33. Tracks from the past

The Amiga goes a long way back in time. It all started in 1987 and as we are now expanding our repertoire, it's really the right moment to talk about the track revolution. It's from the ultimate soundtracker to fasttracker and all in between.

Whoever wrote this song is not known to history, maybe it's all for the better given the title that is retrospective and then a body part that we shouldn't talk too much about. Anyway, you know it's almost 34 years since the Tracker Revolution started. It was when Amiga musician Karsten Obarski created his commercial music creator or yeah, tracker called the Ultimate Soundtracker.The whole thing just took off. It was not a big success, but it was great enough to get the geeks of the days, day to start building their own versions of the software. And soon enough the music market was opened for everyone with an Amiga. This station stands on the shoulders of Mr. Obarski and celebrates the Trekkerworld's rich heritage.

Karsten Obarski, Obarski Megamix. Yeah we have to play that because we need to celebrate his genius. His ultimate soundtracker introduced the world to the 4 channel mod format that was then slowly improved. Every Amiga user must remember Noisetracker and Protracker. The modules played samples that were the instruments.pitch, the volume and also where in the sample the playback should occur could be set. One sample could thus be made into a number of different styles and even instruments. I remember a documentary about the Beatles where their producer George Martin showed us how to play cymbals backwards. That was revolutionary back then, but in the late 80s the Amiga made it simple.But still, you only had 4 channels.

Digidizzi Amethyst Cities. Tracker music was featured in demos, games and presentations. You know, it matched well with the Amiga's reputation of being a graphics and multimedia creation device. But then again, the four channels. It was actually the music chip Polar that put that limitation into the world.Octamed for the Amiga made it possible to play sound in 8 channels, but it cut the output level to the channels causing a poor signal to noise ratio. This kinda hampered its popularity somewhat.

Sleis, back to the roots and well we're gonna run just Sleis songs for the rest of this episode. And that's because Sleis himself actually sent me his oldest works and some new songs he has composed. So yeah, thanks Sleis I guess, I'm really happy for this. So yeah, I remember trying to connect an Amiga tracker player to my father's synthesizerand I was shocked when it actually worked. This made modules possible to use the same way Atari users already did with their machines. This is if you had a MIDI interface for the Amiga, my sampler called AMAS. It actually did, so I was totally in heaven over this.

Sleis groovy beat This is Amiga flashback all the sleis all the time. It's 100 % digital no analog All the games and the demos kept flowing, but it was curtains for the Amiga in 1994 The tracker culture did not die. However, the MIDI connection if I may say so kept the Amiga scene going a while on the more professional side of thingsBut the aging 8-bit sound and as I mentioned earlier, having only 4 channels was a bigger problem than ever by this time.

sleighs, darkness, scream tracker free, fast tracker and impulse tracker were built as the artists left Amiga mostly for PC does and later Windows. They removed the limitation of the four, eight or even 12 channels the Amiga could master. More modern sound cards and drivers made the maximum number of channels more of a problem for the CPUthan the sound card. This increased the quality of the productions. Some old modules sounded a bit primitive by comparison.

Slays electronic waves My brother really really digged the fast tracker format it is known as dot xm or extended module if you want to and it actually has full compatibility with pcs and Those modules are often the best you can get but they are very very far apart from the older Amiga mod format pretty obviouslySo I don't know really if that is a good or a bad thing. I actually feel that any kind of tracker format, it owes to the Amiga, its whole existence. And if it sounds better, so why not? The Amiga modules, the original one, according to me at least, they stand up well to the modern formats. Actually with the limited capabilities, they still sound great.

Lays, Imagination and I must say something, a few days ago I actually got an offer to play some modules made by artists on the Amiga, but they had to retract the offer when they found out that we play a lot of PC, Atari and other kind of modules, know the XM format, the S3M, the Scream Tracker, the Impulse Tracker, all that things, because they felt that the Amiga modules weren't up to sounding as good as they later did.And I must say I respect that they see it that way, but I must as I said earlier, disagree. I think a lot of the Amiga modules, the original ones still sound awesome. And it's true. If you have 64 channels, there's a whole lot more you can do to get that fixed sound. And you can remove this weird stereo thing that Amiga did with two channels to the right and two channels to the left.But I still say the whole station, if you just listen to the RK radio network, can you really tell that much difference? Because we select the best of the best, irregardless of the format, and it can actually be heard that way.

Slays melting eyes and I have to tell you something you probably know that our slogan here on the radio station that this podcast belongs to is the arcade radio network The last true Amiga broadcaster, but today I changed it It's now the arcade radio network the last true tracker music Broadcaster is that a bad thing? No, I don't think so, but we cannot say it's just a meganaAnd we have two ways to go. Last podcast, I spoke about our journey to get more and more any kind of formatted trackers. Like we don't care if it's PC only. And I said that's one way of going and that's where we are. The other way would be to go back to just playing Amiga music. that in that case, I have to remove like one.to 300 songs or something from the repertoire and I don't want to do that. So I think the path ahead is set now and I hope you want to join us and keep listening because we have a lot of good tracker music coming up.

Lace and recycled flowers. And okay, I'm going to leave this discussion about modules and Amiga and not Amiga, but I'm going to say this as a parting word, so to speak. I think that Amiga music today by far outnumbers the other formats on the station because you know, we started this way and we have just recently started building upwith Scream Tracker and Fast Tracker and stuff like that. So don't worry, it is still an Amiga station, we cannot get away from that, but we are now open for everything that is tracked.

Sleaze and recycled flowers and we're all out of sleaze. Yeah, actually I didn't know they would run out but there we are not a problem though We will continue playing some other nice music If you're an Amiga artist and if you have stuff that you've done in the past or right now that plays on an Amiga an Atari PC Whatever as long it is as it is tracker music, please send it to radio at aricade.netAnd if it's good, we will put it on the station. I promise you that. So that would be it. DJ Demon here saying thank you for listening. And next week, Saturday, 9 p.m., another episode. And if you can't really, well, time that, not a problem. It will be out on the podcast player the day after. Thanks for listening.

John Burton, who later became a game developer in his own right, made this song called Rob Hubbard, it's a tribute to Mr Hubbard I guess. We are leading you out into the night with Einstein of the warforkens, Einsteinium number 12.