As far as which tracker has the better interface, I don't see the point of the argument. They are all equally bad.

I played music for 6 years of my life. In that time, never once did I see printed on a staff, "F5 0x15". I saw a quarter note on the top line (?) of the treble clef with a symbol next to/on top of it. This is how I, and most people who actually play instruments, think of music. To edit it in a form that is little better than a hex editor is rediculous.

In this day and age, there is no reason for me to memorize effects codes. I shouldn't have to look up in some table the code to a glisando or various other effects. I shouldn't have to look at music in text form. Composers don't compose music by writing out "F5 G5 C5". They compose with a staff, notes, and appropriate music notation. You can't even make chords in trackers; that's a rediculous limitation.

The only reason that modern trackers (MT2, for example) use these antiquated interfaces is because tracker users are used to them. The only reason that some prefer FT2 over IT is that FT2 came first and that's what they're used to using.

BTW, what's an NNA?

NNA stands for new note actions. In all trackers before IT NNA was "cut". That means that if a note was playing on say channel 7 and then another one came in the same channel the first one would be stopped. IT has the ability to continiue playing previous notes when a new note comes in.

Of course you can. You just made one (that F5 G5 C5 is a chord).

When talking about statistics and experiences, it's hard to be objective, I'm just stating mine, and noting that I am probably speaking for a majority.
(most tracker peeps do not code)

The point of tracking, is to create a file for which there is an easy way to edit, and is a computer friendly format.
Samples / volume columns / effect columns in low resolution, make these things easy, but adding functions such as filters and synths immediately makes it into more of a production tool, where the sound will probably never be the same in 2 different programs, that is why it becomes a better idea to record the sound first in those cases.

If you want game compatible music, use only samples, or if you really need fx, add an extra FX with a fast & dirty algorithm.
I can't imagine you'd want to use the same kind of cpu killing algorithms found in trackers like renoise and some .it editors.

anyone who's been in the tracker business for awhile and moved over to professional music composition software, will know that this is usually a not so wanted feature, since mostly you want to have full control over which notes are cut and when.
If sounds are not cut when playing a second note, the overview of the song is spoiled, since it will be using more channels than you actually see.
When going over to midi, this problem immediately becomes apparent since adding new sounds immediately starts polluting the audio which makes you have to re-arrange your tune and make mixing levels correct again.
It is very difficult to cut notes in midi, since you'd have to do it manually for most progs, but in trackers it is a lovely feature to specifically not have NNA.

There are very little limitations with module files, since their orientation is to allow a user to specify exactly how a sound is played.
When channels start popping up automatically and (non-open) FFT effects are added, it spoils the idea of easily editable standardised computer generated music.

Korval: that's one of the advantages of tracking - you don't need any formal music education to begin tracking as opposed to regular music (but unfortunately, there's no law against releasing the first really crappy mod's you make on the unsuspecting 'net ). IMHO, reading notes from a mod is easier than trying to read regular sheet music: I see G-5 in a tracker and think "ah, that's a G" instead of seeing a note and thinking "ok, that line down there I know is a D, how far up is this one: 1,2,3,4,darn, lost count..."...

midi timing is much higher resolution than mod files,
mods save space & processing by allowing the user to choose the resolution needed themselves, of course there comes the occasional odd note that needs to be out of time, but those can be made so with the trig command, or by editing the sample data.
obviously a mod will never get a "Live" feel unless the artist goes through loads of tedious trouble in making it.
But is that always what you want?
My ears like perfectly synchronized music better, I am not looking for those tiny errors a drummer makes while playing the drums etc.
There used to be a time when quantize functionality in midi sequencers was a hot thing, now it is frowned upon because it makes music "too perfected"
mods are very tedious to make imperfect unless they develop some new "humanize" fx or feature

Anyways, trackers, sequencers and Audio suites are all aimed at totally different types of music composers.

Tracker people create their own little samples and make the music using one small PC
the end result is a portable playable file
The reason for this is obvious, smaller files, less equipment needed, and possibility to put the music in a program.

Sequencer people don't create instruments, instead they normally use ready made ones from synths etc.
Releasing a midi file will not benefit others very much since it might probably sound a bit cheesy on their side.
So a downmix of the material is required as wave.
These people create orchestral symphonies or other live material, and are not very concerned about the downmixed result, instead the notated work might be the more important product.

Audio suite people try to combine all musical capabilities into their programs, mixing midi instruments, software instruments, recorded audio tracks etc.
If you ever need to punch in recordings, or use samples longer than 20 seconds, you probably belong to this group.
Everything will need to be leveled, filtered, mastered and then downmixed.
The end result is of course a wave file.

