d-lusion X-Tracker.
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X-Tracker was first presented in fall 1994 and reached great popularity among serious computer musicians, such as Radical Rhythms and others. There have been quite a lot of commercial songs made entirely with X-Tracker, such as for example tracks by Bomb20 on Force Inc. and Cannibal on Entity. X-Tracker was the logical evolution of Creator, but was completely rewritten in Turbo Pascal (the GUI and application logic) and 80x86 Assembler (the soundengine). Due to the memory limits of plain DOS it was using some extender to address more memory (16 Bit samples with 44KHz were possible!). This is the main reason the program won't run under Windows 9x/XP today. But there seems to emerge a solution: X-Tracker32, although it looks like the project has slowed down recently. X-Tracker had up to 32 tracks, 255 samples and 1024 pattern. Due to this there was the need for a new fileformat: DMF (d-lusion music file) as well as DSF (d-lusion sound file). But X-Tracker could still import S3M, MTM, 669 and MOD music files as well as WAV, VOC, SND, SAM and PAT sample files. X-Tracker had an integrated sampling software for internal sample editing a comfortable SAA desktop, many realtime sample effects and supported the following popular soundcards (the code for the different soundcards had to be rewritten from scratch, since there was no driver model unter MS DOS): GUS, SBAWE, SB16, SBPRO, SB. X-Tracker was distributed by an obscure company and no one at d-lusion really likes to talk about this chapter in the public. |