i’ve been reading a little skale forum and i’m glad to finally see that the stupid “tracker wars” seem to be finally over and see people being tollerant to each other, skale, renoise and madtracker, which i believe are the only trackers worth mentioning today.
i guess people realized that the personal preferences cannot be influenced nor there is a point to do so. but this forum is about renoise, so i’ll just shut up now 
still, ReNoise is the best
I tried all of them, FT2, IT, Protracker, Octamed, Madtracker, X-Tracker, Skale, Modplug, Noizetracker and Whackertracker.
All of them have advantages and disadvantages. What I liked in Modplug was the low system requirements and the high stability of this program. I also was amazed by ASIO and VST-support. Even Midi was possible.
Skale was fantastic, because as an old FT2 user, I could work with it, without having to learn new functions.
XTracker was, in the old DOS-Days the first tracker, that was able to handle more than 8 channels. I even bought this one 1995.
Renoise is currently the “sugar on top”. It has almost all features I need and those features, which I wanna have will come in the next versions. Skale is also a great product, but I have problems with 0.x-Versions because I do not save my work very often 
Currently i still find Impulse Tracker the best one developed, some of it’s very handy features and it’s structures are still not supported by trackers made for the many GUI-oriented platforms today.
Even though IT has no VST and VSTI support, not much when it comes up to native effects (just some filter-curves), it had a few more pattern commands (also for MIDI), pattern controls and better instrument structure.
But if i have to pick a tracker out of todays bunch of available composing applications, Renoise remains my first and only favorite.
Renoise is the Best!!! 
No protest!!! 
Hey dopfish, i actually started with x-tracker back in 1995
Those were the days
Maybe I’m turning off topic, but does anyone know how to use FT2 with XP ?
Thanks for the answer. I’ve tried the Dosbox before, but it was a bit too complicated too handle for me I guess. I have 1900 mhz though.
Well I have XP so I guess I cannot use QEMU… 
I’m old Amiga fun, and I try almost every tracker in the world. The best tracker for me are the new generation of trackers which are a lot better and faster for production.
My suggestion is Buzz, new BuzzLE tracker. Which is also free. Buzz support DXi, VST fx, VSTi, SoundFonts, bla bla bla, everything you need.
And with them making music is easier, faster and more user friendly. In old trackers I don’t like that you are confused and you must check every pattern separetely.
In this new trackers the best thing is visual adding of instruments, trackers, effects plus sequencer.
I preffer Buzz and alpha BuzzLE, then you can also try Psycle and Aero.
QEMU have SB16 emulation? Cause u need it for run FT2 on 44000/stereo mode.
Also how good is performance running with Interpolation+16bit mixing enabled? You need more thana PIII800 for run it?
yep, Buzz is fun, powerful and customizable but it lacks in uniformity and coherence; it’s a mess to get accustomed with hundreds of different modules, many of them mostly doing the same thing… it’s clear it’s born from many users everyone giving his own contribution but without a good unifying idea. it remembers linux and opensource philosofy 
that’s all… 
keep renoising! 
guido
modplug => trashcan. dosbox? if somebody like difficulties then please…
These are just some solutions to create XM. Of course, MPT is not as easy to handle, as Renoise is or FT2 was. But Skale?!? - Naa, not really… I prefer problems
I did only one track (not finished) with MPT and don’t want back to that… F6 to play song? never… Show me your options to make XM files on XP. I have to say that I never use FT2 because I’ve tracked on Amiga. When I started music at PC, my computer (Celeron500) was to weak for Renoise and I did something with Skale…
skale song
Today I don’t have to bother with CPU power but still need to develop some xm tunes. Renoise is hermetic. So the only comfortable way is Skale (of course it’s far from perfect now, because of unstable:/). MPT is not in the game.
FT2 was the first more professional tracker around on PC. The first serious tracker on PC was Screamtracker 3 though. (It was serious enough to lure me away from the amiga since Amiga was always better in sound)
Renoise is the midway for people that want to create professional sounding music but find MIDI-based sequencers like Cubase or Cakewalk too much of a hassle to work with.
and what?
You could try madtracker in fasttracker mode to create xm files