Horizontal Scrolling Sound Trackers ?

[THE INTRANCER]

Many of us are now pretty familiar with horizontal scrolling of sequencers in DAWs and even that of horizontal block based programming with them. However, and rather strangely, sound trackers have never taken that 90 degree turn, at least from I'm aware of. This is actually quite odd given the flexibility and advantages the two creative forms take....

Do they exist.. or is this another case for the X-Files ?

[Benutzername]

I tried something like that in my Atari days. It come on a shareware disc but I sadly don't remember the name of the program.

This tracker used a kind of piano score layout with hex numbers instead of note symbols and you just entered the velocity, target sound and effect commands. It was a fun way of doing things but I didn't dig in further because I was more into Cubase at this time. Another problem was that it didn't support MIDI out (or it didn't work for some reason).

[antic604]

This is actually quite odd given the flexibility and advantages the two creative forms take....

The whole point of a tracker is that a line of digits for given step represents instrument, note, volume/velocity, panning, effect number and its parameters. It gets even more complex when adding chords/polyphony, multiple effects, etc.

Now if you tried to string them in a horizontal line they would be hardly usable, because - at best - you could see only few notes per line - if 16th note in a 'normal' DAW was 5mm long, the same note in tracker could be 5cm. Vertical view allows to see fewer tracks at once, but many more notes per track which - I think - is more important. Obviously you could rotate the view 90-degrees left too, but I guess you'd get neck pains after working like that for just few minutes

So no, it's not "odd" there are no trackers with horizontal scrolling

[THE INTRANCER]

I tried something like that in my Atari days. It come on a shareware disc but I sadly don't remember the name of the program.

This tracker used a kind of piano score layout with hex numbers instead of note symbols and you just entered the velocity, target sound and effect commands. It was a fun way of doing things but I didn't dig in further because I was more into Cubase at this time. Another problem was that it didn't support MIDI out (or it didn't work for some reason).

Interesting, I'm trying to cast my mind back, but I always end up back in the days of computer magazines that were around in 1982/83 time.. it was only in the late 80's that I had a peak at ST Format in John Menzies Newsagent, by the time I got my Mega ST in 1992 if I recall correctly..Even though I had a pile of floppies for it, none were ever remotely like trackers and by that time, ST Format magazines were hard to find among the 8 or so different Amiga magazine varieties available. In 1993 I picked up a floppy with Sound Tracker printed on it when I had first bought my first Amiga 500, it was the first thing I loaded up and I no idea what Sound Tracker actually referred to. It was both pretty awesome and weird at the same time and there were no instructions... From there I think I had pretty much all the tracker based programs that came out and began my music journey from there, from a practical sense.