(Editors Note: For years, MIDI has been the most efficient way to create and distribute digital music. With the advent of faster, more powerful processors and MP3 compression, however, descendents of the old MOD method of sampling and recording music are becoming more and more popular. Linux is a perfect platform for such MOD resurgence, as programmers like David O'Toole work to make sure the world's most stable OS is in the forefront of Digital Content Creation.)

GNU OCTAL is an upcoming music tracker-workstation from the worldwide GNU Project. In this article, I'll give some historical background on tracking and how it's developed over the years, up to an explanation of where it stands today. Then I'll discuss how these ideas apply to the OCTAL project.

What is it?

Tracking is a software-based music composition and production tool. With today's processing power at our disposal, tracking represents a vibrant and flexible alternative to MIDI for composing and performing music with a computer.

At its simplest, tracking is based on the sample, a digitized recording of a real or synthesized sound. By playing the waves at different speeds, one wave can become a whole section of the musical keyboard. By playing a timed sequence of wave events, you create a melody; running many waves at once can create a full musical arrangement. Then you can add effects, tempo changes, drum tracks, or anything else you please.

Now a bit of historical context. A man named Karsten Obarski wrote the original tracker application for the Amiga computer back in the 80's. He took advantage of the Amiga's advanced multimedia hardware to accomplish the then-difficult task of mixing all those samples in real time. His effort paid off: tracking's speed, uniqueness, ease of use, and sound quality touched off a worldwide tracking craze that quickly spread to other platforms, and shows no signs of stopping today. Tracker musicians (like myself) live all over the world and come from a variety of musical backgrounds.

The technology has come a long way as home CPU speeds get faster and faster. Early MODs had only 4 channels of polyphony, as dictated by the Amiga's hardware. But most modern tracker programs are limited only by processing speed.

Perhaps one of the most innovative things about tracking is its stripped-down, minimalist interface--a response to the changing needs of the electronic musician. Since modern electronic composition offers so much more in the way of control and articulation, ordinary musical notation is becoming inadequate. The hallmark of a tracker is the simple, spreadsheet-like grid which arranges the sequence data. Your notes and melodies are numbers and letters; they run down the screen instead of across like ordinary musical notation.

You may already be aware that MIDI files record only the sequences; they don't include sample data. While this approach tends to produce small song files, it has a serious drawback: accurate playback of the song requires the use of equipment having the same sounds and the same controls. This is the reason for standards like General MIDI and Yamaha's XG, which attempt to provide a uniform set of instrument patches across a wide range of hardware. But it's a stopgap solution; those 128 General MIDI instruments act and sound different on different hardware anyway, and the implementations vary widely in quality. Perhaps the worst limitation of standards like General MIDI is that you are limited to its sound-set if you want the portability.

Tracking avoids these drawbacks by embedding the actual sounds and samples into the song file. Because tracking packages up both the sequences and the wave sounds, early tracker songs were called "modules," and were suffixed ".MOD". (The suffixes changed over time, but if you look into the tracking scene you'll still hear terms like MOD music, module formats, and MOD trackers being used.) Of course, doing it this way introduces drawbacks of its own. My song files are routinely ten megabytes due to all the samples inside--not exactly conducive to easy net distribution.

These problems are mitigated by technologies like MP3, already an overnight universal standard for distributing and sharing music. Now tracking can focus on home and studio recording, without having to worry about file sizes or sample quality.

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