Fast Tracker
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Fast Tracker, specifically Fast Tracker 2 (FT2), is a software product that was one of the most widely used trackers in the world. It was created by Fredrik "Mr. H" Huss And Magnus "Vogue" Högdahl, two members of a PC demo group called Triton (now commonly known as Starbreeze Studios) which set about releasing their own tracker after breaking into the scene in 1992 and winning several demo competitions. Fast Tracker 2 was discontinued after the release of version 2.08, though a beta version of 2.09 was leaked to the public in 1999.
Many contemporary trackers (Modplug Tracker, Skale Tracker, Renoise, MadTracker 2) are heavily influenced by FT2. It's biggest "rival" in the scene was Impulse Tracker.
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Architecture and features
The FT2 interface is largely inspired by the looks of Amiga's Protracker. The screen consists of a pattern editor in the lower half, while the upper half features an instrument selector on the right, and the general module settings and some oscilloscopes. The pattern editor can be changed to sample and instrument editors screens. The program also features a little Nibbles game.
Patterns
Pattens are essentially sheets of music where the musician is able to compose the actual musical score. A pattern consists of several rows (64 by default) and is divided to columns ("tracks"). Each row can have one note in every track. A note can look like the following:
C#4 02 20 R11
This means the note is a C#-note on the chromatic scale, played at the 4th octave, with instrument number 2. The next column is the volume setting on a 0x00-0x40 hexadecimal scale, and the last column enables a variety of effects to be applied to the sound (in this case, retriggering).
A song consists of a collection of different patterns which can be played in a user-defined order to create the final song structure.
Samples
Samples are generic raw sound data to be played back at various frequencies, much the way normal musical samplers do. Samples can have a loop start and end point which enable the sound to repeat endlessly, either repeated continiously or in a way which is called "ping-pong loop" in FT2, and essentially means the sample played back and forth as soon as the replay gets "stuck" in the loop. The musicians are able to either record samples or load existing ones, manipulate them by cutting and/or pasting parts, or just drawing them by hand. There's also a feature the crossfade the sample with itself, thus allowing the loop points to be seamless.
Instruments
Instruments are essentially arrays of samples with additional convenience features. A musician can assign different samples do different pitches of the sound, thus eliminating the possibility of a sample sounding bad if played too high or too low. Instruments support various loopable envelopes to be set on either the sound volume or the stereo panning, as well as built-in vibrato. It is also possible to set the generic settings of the instrument here: finetuning, default volume, default panning and relative starting note to C-4.
Files
Fasttracker 2 supports a variety of file formats, though often only two were used by musicians: XM (Extended Module) and XI (Extended Instrument). XM was and still is one of the most popular module formats nowadays, because of it's compact and well compressable file structure.
Compatibility
FT2 ran with a custom made DOS 32bit-extender and it's main supported soundcard was Gravis Ultrasound. This rendered the software rather flaky to use nowadays, as the recent Windows versions are quite hectic about DOS applications trying to access hardware directly, and also, Gravis soundcards are almost impossible to acquire, let alone the fact that most of them are built for ISA slots, which are absent from recent mainboards. Due to this, hardcore musicians who still want to use FT2 often build "oldskool" PC-s with the optimal (and nowadays rather cheap) hardware for the tracker, just to be able to track with it again.
An alternative way of getting FT2 to run is by using DOSBox - this however, as accurate as is, has speed and latency problems and one needs quite a muscular PC to be able to use it as comfortable as on a native environment. Other methods of usage include GUSEMU (http://www.deinmeister.de/gusemu/index.html) or VDMSound (http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound/)
Although there are also numerous clones of FT2 on various platforms, the tracker world is still waiting for the "perfect FT2 clone".
External links
- Fast Tracker 2 Resource Page (http://www.gwinternet.com/music/ft2/software/ft2.htm)
- Fasttracker 2 (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=13350) on Pouet
- MilkyTracker (http://oldschool.voodoofrog.com/milkytracker/) - a heavily FT2-based clone tracker.de:Fasttracker II