soledad penadés

As I can't execute Impulse Tracker properly on my laptop (the most I have accomplished is to execute it with dosbox but without sound... which is useless unless I am making a beethoven compo xD), I am looking for a good substitute for it. I have tried as much software as I have been able to...

First I tried to use sk@le, but I didn't fully get used [again] to the fast tracker style of tracking, although this program is really good (congrats baktery :)). I simply use it for some specific cases - when I have to do a XM for an intro where the coder is using miniFmod (which does only allow XM files) or something like that.

I also tried Buzz, but it didn't convince me at all because it is not really mod compatible (I can't save an IT file, for example), it has lots of crashes and there's no continuity development for this program - just what occurs with IT2, I'm afraid :-/. Somebody told me that the guy which was coding the program lost all the sources accidentally and could never recover them. So all what we have is a bunch of plug-in and new synth-machines developers, but a very old program interface which is not going to be enhaced. It is very funny in any case, easy to use when you get the buzz feeling, but lacks some basic things and well, the frequent crashes are so annoying...

So I played with cheesetracker too, but as it is not windows native (it was originally programmed for linux), I had to install Cygwin and stuff like that, to get finally something which did crash so frequently too. And the interface was not very comfortable for me (I don't like the linux UI style... it is really ... uhm... let me say it once again... ugly), even though it respected the IT keyboard layout, which is a good detail. It seems like it works nicely enough under linux though, but I don't have time nor I wish to install a linux distro in my laptop just for tracking. Too much wasted space :-P

I have been using modplug player as my default player for tracker file formats since 1997, so I thought it could be nice to try seriously the modplug tracker. This one had turned as an open source software as his original developer (Olivier Lapicque) left the project. I hoped it had evolved since the last time I saw that, about one year ago, but I found nothing new which was interesting. Some layout changes in the last binary release, and the last sources package was from more or less one year ago, with no significative changes noted in the readme.txt file. Quite dissapointing. Sometimes open source makes you sad... :-(

So I had still the same style of modplug that I didn't like at its full because of some details like not being able to control everything with the keyboard (as I can with Impulse Tracker), and the stupid decission of changing some essential keys to another ones - which mades me lose lots of time!). Well, but at least this one permits me to save and load IT files. There were some voices against it and in favour of the BeroTracker, they said modplug was not fully compatible and was introducing lots of stuff in the impulse tracker files so it would make the it files non-compatible with genuine it files. Well, I decided to give a try to BeroTracker. Apuf!!!!!! it was slow like hell!! The mouse freezed when moving over the main screen. Oh my god! This is just a tracker, not a synthetic realtime sound generator with dolby surround! I even could use modplug on my pentiumII and it never got frozen, so tell me what's wrong with a pentium 4 executing a brand new tracker... it should work fine, shouldn't it? And I had simply loaded an 8 channels module. Being aware that this is a BETA version, I decided to uninstall it. Waiting for a Release Candidate version...

I finally found Renoise. Well, in fact I had listened about it so many times some years ago, but I was so lazy to try it. This time I had a bit of spare time, had seen Skrebble, ps and dixan using it at bcnparty and I was quite intrigued about this program, so I installed it. It sounded quite nice, the renderer was quite accurate and even the effects it brings are really good; it did not freeze the screen as did the berotracker, and the scrolling of the patterns when playing was damn nice - this is a very important thing, if you are using a tracker program and you see the patterns are not moving smoothly you start thinking that program is pure crap. So I think I'll maybe change to this one or sk@le - I still have to decide about. But the best of all is that now I don't have enough spare time to dedicate to music or trackers XD