Trackermusic on Atari STE
3. Tracker
Not only listening but also making music on Atari STE is no problem either. There are quite
a lot of more or less great tracker programs around. Short reviews of the most
important trackers for the STE are following.
No doubt, PROTRACKER STE is one of the best programs for editing music on the Atari
around. It comes in the typical Protracker-look and is great to use. The options and
tools include everything one needs for creating decent 4-channel modules. Furthermore
you can set up the replay frequency up to (faked?) 50 khz and still have a great workflow in
the tracker. Not much more words to loose on this outstanding programm - it offers
great graphics, great routines and a great feeling.
In the middle of the nineties NewCore brought us OCTALYSER. This tracker has a good interface
and also a nice editing surrounding but is further rather spectacular, as it can handle
up to 8 channels. So for the first time Atari STE users were able to create those modules
on their machines. Some musicians swear on this programm, personally I never got really
warm with it for some reason (I think I got some problems with some screen flickering or
so..). Anyway, it is stable, it is comfortable and also powerful. All in all a really fine
and useful Atari STE-application.
DBE-TRACKER by Sector One was never recognized very much. This is a bit strange as it is
quite strong. It can replay up to 32(!) channels and loads a lot of formats. Of couse
the replay quality sinks with an increasing number of channels, but anyway, it's the
only possibility to listen to e.g. DTM-songs on STE. The interface and the user controls
are in my eyes a bit unusual, but not bad as well. After all, it is worth a try in any case.
4. Conclusions
To summarize all this, the Atari STE has improved sound hardware compared to the Atari STf.
Of course from nowadays view 8-bit stereo is not state of the art, but still better than
nothing. The advantages of the hardware led to a good amount of STE-optimized audio
software. There are numerous good modplayers to choose as well as really good trackers
for this system around. When I remember editing modules on my old STf and when I compare
that to the feeling and quality of working on the Atari STE, there is no other way then
saying that doing modules and playing them is a real pain on the STf. Or to put it the
other way around: the Atari STE is a pretty perfect computer for playing around with
modfiles.
ps:
for download possibilites it is a good idea to visit the music tool site on theDead Hackers Society homepage
----
Nils Feske 2004
written for www.atari-ste.com
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