68020 processor or better is recommended but not required.
Tracker 3.10 by Marc Espie (email: espie@dmi.ens.fr)
Sound-Trecker by Frank Seide
Interface by Thomas R. Lawrence (email: tomlaw@world.std.com)
Macintosh Tracker is a program for playing songs in the Amiga MOD file format.
• What do I need to run it?
System 7.0 or better is required. I've run the program on a Mac LC, which runs at 16 MHz and has a 16-bit data bus. This is just barely fast enough to play most songs without gaps. If you turn on stereo, then you will push things over the limit and there will be gaps, but the Mac LC doesn't support stereo anyway. My PowerBook 170 in 16MHz mode can play almost every song without gaps, but there are a few it has difficulty with. A Mac IIsi or any machine faster than 16MHz should have no difficulty playing any song.
Marc Espie's "Tracker Server" might run on a 68000 (with the special version included). However, be prepared to reduce the frequency or do without antialiasing if you want to hear the song without skipping. 68000 capability is mainly intended for people with PowerBook 100s and Portables. I don't think the 7.8MHz chip in Mac SE's and Classics is fast enough to do the job. But if you get 8000 Hz, then heck, you're doing as well as a Sun workstation! Please note that I am unable to test to see if the program actually works on a 68000 machine since there aren't any around here.
Note that the 68000 version of Macintosh is in an archive because you can only have ONE of either "Tracker Server" or "Tracker Server 68000" on the drive because otherwise the interface program will get confused and not know which one to use. But most people don't swap chips every day or hook their hard drives up to all kinds of different computers, so this shouldn't be a problem.
• How does it work? What are these "server" things?
Macintosh Tracker is actually a set of 3 programs. The one you use is the "interface" program which lets you control what songs you want to hear and how they should be played. Behind the scenes, it actually runs two other programs (the "servers") which do the actual playing.
• The controls
When you start the program, an empty playlist will be opened containing numerous controls and a scrolling list of songs.
- The Playlist
To add songs to the playlist, either open them using the "Open" menu option or drag the song's icon to the Macintosh Tracker icon. The song will be added to the bottom of the playlist.
To rearrange songs in the playlist, click on the song you wish to move and drag it to it's new location. A black bar will appear between the two closest songs showing where the selected song will be inserted. If the new location is far away from the current location and you don't want to scroll through the entire playlist, just select the song, then find the new location and click while holding the option key down.
- The Controls
The controls are divided into 2 categories. On the top half of the window are the "default" controls. On the bottom half of the window are the "specific" controls. The specific controls always represent the song that is selected (hilited) in the playlist. By default the specific controls are disabled. This means the default settings will be used. If you want to use a different setting than the default for one of the parameters, click the associated "Override Default" box to enable that specific setting and then adjust the parameter as you please. This special parameter will be used for the selected song; the default parameter will continue to be used for other songs.
What the controls do:
- Volume: adjust how loud the song should be played. 0 is silence and 64 is as loud as it gets.
- Frequency: adjust the sampling rate to output the song at. 22254 is 22kHz, which is the highest frequency a Macintosh can output sound at. This will sound the best but use the largest amount of processing time. You can enter values higher than 22254 in this box but the Macintosh won't be able to handle it. As a result, sound quality will not sound quite as good at 44100 Hz as it will at 22254 Hz. In the future, hopefully, Apple will get around to giving our computers CD-quality sound. (But don't count on it.)
- Speed: usually you won't need to fiddle with this. 50 is the normal setting. Some MODs need 60. You can put really strange values in here to make the song sound very odd--smaller is slower.
- Repeats: this is the number of times to play the song. 1 means play the song once. 2 means play the song twice. 0 means play the song forever. If the song is looped, this will determine how many times the looped part will be played.
- Stereo Mix: this is the percent mix between the left and right channels when stereo is being used. 0 represents no mixing (hard stereo) and 100 represents full mixing (mono). Usually, I suggest using 50-70 for use with stereo systems and 60-75 for use with headphones, but it is greatly a matter of personal preference.
- Antialiasing: when this is checked, linear interpolation is used to create a smoother sound. However, this requires a lot of extra processing power so you might want to turn it off for some songs.
- Stereo: this is the master stereo switch which determines if the player will use stereo or mono.
