20 Years of Impulse Tracker, Part 4 – full source code | Hacker News Reader

20 Years of Impulse Tracker, Part 4 – full source code

roartindon.blogspot.com

65 pointsbane9 comments

Whoa. Hard to believe it's been 20 years already. I remember Impulse Tracker coming to the scene vividly. Almost everyone in our crew (Explizit) on ST3 jumped ship. It was technically superior; you could keep notes playing in a channel for longer, and music improved for the better. We made awesome music in it.

Of course those on FastTracker2 would never use Impulse Tracker. They were two camps, even within our crew, and the two would never meet. At the end both trackers were equally capable if I remember correctly. Of course we're talking about a time when 16 bit samples were the hottest thing around.

In case anyone wants to listen to a bunch of Impulse Tracker songs, check out our archive at http://www.explizit.org. The .IT tracks are at the bottom (or just download the full ZIP).

As a friendly reminder, VLC can also play module formats. I mention this because of the text at the top of the page about the files requiring a "module player". As an added bonus, VLC is archive aware, and so one can just open the zip and play them while still compressed (but not e-all.zip, since it contains the individual zipped mods; VLC isn't that savvy).

Thank you so much for hosting this, and for the untold number of hours of work that went into the songs!

You're right! I play them with VLC now and again. I'm reluctant to add anything about it to that page though. It's so beautiful in it's 1996 ascii-art design.

Actually, IT was strictly more capable. It had NNA's and even some simple 2-pass filters (omg! filters!). But it was inoperable! Everybody knows that it was inoperable. The only workable tracker is and was FT2 (and, by extension, Renoise).

But that's not what I came here to say. I came here to say that 1) it's awesome how many sceners lurk around on HN and 2) how dare you omit your handle? Are you actually Kom'ah? If you are, man, you're a legend!

I am Ch:ilm and Komah was indeed a legend. I lost track of him and to this day have not been able to find him online. Other members went on to become music producers, such as as Mekx (Ralph Barendse). It really was a great time. Thanks for the shout. I have met quite a few sceners indeed. In hindsight it's amazing what we did back then, on 28k8 modems and a 386!

Whoa this brings back some memories! I was mostly a Fast Tracker user though. I used to love spending hours downloading .xm's at my dad's work so I could rip the samples and use them in my own tracks.

Impulse Tracker still is the only DOS program that I know of that had a DirectSound driver. Let that sink in for a while.

Neat. A friend in highschool (back in the ol' GUD days) was a mod tracker and composed using impulse tracker and acid tracker. He went on to win some intl contests.

Wow, talk about a blast from the past.

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