First part: Once upon a time in 1987Š ========================================== What computers sounded like in 1987? .................................... By these times, the music was often limited to a 3 or 4 voices chip, noisy and just bearable. Well, it sounded already nice to have more than a beep outside the machine, and left your friends and family without any voice in front of this kind of miracle. However, especially on C64, some artists (and we could say as well programmers), managed to bring, despite of these limitation, some kind of magic music. To go further, you had then to buy one of these famous 16-bits. The choice was restricted: Atari ST or Amiga. The Atari charmed many professional composers for his onboard Midi interface, allowing Keyboards connection and using sequencers. On the other hand the sound-chip on the Atari was not better than the Amstrad one, except it has 4 channels... a true shame. Only Amiga made it possible. ............................ Next to it, the Amiga 500 was released at an affordable price, and the sound chipset was far better than Atari ST (could we only compare them?). Also it was a totally graphic oriented machine. It was THE computer to have for creation. It was also the first multitasking and co-processor home computer, running at 7.14Mhz. The only thing that could then stop the Amiga, was the poor number of softwares. But like any new non-standard computer (by these times, each machine was compatible with itself only, even of the same brand sometimesŠ) the time started to work for it, because developers believed in it more than ever... Electronics Arts was part of them, and a 21 year old German employee, a certain Karsten Obarski, didn't know he would write a part of the musical computers history. A legend named Karsten. ....................... When I get my own Amiga, in December 1987, it was to develop, as a graphist, an adventure game with some friends. Our musician made the soundtrack on the most accurate software then: Aegis Sonic. To compose anything on sonic, you had then better to be a true musician, knowing solfege and being patient. It's fun when you learn that Sonic worked the same way than the first soundtrackers: with instruments disks (including samples), asked by the system when needed... but that's the only possible comparison. Now I wonder how could have been the tunes if our musician had known Soundtracker then. (It was too late to come back anyway). So, Karsten Obarski, as a programmer and musician (remember that at this time, it was frequent that one person could make a whole game: coding, music, gfx), decided to code his own music software... this would be the Ultimate Soundtracker. Ultimate? NeverŠThe legend was on the way. The principle of tracking ......................... Used first to make their custom tunes, it quickly appeared to Karsten and Electronic Arts that it would be a good opportunity to release a commercial version. Was it a mistake or not? At least, for today's mods scene, it was the best idea of the world. Even if, like some people said, it would have been done sooner or later. He has done it first, so what? Although some kind of trackers was existing on C64 before, it was nothing really like Soundtracker (these couldn't work with samples, that's the essential difference that makes the big gap). You all know how work trackers, using samples played in different frequencies to reproduce notes, but the amiga was the first one to allow this kind of operation. It was then on 4 channels (This is false stereo. A true stereo channel allows setting the panning anywhere at any time), 2 on left, 2 on the right. The maximum sampling rate was 28Khz on Amiga 500 (44Khz for A500+). (Against 44Khz of a common card on PC nowadays, reaching 96Khz on the Soundblaster live! Series, for example). Any user of first Soundtrackers would still remind and tell you: composing was easier, faster and funnier, but these versions were not so reliable. The modules format did not exist, it was a 'song' format, where only patterns and infos were saved. The program claimed for the needed instrument disks (the famous ST-xx, the ST-00 was reserved as song disk) when the song loaded, and you had had better make no fatal manipulation. Also the instruments were limited to 16. All became simpler when the module support came out with Soundtracker 2.1.You could then save both patterns and instruments in the same file, and spread your pieces of music without caring if the rest of the world had the specific instruments disks... The Soundtrackers' wave. ........................ Since the first Soundtracker was released, an incredible number of clones, copies, or programs inspired or totally code-based on it were spread trough the world. If we except Future Composer or Sidmon then, any tracker was based on the soundtracker ideas. For example, MasterSoundtracker (By Exterminator) was a continued version of the Ultimate Soundtracker, then itself continued by TIP (The New Masters) , continued by Unknown (DOC) and so on... And this is one of the reasons that pushed Karsten Obarski to stop the development of Soundtracker. Why continue when everybody was re-coding his jewel, always improving and this for free, while he wasn't systematically credited as the first coder? (Excepting the very first releases of Soundtracker). And not only demogroups started to clone Soundtracker, but some were also using Obarski's excellent tunes in their intros (like Impact using Rallye Master, or Bamiga Sector One using Blueberry for the crack of the game 'Carrier Command'). Quick extra to say that in 1993, interviewed by Mattias Dahlberg (Amiga Disk Mag), Karsten Obarski planned to release his new own-made tracker on many platforms. However he cancelled the project release of this product, certainly aware of what happened before with Soundtracker. He used it to compose the game soundtrack of Oil Imperium (Reline Software). Curiously, some players of the Dyter07 (format name) are existing (like Eagleplayer on Amiga or WinAmp on PC, with a plug-in). One of the first and most famous version was certainly Soundtracker 2.1. Famous because coded by 'Unknown' (his real pseudo) of Doctor Mabuse Orgasm Crackings (DOC), -still crediting Obarski as first coder-, famous for his animated mouse pointer and finally famous for his huge scrolltext (in terms of length) in a ridiculously small window. Stories told in a scrolltext were usual during these years, some stupid ones (like the DOC one), some funny, many without interest, and I won't talk anymore about the never-ending greetings too... You'll know more about DOC in the second part of this article. Soundtracker 2.1 included Modules (saving only), PLST (Preset LiST, previously known as PSET : PrSET) (An index of the samples you have on all your disks, allowing you not to search on each disk to find a specific instrument) but the disk requester did not let you continue if you could not insert the asked disk. (A trick consisted in naming any disk as the same of the missing disk, e.g. ST-03, and then Soundtracker only loaded the song without missing instruments, but didn't suspend the system).And the spectrum analyzer was really nice! The new versions of Soundtracker were sometime released a few weeks after each other, adding more or less useful options, but more reliable versions started really on the Soundtracker 2.5, still programmed by Mnemotron. He was also responsible of several versions (from 2.3 to 2.6). A strange and often contested evolution of the Soundtrackers was the version 2.6 by Mnemotron (Spreadpoint). The new feature was that every track had its own pattern (modules'section), instead of the usual pattern which included the whole 4-tracks. This meant more facilities to build up a tune, but more complex architecture to manage. It didn't reach wide success. While all these trackers were widely released and were spreading like a fire, Marco Nelissen programmed Soundtracker Pro, based as well on the Ultimate Soundtracker. He never released this product, however he released the Soundtracker Pro II a few years later. The last version, 2.4, came out in 1996. Meanwhile, some coders decided to add major improvements to Soundtracker, and so arrived the first clones. The clones. ........... Without the clones, Soundtracker would be on its version 60.5 ;-)Š First clone, Noisetracker, from Mahoney & Kaktus, added more features, especially the 31-instrument support. Noisetracker was based on Soundtracker 2.3 (By Mnemotron), and had a big success. Nothing really new was released until Protracker. Itself based on Noisetracker, It was the first Soundtracker clone to bring up oscilloscopes in addition of the now classical spectrum analyzer. But that was not the only innovationŠ This one been for sure the best clone ever of Soundtracker and still remains a reference. Old modules support, powerpacking options, accurate sample editor, it had anything the 'moderns' trackers have now. (if we Except the Nibbles'game in Fasttracker ;-)) We can also talk about Startrekker, that included 8 voices possibilities but wasn't really reliable on this feature. (read later about 8-channels trackers) Next to all these various and sometimes exotic versions, a few coders made kind of independent trackers, with their own graphic interface, but still widely inspired by Obarski's Soundtracker. The independent trackers. ......................... The Music Editor (MED) was first released in summer 1989, because Teijo Kinnunen, in spite of his love at first sight for Soundtracker, though he could do better. Remember that at this point many Soundtrackers were quite buggy. For example, in all the first versions, you couldn't even exit the program (you had to reboot). After many versions of his program, to which he gave compatibility with Soundtracker on the version 2.01, he released OctaMED 1.0 in 1991. This was a new 8-channel tracker, using the same routines as Oktalyzer, but a little bit more powerful. He stopped the development of MED then. OctaMED was free until the version 5.0, and was then commercially distributed on PC. The last Amiga version was the OctaMED Soundstudio in 