- 16 Bits: this allows you to output 16-bit sound instead of 8-bit sound. On most machines this won't result in an improvement, but on the new AV machines, you can get CD-quality sound. This option does need a fast processor (like a 68040) to work well.
- Autostart next song: If this is checked, the next song will automatically be started as soon as the current one finishes playing.
- Repeat song list: If this is checked, the playlist will start over at the beginning after the last song has been played. If not, once the entire list has been played, the program will stop.
- Autostart on open: If this is checked, a song will immediately begin playing when it is added to the playlist unless a song is already playing. Also, if you save the playlist and open it at a later date, if this is checked, the first song will automatically be started.
- Randomize: When this option is checked and "Autostart next song" is checked, the next song to be played won't be the next one in the playlist; instead, a song in the playlist will be chosen at random.
Hint: If "Autostart next song" is checked, but you don't want to start the playlist or the next song you open, hold down the control key while opening the song or playlist and keep it held down until the program has finished opening the file. This will temporarily override the "Autostart next song" option and the song or playlist will not be automatically started.
One final control is the "Use Trecker" check box in the lower right hand corner. Use this to select which tracker program to use to play back the song. By default, Marc Espie's Tracker is used to play all songs. If you instead want to use Frank Seide's Sound-Trecker, click this box and that particular song will be played using Sound-Trecker next time. If you are using a 68000, you won't be able to use this feature because Frank Seide's Sound-Trecker will not run on a 68000.
• Playing controls
When there is no song playing, all of the buttons (which look like those on a tape-deck) will be greyed out except for the play button. Pressing the play button will start the selected song. If there is no selected song, the first one will be started (unless Randomize is checked in which case one will be chosen at random).
The stop button stops the current song. In addition, the next song will not be started.
The button that looks like a right arrow with a vertical bar on the right stops the current song and starts the next one.
The playing controls should be relatively straight forward, but Marc Espie's Tracker currently doesn't support fast forward and the other controls don't behave as expected. Please refer to my discussion of the tracker programs later on in this documentation for explanations.
• Saving the playlist.
You can save the playlist to a file using the "Save As..." option from the File menu. After it has been saved, you can reload the list at any time.
Be careful to save your playlist if you want to keep it. While the program does ask if you want to save changes to a playlist that has been previously saved which you changed, it will NOT ask if you want to save a playlist that has not ever been saved. This is for convenience if you simply want to play some songs but don't want to save the list.
• The Tracker programs.
There are two trackers included in the package. Originally, this program was simply going to be a port of Marc Espie's tracker from UNIX to the Macintosh. However, it came to my attention that I could easily adapt Frank Seide's Sound-Trecker to also work with the interface. This gives you an option in case Espie's tracker doesn't play a song right. Each particular tracker has its advantages and disadvantages.
Espie's Tracker:
The principal advantage of Espie's tracker is that it plays more songs correctly than does Frank Seide's tracker. This is because it implements some of the ProTracker commands while Frank Seide's does not. Another important advantage to Espie's tracker is that the source code is freely available.
The main disadvantage is that it comes from UNIX. I have tried to minimize the extent of the changes I have made to the tracker so that upgrades to the UNIX version by Espie can be easily incorporated into the Macintosh version. However, in order to do this, I had to avoid hacking around with his code. This means that unlike Frank Seide's tracker, Espie's tracker does not run at interrupt level. Thus, things like holding a menu down for a long time tend to interrupt playback. To counteract this, the tracker attempts to precompute as much of the song as possible. It allocates up to a megabyte of buffer space to hold up to 46 seconds worth of the song. Since all of this has been precomputed, it is quite difficult to implement pause and fast forward correctly. Therefore, pause takes a long time to have an effect and fast forward has been disabled for this version. However, The source code is available, so any programmer is free to mangle the code to work at interrupt level. If you do this, you can basically kiss forward compatibility goodbye.
Seide's Tracker:
Seide's tracker is much more elegant because it was designed for the Macintosh from the ground up. It is therefore able to take advantage of the Macintosh's asynchronous interrupt manager to support smooth multitasking with other applications. Basically, it steals as much time as it needs and lets the remaining programs fight for the rest.
The disadvantage is that it can't play as many songs as Espie's tracker can. However, it seems to be able to play the songs that Espie's can't, so that's why I've included it. With both of the trackers together, you should be able to listen to the vast majority of the songs that are out there.
