Tracker Music

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What is this page?

On this page, you can listen to some of my favorite pieces of tracker music. These aren't the only songs that I really like, but a curated selection to encompass a wide variety of styles and artists I enjoy.

You can drag the top bar of the player around to reposition it on the screen. To see the full playlist, drag the bottom right corner of the player down. You can right-click the player to view a list of options, including choosing from a hand-picked selection of skins. If you close the player by accident, refresh the page to get it back.

What is Tracker Music?

Tracker music is a form of music made on old computers, originating from the late 1980's to the early 1990's. Instead of containing the raw audio data for a song, tracker files are composed of a series of notes and the samples that those notes play back. It's sort of like a MIDI file that also contains the instruments.

Due to the general era and time period tracker music originated from, tracker music is generally associated with 1990's dance electronic music. However, this is not all it is. Tracker music covers a wide variety of musical genres and styles.

Tracker music first originated on the Commodore Amiga, a line of computers produced from the mid-1980's to the mid-1990's. The first tracker music software was created to make it easier to make music for the Amiga, but due to containing the samples embedded in the file, it also made it easy to play them back, allowing the songs to be shared far and wide. There were many different pieces of tracker software for the Amiga, but a popular one was ProTracker, seen below.

In the early to mid 1990's, due to the decline in relevance of the Amiga, tracker music emerged for PCs, which were rapidly becoming more powerful and capable. This new horsepower allowed PC tracker music to be much more complex and high fidelity than what was made with Amiga software. Two examples of popular PC tracker software were Fasttracker 2 and Impulse Tracker, both pictured below. They both ran under DOS.

Tracker music represents the first widely utilized form of easily-sharable music on computers, predating music formats like MP3. While tracker music lost its technical edge due to the rise of MP3 files and CD audio, it never truly went away and is still being made today. There exist projects like OpenMPT and Milkytracker that let you compose tracker music on modern operating systems. You can also play tracker music files in many popular media players like VLC and MPV.

If you want a more detailed history of tracker music, check out this excellent video by Ahoy:

Where can I hear more?

If you want to explore the world of tracker music, the best place to do that is the Mod Archive. It contains an absolutely massive number of files that you can download or listen to in your browser.

Another good place to explore tracker music is the online chiptune player Chiptune.app. These sections of the site provide good curated lists of tracker music:

Finally, Youtube is always a great, nearly endless source of tracker tunes. Many of these videos show the songs played in their original software. There are lots of channels and playlists to indulge in, but here are a few of my favorites:

There's also plenty more out there for you to find and discover. Happy listening!

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