1996. I'd like to have a few words about 'Sound-FX', an obscure -and almost forgotten now- 4 voices based tracker program, with a simple and clear interface but obviously it didn't made it against Soundtrackers. I remember a few songs made on it, really nice, but it did not stand as a real standard, even if a SFX to Soundtracker converter was made. (It proved the need composers had to keep on Soundtracker). You can still find SoundFX tunes on Aminet (http://se.aminet.net/~aminet/), and it can be replayed with Eagleplayer on Amiga or WinAmp on PC (using Oldskool plug-in) Oktalyzer and 8-voices amiga soundtrackers .......................................... An obscure afternoon of 1989, a friend of me came with a surprise... he was holding a disk in front of my face, telling me this would change many things for me. With my eyes and impatience of teenager, I booted the disk right away, and what I saw let me totally mute. Eight tracks on my Amiga Screen. I've heard a rumor a few months ago didn't really believe, but once again Amiga made it possible. This one had been spread by Shining 8, a famous German team (once again, Germany was productive...), but there were no info about who coded it. (NB: I've contacted Shining 8, they replied but couldn't, at this time, give me an official statement. To be continuedŠ) It is believed that this was a beta version of the future Oktalyzer, developed by A. Sander, but strange is the fact that the 2 formats were not compatible at all. Therefore the mystery remains intact! (I've contacted Shining, no reply yet) Shining's 8 voices soundtracker was forgotten then (and today there isn't any routine in any replayer that can replay this format!), but Oktalyzer didn't came out with the deserving success, especially because of the heavy CPU activity required, slowing down demos. Without entering the details, the principle was to divide the Amiga sound rate frequency by 2 to gain cpu activity (22Khz/2=11KHz) while alternating very quickly beetween the samples in order to simulate 2 sounds instead of one. A sample alternation of course too fast to be heard by any ear of human being. So, it doubled the numbers of voices, but you were loosing half the sample quality. Some unwanted consequences concerned the notes effects, indeed they couldn't separate effects on 8 voices as well (too intensive CPU needed), so when for example, you wanted to slide the volume down, it applied on 2 channels simultaneously. The depth of the music was better, but it wasn't good enough for many users, and the interface, despite of its simplicity (and including a sampling window), was limited. If Chris Hüslbeck & Peter Thierolf developed TFMX approximately at the same time than Oktalyzer, it was far too hard to handle and control. It seems it had over than 4 channel capabilities. Starting screen shows 8 tracks, but could they play all together on a common Amiga 500? Anyway, the development been stopped in 1989 (the same year it was released), because, according to Chris, they were cheated by a software company. Note that Chris Hüslbeck is also a famous Amiga composer, especially for the game soundtrack of Turrican II, and he's now working as a professional game musician, like the best of their generation, Moby or Dr Awesome (Björn Lynne). Then, appeared OctaMed (http://www.octamed.co.uk) in 1991, which we've already seen above. [ OctaMed was the enchanched version of MED. It's still in active development. I've used the latest Amiga version and have to say that it is one of the best trackers, although the user interface is one of the worst... --- jab ] Tom Beyer has made one of the latest known official Amiga trackers in 1996: Protracker 3.61 -at least this is THE LAST official (and non-beta) version of Protracker- Also the latest Soundtracker version is known as Soundtracker Pro II v2.4. by Marco Nelissen in 1996. It wouldn't help much to establish a list by version number, simply because each coders named their own version number, regardless to any other, (developing parallel versions) so a chronology it could looks strange. For example, you could find a Soundtracker version 6.0 by DOC, in 1987... Therefore, to help you better understand the Soundtracker evolution, here's a scheme (http://www.multimania.com/fonzo/Tscheme.html), sum up of the major evolutions from the original Ultimate Soundtracker. A sum-up list of trackers: http://www.multimania.com/fonzo/hotp3.html Second Part: The demoscene ========================== We couldn't talk about the tracking history without the Amiga scene's one, just because their stories were like tied notes. Some words about the 1987-1989 scene .................................... After the first intros made in 1986-87, many by C64 famous groups -that has logically joined another Commodore product-, like Alpha Flight, HQC or Triangle (often specialized in crackings), the real first demos started to be released. The first and probably never forgotten demo masterpiece was 'DOC demo: Demons Are Forever' which was incredibly advanced for the time. Coded by Unknown and soundtracked by