I was wondering if there are any trackers out there that are very simple/basic to use. I sometimes find that the more options I am presented with, the more I spend playing with sounds and not making anything. I’ve used Nitrotracker on the Nintendo DS quite a bit and found the limited options very inspiring. It had note, velocity, a basic WAV editor with looping, and… that’s mostly it. I didn’t have to spend time thinking anything except the notes I was putting down, which worked very well for the rhythmic kind of stuff I like to make.
I was wondering if there are any trackers out there that can run on Windows 8 that are very limited, or at least allow me to make them more limited. Renoise is fine, but I was thinking of something that’s limited from the start, not having to ignore so many things on the screen. I haven’t tried many of the older trackers or know of the newer ones. Plus, there are unknown vast amounts of random uncompleted or slowly-worked-on trackers (which I am not opposed to trying). A big plus would be something with sample preview, but I understand if this is not common in trackers.
You should try Schism. It’s an Impulse Tracker clone. When you are in the pattern editor, that is ALL you see. I know of at least 1 professional musician who swears by it because he says he likes the limitations. So it might be just what you’re looking for
And of course you could always look at the list at Woolyss. It shows a screenshot of each one, so you could find the one that jives with your workflow the best.
Good luck!
P.S… When scrolling through the list at Woolyss, LittleGPTracker (aka LGPT) came to mind as one that might work for you as well.
I like Schism.
It opens IT files, and a host of MOD formats including XM files. It saves IT files.
And can render MOD’s to one or multiple wav files (one wav per track).
I even have a PC I built for a cost of $20. It runs Win95 and DOS 6. With the REAL Impulse Tracker.
Add to it Voyetra’s Sequencer Gold in DOS (Midi sequencer) with the wonderful Voyetra SAPI/VAPI/TAPI drivers and you are in business.
No kidding )))))
If you think modern sound cards are nice, wait till you use Turtle Beach Tropez with the Yamaha midi daughterboard.
At least in DOS the limitation of one program at a time forces you to actually do some work hehehehehe
Yeah, i was involved in the development of Schsim Tracker for a few years around 2006-2009… actually added a few features (mini-sharps-flats, field masks on inst/samp mapping) corrected a few bugs, and wrote some demo music.
Though i don’t consider it to be the most “basic” tracker, it sure has a small memory and cpu consumption for what it’s able to do.
Nice work delt. I hope they continue developing Schism.
I do hope also they fix that weird implementation of exporting to WAV that actually allows users to overwrite their own modules loooool
It is not a bug. It is just the confusing way it is implemented. It took me couple of hours to figure out what was happening.
Off topic (since we are in the off topic area any way):
Two camps should have merged forces and efforts to produce one program: Schism Tracker and zTracker.
Too bad, zTracker seems to be dead with no implementation of importing .MID/.RMI files
You are right, Schism is not the most basic tracker. I meant it by way of divisions of windows and panels.
You get what you see. But there is no escaping that one has to learn shortcuts etc…
I remember Screamtracker 3 as being very basic and easy to use, but unfortunately it only handles 8 bit samples and i guess you’ll have to use dosbox or something.