Most trackers, Renoise among them, could be characterized as a standalone sequencer instrument with some DAW features. The compelling thing was that these files were small, because they contained a few audio samples and the data on how and when to play them, so you could fit a tune that was multiple minutes in 1 megabyte or less.įor an example of what tracker software looks like: Said magazine had came with a CD that contained multiple different tracker programs and a collection of music files in different formats (MOD, XM, etc). I first discovered trackers in a French gaming magazine around 1997 or 1998, but they had already been around much longer.
Most people didn't have the internet at home before the mid-late 90s, and even when people started to have the internet at home, it wasn't like today, the music making community was smaller. Trackers were strange kinds of sequencers that were very focused on using samples to make music, and they were created at a time when memory was expensive, so you'd typically have fairly low resolution samples (8-bit 22KHz?), and people tried to use those samples creatively because you might not have many of them, both because of memory and hard drive space, but also because they weren't as easy to get as they are today. Also pitch-shifting samples so you can play them at different notes. I think they mean tricks things like reversing samples, or having a segment of an audio sample keep looping after starting playback so you could "stretch" it longer.
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