pouët.net

I enjoyed alot Startrekker 1.3 by Exolon of FLT back then for its use of realtime AM and FM synthesis for generating samples in the module, was alot of fun and i learnt alot from using it.

I suppose you have a better theory as to why it took so many years and eventually some Swedish Turbo Pascal coders and a PC before the limitations were _really_ blasted away? (and even they didn't include support for stereo samples)

Anyway, I am sceptical. Musicians have always whined about "limitations", and hoped for the mythical tracker that would make their problems go away. ;) I remember this used to be a frequent topic on comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos, and I was pretty annoyed by the whole thing. There was this Italo Tracker and New Note Actions and whatever. I was not impressed by the results. Sometimes it seemed that the whiners just wanted an excuse for their inability to create good music. ;)

No, it was Impulse Tracker. LOL

To sum up my opinion (like anyone cares): ProTracker had limitations, or lack of support for some things that could have been done with the Amiga hardware. Some limitations actually prevented new types of musical expression from being done or discovered. Others were merely annoying to the musician, and clever musicians were able to somehow stretch the limits with various tricks. Having 31 samples instead of, say, 64, is of the latter category.

keito: That's one of the most awesome trackers ever made!

Franky, the 8-channel mode sounds a by crappy compared to OctaMED's or Oktalizer but the synth and those happy eyes following the mouse somehow compensated it. :)

yzi: Nowadays we have near-perfect-dream-music-tools like Renoise and some people are still moaning because it lacks a piano roll.

*EDIT*

the 8-channel mode sounds a bIT crappy

Renoise actually has a limitation that I hate. ;) Last time I checked, they still refused to generate MIDI pitch bend messages from pattern commands for VST instruments, because of blah-blah theory-hygienic philosophical problem related to "it cannot be made perfectly perfect in every conceivable case in every possible universe, because we cannot know how the MIDI instrument will interpret the pitch bend values into musical pitches". :/ It was sad because pitch bends are an essential part of how I want my tracks to sound. Even weirder, the official suggestion was to draw automation curves. WHAT??? Too bad it's closed source, so I couldn't fix it. Had to resort to using only sampled sounds for melody lines. Which pissed me off. Still does. So I just keep using Ableton Live. (even though I have a Renoise license) What's the point in using a tracker interface, if you can't write pitch bends in the patterns. ;)

LOL x)

it would be great if you could set the pitch bend settings up per song and have the note bend commands correlate... i guess the issue is that the bend range varies and isn't known by whatever might be issuing bend commands.

It's really a non-issue if you have a per-instrument pitch-bend setting. It's not like tracker portamento and vibrato was impossible to implement in OpenMPT. ;)
Yes, the user has to manually set this value because it cannot be queried automatically from VSTis and external MIDI gear, but letting the user doing that is still better than not giving him the control over portamentos.

agreed

yep, the limitation is that it is not like a oldschool tracker but more than a modern DAW -- there is no standalone replay lib. to use tracks composed in it in your own prods.

(just like Cubase, Logic, Reaper and the trillion other mp3-exporting DAWs)