Erm, excuse me. I realize that was a terrible intro. Let me start again:
A long time ago, I used to be involved in the "Tracking Scene." The Tracking Scene was effectively a parallel offshoot to the demo scene, only for the more artistic sort who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag with a sharp object in one hand and an angry siamese in the other. Naturally, I used to be far more creative back then than I am now (I'm not sure what happened; maybe I'll blame WoW, although I do still write a bit). Of course, I still can't code my way out of a dry paper bag, much less a wet one, so I'm not entirely certain what the whole point of this rant is. No matter. The general premise of the Tracking Scene was to put together music composed by various "samples," or wav-file snippets of instruments and the likes. Oftentimes, this sort of music was highly electronic in nature, but it did have some diversions into other genres. (Aside: If you're curious about the demo scene, look up "The Black Lotus" on YouTube--there's a fair number of their old Amiga demos listed there.)
Anyway, I used to do most of my tracking in ScreamTracker 3 until I discovered two problems: 1) that I sucked and 2) the tracker was limited. Though, I think the limitations of the tracker are primarily the result of the former, not so much the latter. As a result, I migrated to something else called Impulse Tracker, which marginally improved my total "suck factor" by a fair amount but provided me with a fair bit of new options and expanded my horizons to a large degree. (Impulse tracker supports the notion of instruments, which are an abstraction over samples.) Unfortunately, Impulse Tracker was exclusively DOS-based tracking software, and the last time I used it was sometime in 2001 or 2002 when I was dual-booting Windows 2000 and Windows 98. Of course, as time went on, Windows 98 would no longer boot on my more modern hardware, I migrated to Windows XP, reformatted drives, and generally had no real means of tracking. Sure, there was ModPlug Tracker, but its interface was cumbersome, buggy, generally annoying, and Windows only--which would force me into using yet another software package that was limited by the OS it required. So, sometime around 2003, I quit tracking altogether. Having started in 1998, I think I made a decent go at it, though I never did all that well, and a vast majority of the tunes I tracked (well, I didn't really know what I was doing, I just practiced my pre-WoW warlock skills by rolling my face on the keyboard) weren't all that great. Hint: You can find some of the slightly better ones on my personal site, though I'm not particularly inclined to post that here directly[url=#footnote1][1][/url]
Much to my surprise, some time ago, I found a tracker that attempted to clone Impulse Tracker and its interface. They even provided a Gentoo-specific ebuild for building it (no Windows builds were available at the time, and I wasn't running Linux full-time). However, since then, I've discovered that not only has it been updated--with a few annoying bugs I've uncovered in the first 15 minutes of running it *sigh*--but they have CVS snapshots and Windows builds. My, how things change! Soon as I rediscovered this tracker, I'm effectively running Linux full-time and they now offer Windows builds! No matter, the source distribution is intended to be compiled unmodified on most *nix-like platforms. And--check this out. In this screenshot, I have the Wikipedia entry for Impulse Tracker up and have Schism, the IT clone, running in the foreground. Aren't they a lot alike?
Yeah, this post is mostly pointless. But given the timeframe and how quickly software changes, you can see why I was surprised to find such a near-perfect clone of something almost ten years after the fact. Pretty impressive. It takes either dedication, determination, or insanity for someone to come up with a clone like this (maybe all three).
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[anchor="footnote1"][1][/anchor] There's a few reasons for this. While I don't mind everyone in-guild knowing who I am and some of my background, I'm not entirely keen on the fact that some random schmuck from the Terenas forums could use this association to figure things out a bit more thoroughly. Viva paranoia. If you're curious, send a PM. Most of the officers know my personal details anyway.
