SoundTrackers were the first tools of the computer-only music era. These Trackers were used to create so called modules (XM, MOD and others). XM may stand for: XM Satellite Radio, a United States broadcasting company. ... Ministry of Defence or Ministry of Defense may refer to the Ministry of Defence in: Afghanistan China France Guatemala Greece India New Zealand Norway Saudi Arabia Singapore United Kingdom Soviet Union This is a disambiguation page — a list of articles associated with the same title. ...

They were characterised by their austerity, making them look like hexadecimal hacking programs, and their total lack of liveness. Conversely, they allowed ultra-fast composing and great ease of use once mastered.

The name of the program is a tribute to Karsten Obarski, who released his SoundTracker program for the Amiga in 1987 and thus unknowingly founded the basis of a huge free music movement which developed in the following years and which is still going strong. Karsten Obarski (born May 11, 1960), handle Obi, is considered a pioneer of the demo scene for the creation of the program Ultimate Soundtracker, the ancestor of all Trackers. ... The Amiga is a family of home/personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation as an advanced game console. ... 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

How it works:

Samples can be lined up on tracks and patterns which are then arranged to a song.

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.

Tracks which are played at the same time are grouped to form a pattern. A pattern typically has 64 entries per track; these entries are cycled through at equidistant time intervals. A basic drum set could thus be arranged by putting a bass drum at entries 0, 4, 8, 12 etc. of one track and putting some hihat at entries 2, 6, 10, 14 etc. of a second track. Of course you can also interleave bass and hats on the same track, if the samples are short enough -- they can't overlap, otherwise the previous sample is stopped when the next one sets in.

Finally, a module is a compact file containing various patterns and samples, including a position list which specifies playback order of the patterns, forming a song. Modern SoundTrackers like the OpenSource Modplug OpenMPT can load different types of modules in the popular formats. Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...