Frog, those unforgettable bobs transforming into Demons were just amazing ! Phenomena, Alcatraz, Jungle Command, Triangle, Megaforce and more then ruled the scene. Created on C64 in 1985, and certainly the most famous team on Amiga, Red Sector (introduced to the scene by HQC in 1987) had brought us many mega demos, always improved. Red Sector still exists now and has a big website, but they have fusionned during 1990 with Tristar, and are better known now as TRSI (Tristar and RedSector Incorporated). They even made a record company with Fairlight, TRSI and Fairlight records. DOC made the disappointing DOC Demo 2, never reached the first one, simply because it was more a music disk. The many great Soundtracks like 'Angie S.' (Frog), 'Crack of dawn', or Metalsynth (Walkman)Š Future freak, one of Dexion's composers, made a tune that allows him to enter the tracker hall of fame: 'Gloomy'. The samples were a little bit 'roots' (understand 'rustic') but it fitted like a foot in the right shoe. (Sorry, I'm french...) Wild Copper released the funny and original 'Megalodemo', including tunes composed by Pat, who also worked for the cracking french group Ackerlight. The typical demo of these years consisted of at least one never-ending scrolling (often many at the same time, sorry to have only two eyes ;-P), as many animated bobs as possible in order to enter in the Guiness book of records, stars (parallax scroll or 3D stars), copper effects (gradient colors), a good soundtrack (ripped if they don't have much time) and sometimes rotating 3D objects... Excepting some demos like 'Demons Are Forever', it was often anarchic, not very beautiful but nobody ever seen that on home computers before. This was mostly technical demonstration, but everybody knows that techniques should serve art, and not override it. You'll find, at the end of this article, a pick up of typical End-80's demos to be seen, in order to let you make your own opinion. The musical tracking scene was a jungle of various composers, but some were already emerging by their talent. Let's mention, -next to Frog, Future freak and Sll-, the works from Romeo Knight, Pat, Firefox, Audiomonster, Gryzor, Clawz and Static. Beginning of 1990's, time for the musicians! ............................................ In a musical way, using always the same samples, the same instrument disks, there were not much surprise on each demo release. But a new kind of composers came around, with incredible technical and creativity skills, like 4-mat, Moby or Dr Awesome. The specificity of these trackers was their ability to make their own samples. Thanks to the new trackers' features, like advanced sampling edition, more instruments allowed, and more effects. How many 4-mat samples did many others rip? who knows? 4-Mat seemed very annoyed by these lazy thieves and let it know in his explicit messages included in the mods... One of the best songs ever composed in early 90's was surely the masterpiece 'Klisje paa Klisje' by Walkman (where, indeed, you can find some samples made by Moby) for the Cryptoburners 'Hunt for the 7th October', another mythic Amiga demogroup. If you never heard this one, repair this gap in your mod's culture! It remains in the top 10 of the best-ever-composed modules. Moby (now known as El Mobo) proved that composing on a computer didn't means systematically acid, house, new wave or techno styles, but he managed to make kind of blues, rock, and his always copied but never reached own style. Just listen to 'Knulla kuk', original soundtrack of 'Substance' demo by Alliance Design from Quartex (The 'legal' part of the cracking group, Quartex). Tip & Firefox of phenomena contributed as well in improvement in quality mods, like the masterpiece 'Enigma' used in the Phenomena demo of the same name. An anecdote: still interviewed by Mattias Dalhberg, Karsten Obarski was asked if he remembered good tunes made on Soundtracker. He couldn't find out a precise name, but he mentioned a Phenomena demo in which he was amazed by tunes. (Probably Phenomena Mega Demo) Peter Salomonsen had a very close style to Moby, and composed mostly for Pure Metal Coders, a major team then. Get yourself one of his best : 'A better way'. Jesper of Sanity did some great work with 'Elysium' from the demo of the same name, the samples were simply great, and the tune blasted off ! Let's mention also the Crusaders (and one of their most famous members, Dr Awesome a.k.a. Björn Lynne), with their many Eurocharts music disks. Of course, next to these, the 90's seen the beginning of many 'Techno disks', made by many so-called composersŠ The various demos claimed to be the 'true' or 'best' or 'real' technostyle disk, but none was really hearableŠ (till a group like Spaceballs came over, like you'll read later) A new era for the demos. ........................ Following that 'policy', new kind of innovating demos came out. The coders tortured their brains, and this was not only a competition in displaying as many object as possible but also a creative competition. They understood the importance of design (less anarchy than before), continuity and music-synchronization. The demos gained in sobriety (this not means it was boring!) , and had a real signature of their producers. Each team had is own style. This was the second light for demoscene. The demos were finally pushing the limits; far, far beyond anybody could expect from this machine. Remember it was only running at 7.14Mhz ! (for a common 68000 processor, equipping Amiga 500). Some kind of wizard tricks might have inspired the codersŠ Probably the most impressive Demo ever coded till then came again from Germany, with an incredible dance soundtrack, subliminal images and fast human dancing shadows: 'State of the Art' by the Spaceballs. Once again a German team blasted the screens ! Although the Rebels did one of the first techno-demo ever with the 'Coma Demo', (Soundtracked by Static), and the Budbrains made a good try with 'Kaos', 'State of the Art' was more than a step furtherŠ Travolta's soundtrack was enormous, and I'm still, today, trying to convince myself it was done on 4 channels ! They did a second great release with '9 fingers', less surprising of course... The other great release was 'Arte' by Sanity (probably the best demogroup then), with an excellent design, not boring (unlike most the 80's demos) with various parts, a synchronized soundtrack 'Living Insanity' (another point that 80's demos didn't care), orchestrated by (yeah, orchestrated I can't find another word !) Moby ! Once againŠ I couldn't make an exhaustive list of all those talented artists, and you have to be conscient that my choices can be subjective, also I don't pretend to handle or know all the amiga demos of the world, for sure ! Some demomakers became conscient of the importance in Cooperation's. Instead of trying to jealously keep their routines secrets, they started to share their knowledge, and that's probably the reason why demos quality was increasing.Some didn't hesitate to ask another team member to write them a good tune, like Mantronix did for Razor 1911's 'Voyage' Demo. Amigascene fading away... .......................... Unfortunately, while some people tried aim the same direction, some newbies just wanted fame and money and this was the beginning of the end. The scenes came up on business more than on fun, and started to fade after 1993. A lot of well-known team stopped their activities (some were just disgusted), and other reoriented their talents on the emerging PC scene. The new Amigas and operating system did not supply enough excitement to the users, even if the AGA (the new amiga co-processor, equipping A1200 for example) demos performances were better. Prices remained too high in front of the PC's. More of less unfounded rumors of a potential Amiga' death finished to redirect people on other systems. However, the Amiga users are still existing and very active, never tell them you've got a PC (at least say you've got a Mac), even if what I would call the 'Amiga Golden Days' (1987-1993) are over for sure. I personally do own a good old Amiga 500 that is standing next to my PC, just to look at some legendary demos running by... ... the PC scene emerges from the dark ! ........................................ If a demo could resume the PC-scene accession to the top, in terms of quality and finition, this would certainly be Future Crew's 'Second Reality'. It awakened the quiet PC-demoscene, because many realized that CPU performances, joined to the new Soundblaster or Gravis Ultrasound cards could make incredible things. The 3D weren't any more made of plain cubes or simple shapes, but included texture mappings in real-time calculation, lightning effects and complex objects. Nevertheless the creativity did not follow the technical evolution, a little bit like the first Amiga demos (Maybe less efforts to make good effects, regardless of any limits). Excepting the very first demos that deserved this name (which were based mostly on Amiga's new-style), PC-demos never really reached the Amiga impact. On the other hand, the new trackers (e.g. ScreamTracker and the popular Fasttracker), looking more than ever like Amiga soundtrackers, could handle, thank to the heavy CPU's, easily more than 4 channels with a CD quality (Considering you were using an SB16 card and sampling at 44Khz.). That's certainly why the modules'scene exploded on the web, separately from the PC-demoscene which is not so active. (Although the demo's huge size might have pulled the scene up short too. Amiga demos could stand on one floppy disk). Unlike the demoscene, modules quality increased in time, revealing new or previously unknown talents (e.g. TBO, Vega, Petr Mikovec or DarkHalo), Thanks to sites like Trax in Space, Tracking Factory or United TrackersŠ Now history is on the way, and what is still an underground scene could become a famous reference, and be interesting for major production houses. (however, wouldn't it be better to stay underground ?) Even if, like say some midi-reconverted trackers, we must evolve to a more professional approach of music. But this is another storyŠ