pouët.net

I'm 22 I feel like I've been hyperfixated on OpenMPT due to listening to .mod, .xm, .it, and .s3m, but how am I even supposed to tell if the scene is shrinking or if I’ve just fallen into some niche rabbit hole all by myself? It’s like everyone else moved on to fancy DAWs and I’m still here obsessing over hex values and pattern effects like it’s the 90s.

Speaking of the 90s, back in that period, people my age group that are tracking while they are in college (I assume) or working or unemployed

They don't know how good they got back then

More seriously, nah mate. There's a lot of kiddos using renoise and/or the m8 tracker, and/or weirder stuff, it's not "the tracking scene" yeah, indeed. It's some folks doing chiptunes for games, it's some other folk using m8 tracker for making cool electronic beats, it's just a tool.

Yeah sure, there's a bit of "missing the right moment" here but to be fair, it's not like the people of Tokyo Dawn Rec. hung with the tracne people. People were not all lovey dovey just because they used trackers.

Also, I'm fairly – super pretty – sure people used trackers because they wanted to make music, not because they wanted to be "in the tracking scene" so in a sense, if they find better tools to keep making music, they will use these.

It's a niche these days but what's wrong with being in a niche? And it's a niche which seems to be well alive nevertheless. Moog synthesizers and pipe organs are cool so why not tracker programs... Isn't the knowledge about the older technology something with an intrinsic (and possibly also practical) value?

Naturally, you can use both modern music programs and trackers (OpenMPT's native format has many modern features, so that's one place to reach for modernity), to get best out of them both. Though your fondness of hex numbers may lead you also further into the past.

Trackers ain't just about "the oldschool format".

When you've got talented newcomers like Djego Flochs coming up with interesting experimental works, I'd say the tracker scene is far from dying.

Somehow that got me back into ProTracker (and has itself been collecting dust on the shelf for a couple of years).

I also loaded up PT2.3d after a 25 year break. Still a lovely tool and it's hard to forget how to track on it - like riding a bike. I have different vision and goals now using it compared to when I was younger tho. Makes me also more relaxed using it.

In regards of professional music I simply would say the sound quality is one of the reason why people just use DAWs nowadays. You have so much more headroom and nice VSTs or even new hardware to explore.

Of course, tracker music has become more underground now than it was in the ’90s (back when it was listened to by regular PC users who knew nothing about the demoscene).
On the other hand, many subcultures have appeared around trackers today, and they don’t overlap much:

There’s the demoscene, where tracker music is composed for old-school demos as well as for compos at demoparties.

There are various chiptune/8-bit communities that don’t really know much about the demoscene; they just like the “chiptune sound,” the sound of old game consoles, and so on. They have their own parties and their own circles.

There are people not really connected to the demoscene who compose music in trackers, exploiting the aesthetics of 8/16-bit sound chips, and release full albums of it in mp3/flac.

There’s the Furnace tracker with its own community.

And yes, I know people who still earn money by composing tracker music for indie games.

So actually, you have plenty of room to maneuver :)

using trackers: not niche
tracker scene of the 90s: niche

I had to scroll up to see if this thread was started in 2001. It was "dying" then (thanks in part to the DOS+soundcard to Windows+soundchip transition), but really hasn't changed since; if anything there are more tracker compos today than there were 10-20 years ago, along with a steadily growing supply of clones and ports.

So we went from cardtunes back to chiptunes?