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Fast Tracker, specifically Fast Tracker 2 (FT2), is a program that was one of the most widely used trackers in the world. It was created by Fredrik "Mr. H" Huss and Magnus "Vogue" Högdahl, two members of a PC demo group called Triton (now commonly known as Starbreeze Studios) which set about releasing their own tracker after breaking into the scene in 1992 and winning several demo competitions. Fast Tracker 2 was discontinued after the release of version 2.08, though a beta version of 2.09 was leaked to the public in 1999. On May 23, 1999, Starbreeze productions announced on their website that "FT2 has been put on hold indefinitely. ... If this was an ideal world, where there was infinite time and no need to make a living, there would definitely be a multiplatform Fasttracker3. Unfortunately this world is nothing like that," signed by Vogue. * Many contemporary trackers (Modplug Tracker, Skale Tracker, Renoise, MadTracker 2) are heavily influenced by FT2. Its biggest "rivals" in the scene were Scream Tracker (on the first years) and Impulse Tracker. ("FT2 vs IT" is a common and still ongoing debate among musicians, usually involving IT users complaining about FT2's mouse interface while FT2 users commending the very same, and pointing out that every mouse feature has a keyboard shortcut as well.)
Architecture and features The FT2 interface is largely inspired by the looks of Amiga's Protracker. The screen consists of a pattern editor in the lower half, while the upper half features an instrument selector on the right, and the general module settings and some oscilloscopes. The pattern editor can be changed to sample and instrument editors screens. The program also features a little Nibbles clone. Patterns Patterns are essentially sheets of music where the musician is able to compose the actual musical score. A pattern consists of several rows (64 by default) and is divided to columns ("tracks"). Each row can have one note in every track. A note can look like the following: C This means the note is a C A song consists of a collection of different patterns which can be played in a user-defined order to create the final song structure. Samples Samples are generic raw sound data to be played back at various frequencies, much the way normal musical samplers do. Samples can have a loop start and end point which enable the sound to repeat endlessly, either repeated continuously or in a way which is called "ping-pong loop" in FT2, and essentially means the sample played back and forth as soon as the replay gets "stuck" in the loop. (This is also called a "bidirectional loop".) The musicians are able to either record samples or load existing ones, manipulate them by cutting and/or pasting parts, or just drawing them by hand. There's also a feature to crossfade the sample with itself, thus allowing the loop points to be seamless. Instruments Instruments are essentially arrays of samples with additional convenience features. A musician can assign different samples to different pitches of the sound, thus eliminating the possibility of a sample sounding bad if played too high or too low. Instruments support various loopable envelopes to be set on either the sound volume or the stereo panning, as well as built-in vibrato. It is also possible to set the generic settings of the instrument here: finetuning, default volume, default panning and relative starting note to C-4. Files Fasttracker 2 supports a variety of file formats, though often only two were used by musicians: XM (Extended Module) and XI (Extended Instrument). XM was and still is one of the most popular module formats nowadays, because of its compact and well compressible file structure. Compatibility FT2 ran with a custom made DOS 32bit-extender and it supports Gravis Ultrasound as well as Sound Blaster, Covox and the simple PC speaker. This rendered the software rather flaky to use nowadays, as the recent Windows versions generally do not allow DOS applications to access hardware directly, let alone the fact that most of those compatible cards are built for ISA slots, which are absent from recent motherboards. Due to this, hardcore musicians who still want to use FT2 often build "oldskool" PCs with the optimal (and nowadays rather cheap) hardware for the tracker, just to be able to track with it again. An alternative way of getting FT2 to run is by using DOSBox - this, however, as accurate as is, has speed and latency problems, and one needs quite a muscular PC to be able to use it as comfortably as on a native environment. Other methods of usage include GUSEMU or VDMSound. Clones The success of FT2 has driven many people to attempt to duplicate the software to other mainstream platforms, when the original version became tedious to utilize. Although there were numerous variations of the software concept on a multitude of platforms, many in the tracker world are still waiting for the "perfect FT2 clone". Freeware clones Non-freeware clones | ||||||||
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