Although this type of musicianship is very common, it is also the most expensive, with an average studio price of maybe $10k

Which leaves "tracking" a great option for hobbyists, and people who don't like the thought of dedicating 2 rooms to audio equipment, or if you wanna use your laptop to make music on the move???

as a sidenote, I too find the
12 E-6
13 G-5
mod way of displaying musical data much easier to read than a real score.
The notation format we still use is old and deprecated, and only benefits string instruments in its design.
(otherwise why would all audio packages change the format?)
xx-------
---xxx-
-xx----
the above typical sequencer format is nice too, but in a different way, for different purposes.

MAZ sounds

Doesn't actually hold any songs or samples but there's a huge number of links and you can order sample CDs and things...

EDIT:
Hammersound

Holds tons of soundfonts, both single instruments and complete GM collections. You can use those as a replacement for the default SBLive sound font or you can rip individual instruments and/or samples with a program like Awave studio or something and use them for your tracking needs...

Renoise does that!

hehe, ben, You should take that one allegro example, the one with the keys and modify it to actually record and playback the notes

eh. its midi though

Yup. Very useless. But a fun hack for someone who knows what they are doing

No need to have opinions. Let's verify it.

I word, I created a 3-column document containing arbiturary text. Sitting an appropriate distance (for playing an arbiturary instrument) from this paper, I would say that Times New Roman 8-pt is the smallest font you can get away with and still be able to read the letters.

Given that, I get 118 rows with 3 columns, or a total of 354 total rows. If each row is a microbeat, and the music uses 16th notes, you need at least 64 rows per measure. In total, you can fit 5.5 measures onto one sheet. Even if you go down to 8th notes per microbeat, you're still looking at only 11 measures on an entire page.

By contrast, I've seen 12 measures on a single line using a printed staff, depending on the contents of the measures. If you shrink the size of the music down some (to the point of legibility), I wouldn't be surprised to see 16 measures on a single line.

The standard tracker form of displaying music is terrible in terms of space efficiency. Just look at it: a whole note (given the above) takes the same room as 64 16th notes. By contrast, a whole note takes far less room than a measure of 16th notes in a staff view.

The common band score has 8 measures per page, but it also displays the music for every instrumental part in that same page. Let's see a tracker view pull off 8 measures for 16-20 parts legibly (at, say, 3 feet away), with all modifiers (tempo, duration, etc), and with multiple notes/chords possible.

It's funny; I know of precisely 2 instruments that span 8 octaves: the piano and the guitar. Most instrument only have a 3-4 octave range. Usually, they pick a clef and stick with it. As such, for composing instrumental music, the staff view is perfectly fine.

Now, if you're making up instruments, or just screwing around with samples, or whatever, that's a different issue. Musical notation was made for actual instruments, not invented sounds. That it handles this case non-optimially is unimportant. Note that even a grand staff with many lines above and below lets it have more room than a tracker view.

tracker notation has a rhythmic starting point, whilst the typical notation starts out from tonal, squishing the notes into a smaller space, so depending on how complex the piece is, it will become larger/smaller.
This makes it not at all suitable for instruments such as drums, that are not in any way concerned about tone, rather about timing, since it is the timing that in this case gets graphically displayed.
I know there is a special drummers notation, but what I mean is that timing is an issue for other instruments too, and the old notation is not very intuitive for describing it since the size of measures is variable.

In tracker notation it is always the same size as initially chosen.

Looking at the staff notation created from a typical midi tune, you can clearly see the trouble the program has to go through to display it accurately, they don't usually look like your average notation, they'll be using very wide measures, several clefs and clearly take more space than a tracked tune will.
Of course an instrumental player will probably choose to change or remove some of the material for the sake of space and readability, of what he considers non-useful musical content.
Or maybe given that it doesn't even look like a typical staff note, it cannot even be played back by a single live musician...

I don't know, maybe this is the case of the notation, optimised for what one person can play.

I tend to get crazy with 1/16 arpeggios and such, which clearly are not suitable for live music.

I think we can agree that staffs are optimal for orchestras, and that the tracker view is optimal for sample playback since it will contain mostly rhythmic events.

http://www.me.berkeley.edu/cpl/pictures/flame_ani2.gif Flame!http://www.me.berkeley.edu/cpl/pictures/flame_ani2.gif Flame!

I went to HammerSound, & went to [sounds > Soundfont Library > Collections > Gort's_Synth v2], & I got a zip with a .SF2 in it. What's that? It's not recognised as anything by MODPlug.

Note: Never heard of a soundfont.

BTW, my 2 cents on the tracker vs stave debate:

Staves are good for people to understand & write quickly, but staves require ‘common sense’ which is too complex for a computer to handle well. That is, every single stave system I've used on a comp has been woefully user unfreindly. (Apart from Sibelius, which was meerly fiddly.)

Trackers, on the other hand, may be harder to read by a person, but have a logical way of being inputted & handled by a computer. This makes them better suited for making MIDs, MODs etc, but I still think staves are better for sheet music (speaking from ~4 years violin experience).