A story of Tracking

Ever since my first – very own – Commodore Amiga 500 home computer (despite I’d wished for the Amiga 1000), music has been a major part of my life.

For me, it all started with Deluxe Music Construction set for a short while, then I moved to Aegis Sonix for a while and then the first tracker system saw the light of day. This was the Ultimate SoundTracker a.k.a SoundTracker created by Karsten Obarski.

To be honest, I only started using SoundTracker after the modified version by D.O.C was released. Maybe it was the gold color that kept me away. I liked the silver UI much better. There ware released many different versions by many teams/people – some better than others – right up to ProTracker.

SoundTracker on Commodore Amiga, by Karsten Obarski (‘Ralley Master’ and ‘Amegas’ by Karsten Obarski)

SoundTracker is based on sampled instruments (analog or digital) so, this wasn’t the product we wished for. As Peter A, Lars and I, rather would play around with FM sounds, we had to develop the music program ourselves. This would eventually become the ‘Editor’. The Editor had both synth sound (via PCM) and sample support.

Lars wrote 99% of the code for the program in Seka Assembler and later ASM-One. The GUI (or graphics) was mostly created by Peter A but I made the mouse pointer (and maybe some minor GUI work).