20 years of Impulse Tracker

20 years of Impulse Tracker

impulse tracker is better than fast tracker 2

sorry robotrobot, but you’re spreading disinformation here. ;)

Well, he is partially right and you are partially right.
Regarding the interface and Nibbles, FT2 wins by far.
But FT2 did not had filter envelopes and NNA voices which made IT2 far more advanced for its time.

Also a lot of edit options were a lot more convenient in IT2 due to the keyboard shortcut structure for those options (quick masking options, mix-paste, interpolated command ramping / humanisation etc.)
It’s quite a while ago for me, so i might have forgotten quite a few nice things about IT2 vs Ft2.

Eventually it still remains a matter of taste and desired / accustomed workflow habits.

I was a Fast Tracker user. Fuck IT! :)

All I remember from Impulse tracker was that their own users pirated the shit out of the WAV output component and treated the developer like shit by emailing him death threats lols or something equally ridiculous?

I’m glad Mr Lim is remembering things more positively then when he announced he was cancelling the project. Time heals all wounds.

There was frankly one user that drifted Jeffrey to that boundary indeed. However, he did still created the IPX network driver for its registered users (2.15) so that collaboration across a LAN was possible (or running multiple PC’s so that you could cross the track boundary of 32).
That action however did set a mark pushing some sense of awareness into people to have respect for the many hours of work that people put into their work and release the majority of functions freely usable by anyone without giving anything in return (than just some good modules in the PD scene).

I personally did not had any understanding of why one should even pirate the stereo wav-driver: I knew folks that used the trick of rendering the mono output twice (left channel tracks, then the right channel tracks) and mixing both left/right output into a wav-mixer. (the mono rendering also was free of use) so there was a already a legal way to play a dick without needing to make something clear to Jeffrey.
I was already quite pissed just for the idea that people really don’t understand what assembler programming involves at all (regarding knowledge and organization).

Then we have the so called promised Impulse Tracker 3 and it is still as dead as a rock.
I suspect that ReVisIT gives a good available alternative to that IT3 idea. It has a few practical examples that people also crave for to have in Renoise.

hey don’t shoot the messenger. kaneel said impulse tracker is better than ft2 so I’m going to have to parrot that when I instigate the age ol debate.

IT had a 64 track limit on a single system. You didn’t need to do any weirdness with multiple computers. I used it up until I had to switch to Renoise because I couldn’t find good DOS hardware anymore. I still miss a lot of IT’s features. In fact, the NNA loop release feature is still something that I miss.

“Leaking Renoise means loosing your license!” --bitches! :)/>/>/>

I think fucking Pulse over and rubbing his nose in it is one of the great tragedies of our scene. If you read the article’s comments, it’s obvious that there were a great many people for whom this program was a first course in music production and composition. If Jeff has continued to be a creator of music tools, our world would look a bit different today.

Not to excuse anybody, but I think it’s easy to forget that Tracker culture came out of the pirated software scene. Many of us used to run around on BBS’ decorated with ANSI art that glorified vandalism and drug abuse. Demoes used to accompany pirated software releases. I’m a professional Media Programmer these days, but I cut my teeth in the early 90s on assembler cracked copies of 3D Studio (r3 way before MAX!), Photoshop 3, Fractal Design Painter, Cakewalk and Sound Forge. These days, I buy all my stuff legit, but once upon a time, we weren’t just designery types with fancy gear, we had cobbled together hardware, wore punk uniforms and pretended we were the artist class of Gibsonian cyber gangs. Man, it was fun! :)/>/>

Just as there are little rich suburban assholes hanging out at your warehouse and tagging your living room when they should be out tagging billboards and trains, there were little idiots who didn’t know that there is a difference between ripping off Adobe, Autodesk and Cakewalk, and snatching a meager few bucks out of the mouth of some student in Adelaide who was weighing his future career options, and then writing him to tell him what a loser he is.

Ugh! IT3… this is how I learned about vaporware… so frustrating. Chris Nash’s ReVisIT was something I always wanted to try, but I was never deep enough into another DAW. I was even a betatester for it, but I never had sufficiently hot gear back then to run fancy DAWs and VSTs. Then Renoise came along and it was the closest thing to what I needed…

Even if it did have an interface that reminded me too much of some other totally useless tracker: FT2… yeah, FT2 sucked. All flashy interface with B grade features sporting fancy names. Nothing bugs me more than an interface that spends more time looking cool than actually being useful.

ImpulseTracker, 64 visible channels, 256 virtual channels.

The workflow was and is beyond any tracker I’ve ever used. Hence why Paketti exists for Renoise and why I carry my own KeyCommands.xml around to make Renoise palatable.

Sure, FT2 could, you know, sample and edit samples. fast. but IT2 would load the .xm’s saved after the sampling sessions.

I think the only real issue I had with IT2 was that it didn’t have compatibility modes like ST3 had, where you’d be told which portions of your track made non-amiga-4channel-module-compatible modules. That’d be pretty sweet to know even now.

It was fun tracking for .XM compatibility with IT2 tho, for intros + demos + sometimes diskmags.

We’re missing something big here friends :

  1. IT2 >>> FT2 (what would they discuss anyway… ^^)

And 2) SNES > Megadrive/Genesis

Just not to forget. :wink:

Only a reflection:

Impulse Tracker was my first tracker.I tried other trackers but not convince me.With IT got to make a CD of 10 tracks, about 63 minutes, electronic and new age music type.The quality was basic, but it frees creativity.Now, with Renoise, evolution is evident, and with current hardware and software can do wonders.It really is overwhelming!!!

I remember IT with great affection! :slight_smile:

Today is Sunday, and in Spain we eat paella! ñam ñam!!!

first music software i ever used…on the ol’ 486 33mhz.

I remember being blown away watching the panning moving in time with the music separately on each track.

I heard it has an interesting pitch envelope as well…like you could make sweet melody with the pitch envelope.