ProTracker 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 a ...

for the

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 ...

platform. A free software tool that required no additional equipment, it became popular in the early 1990s with both amateurs and professionals, allowing for sample-based music in the MOD file format.

Introduction

''ProTracker'' allows the user to create sequences of notes called "patterns", which are chained together to form a complete song. Music created in ProTracker uses the

MOD Mod, MOD or mods may refer to: Places * Modesto City–County Airport, Stanislaus County, California, US Arts, entertainment, and media Music * Mods (band), a Norwegian rock band * M.O.D. (Method of Destruction), a band from New York City, US ...

file format. It was initially developed for the

line of computers, but was later made available for other platforms such as the

Atari ST The Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the Atari 8-bit family. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985 and was widely available in July. It was the first pers ...

Features

Building upon the features of previous trackers such as

Ultimate Soundtracker The Ultimate Soundtracker, or Soundtracker for short, is a music tracker program for the Commodore Amiga. It is the creation of Karsten Obarski, a German software developer and composer at a game development company EAS. The Ultimate Soundtracke ...

and

NoiseTracker NoiseTracker is a freeware tracker created in 1989 for the Amiga platform. It was based on the Ultimate Soundtracker and developed by Pex "Mahoney" Tufvesson and Anders “Kaktus” Berkeman. It was used by Amiga game musicians to create music wit ...

(of which ProTracker's code is based on), ProTracker came equipped with a built-in sample editor and a keyboard split function to assign multiple instruments to different regions of the

keyboard Keyboard may refer to: Text input * Keyboard, part of a typewriter * Computer keyboard ** Keyboard layout, the software control of computer keyboards and their mapping ** Keyboard technology, computer keyboard hardware and firmware Music * Musi ...

. Later versions also extended the MOD format by increasing the maximum number of patterns from 64 to 99, and adding a number of additional effects. ''ProTracker'' is capable of playing back music at the correct speed on both

NTSC The first American standard for analog television broadcast was developed by National Television System Committee (NTSC)National Television System Committee (1951–1953), Report and Reports of Panel No. 11, 11-A, 12–19, with Some supplement ...

and

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a colour encoding system for analogue television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

computers. Previous tracker software used playback routines which were synchronized to the

refresh rate The refresh rate (or "vertical refresh rate", "vertical scan rate", terminology originating with the cathode ray tubes) is the number of times per second that a raster-based display device displays a new image. This is independent from frame rate ...

of the screen, which would cause music composed on one standard to sound incorrect on computers of the other standard due to the differing refresh rates.

Open source remake

There is an ongoing effort since 2010 to make an

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

clone of ProTracker for modern platforms at

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

.Protracker 2.3 clone
/ref> The also "ProTracker 2.3D clone" named software is developed under the

BSD 3-Clause License BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lice ...

and available for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

, and

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

Notes

External links

ProTracker
at pouet.net
ProTracker v2.3D clone for modern platforms
on

o
Debian

ProTracker tutorials
on

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

{{AmigaOS Audio trackers Public-domain software with source code Amiga software

Introduction

Features

Open source remake

See also

Notes

External links