h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just to fill in some details here:

The first Amiga tracker was The Ultimate Soundtracker by Karsten Obarski. It came with a specific set of instruments (mostly sampled from the Yamaha DX100) and you could not add your own samples. Later incarnations allowed you to add your own samples using an awful system using a "Preset List". You had to manually add your own sounds to the preset list file before you could use them inside the program, and the instruments had to be on disks labelled ST-xx, where xx was a value from 01 to 99 (ST-00 being the song disk).

You couldn't by this point save out a "module" or MOD. All soung were saved out as separate song data and when loaded back in, each instrument had to loaded back in from the relevant instrument disks.

Sounds awful, but people were producing some pretty amazing stuff by this point.

There was another similar type of tracking program called SoundFX, written by software company Linel and originally intended only for internal use. The preset samples were much nicer than the Soundtracker ones and the interface was quite a lot better. Music for games such as Lemmings were created with SoundFX.

It must have been around this time that Oktalyzer appeared. I remember when I saw this program, I didn't quite understand it. It looked sort of like Soundtracker, but had 8 channel lists instead of 4. I was speechless when I realised that it was actually an 8 channel music program and really couldn't work out how it was done. I don't think it was used much though due to the processor requirements of doing 8 channels.

The next major revision was NoiseTracker by Mahoney & Kaktus (who produce some huge impressive music compilation disks with it). A lot of previous problems were sorted out with this release. It inherited the music format of the previous incarnation of Soundtracker, but the interface was improved and you could have a nice pink colour scheme by switching on the caps lock key. You could save out modules (complete songs with song data and instruments in the same file) which made life much easier, but took up much more disk space as everybody had already made their huge collection of ST-xx instrument disks by now. A sample editor was built into Noisetracker so you could sample and edit your sounds directly - a fantastic addition which made the whole program come together as a complete "music workstation".

Next up - Startrekker. This was very similar to Noisetracker, but had an 8-channel mode and again a few interface improvements. This was the tracker of choice for a while.

Protracker is the one that is remembered the most. It was again written by a different author and inherited the best of Noisetracker and along with many more effect commands and features. The sample editor was improved, as was various other parts like file handling ans so on. I stuck with Startreckker until Protracker reached v2.0. By this time there was nothing to beat it. To this day, it remains the best tracker.

The other tracker, which probably appeared around the time of Noisetracker was MED. It was just another tracker with no improvements, yet it started to gain a following. The hardened tracker like myself however thought it was awful and cheap and didn't steer away from the better control that was given by Noisetracker. It also saved it's own (unnecessary) music file format, which made it seemlike it was trying to distance itself from the usual Tracker while giving no extra benefit whatsoever. Music for Lemmings 2 and Hired guns was written using MED, however.

During the reign of Protracker, OctaMED was released. This was an 8-channel version of MED, and yet, although the interface by this time had got much better, it was not Protracker. The control and immediacy of Protracker simply wasn't there. By now, OctaMED had become the program for mostly people who dabbled a bit in tracking, whereas
Protracker was for the game music Professionals and demo musicians.

Protracker's best incarnation was/is version 2.3b which was the definitive one. It had everything needed. Later versions (from 3 onwards) changed the interface to a high-res mode which seemed like a good idea but the program got diluted in some way and didn't seem like the same program anymore. There were a lot of off-putting confusing additions and removals which meant that it didn't really catch on.

Let's not forget some of the other trackers:

Mugician - not like anything else. Written by the author of the old SIDmon and BUGmon. SIDmon started life as a C64 tracker, but the Amiga incarnation allowed real synthesized instruments unlike any other tracker. BUGmon was a version of SIDmon with most of the bugs fixed. Mugician was a pretty amazing program. The interface was pretty bug-ridden, but some of the sounds you could get from it were amazing. There is now a PC version of Mugician called Jaytrax (available at [link removed by moderator]) with many more effects and synthesis options, along with many more channel of course. There was a 7 channel version of Mugician which was never publically released, that was used on the title screen for the game Hoi (also written by the author of Mugician).

Future Composer - based on the player written by game musician Jochen Hippel. This tracker allowed very Commodore 64 sounding Pulse Width Modulation effects. Used mostly for Thalion games (Jochen Hippel) and some demos.

TFMX - Designed and used by Chris Huelsbeck for his game music (mostly Factor 5 games). Designed specifically for games, so was very efficient and programmer oriented. Allowed 7 channel music (like on the title screen of Turrican2), and a host of weird features like real-time pitch shifting and real-time sample reversal using some relatively easy programming tricks.