Tracker Music

Tracker music is music composed with tracker software — vertical, text-based step sequencers in which notes, samples and effect commands are entered in scrolling columns — and distributed as module files (.MOD, .S3M, .XM, .IT) that contain both the score and its samples. Born on the Commodore Amiga with #Ultimate Soundtracker# (1987), trackers became the compositional engine of the demoscene, where severe memory limits encouraged ingenuity with tiny sampled sounds. The idiom spans chiptune-adjacent game music, rave, ambient and breakbeat styles, unified less by genre than by method and by a culture of freely traded files, competitions and scene gatherings.