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.
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
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.
I’m not going to use vst with skale. in pure xm I don’t see many bugs (maybe I’m blind). I don’t know what with you, but I’m making music with scale at this moment, so what’s wrong? It’s comfortable for me, fast moving inside patterns and between… easy editing…
I used Modplug for years. When the program became open source, I even compiled myself a version for my personal needs. Of course, MPT is different from the Amiga-Versions of Octamed, Protracker or Noisetracker and MPT is also very different from Skale, FT2, IT or Renoise but it is possible to configure MPT that you can use it almost like FT2.
F6 is for playing the song, yes but the right CTRL-Key works the same after setting up the keybindings. The trick is to use a custom keymap and just set it like you want to have it.
The only reason, why I do not use MPT anymore is that VSTi never worked and the soundquality was poor compared to Skale or Renoise.
AFAIK Modplug is the most stable tracker I ever used…
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