tg4A, Demo
The Tracker History Graphing Project
contains both SVG and Postscript graph of Soundtrackers' evolution. Amiga music formats Audio trackers Amiga software Public-domain software with source code

History

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

External links