Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Tracker vs. sequencer
From: David Olofson (audiality_AT_swipnet.se)
Date: su elo 29 1999 - 11:19:06 EDT
On Sun, 29 Aug 1999, reactor/CTPmedia wrote:
> the only thing you can do with a sequencer but not with a tracker
> is to make chords easily. in a tracker you have to split your chord, and
> put each note to a separate channel. i wanna get around this, but i haven't
> found the right idea to avoid this. maybe "piano-roll view" would be the
> best solution. please, tell me your ideas!
I've used trackers that handle this, and even though the implementations were
quite limited, it did work pretty well. The trick was to have switch
"polyphonic edit" that enabled note events (key donwns) to insert a note and
then move on to the next track. IIRC, the tracker I saw it on had a setting
"polyphonic edit tracks" that let you set how many tracks should be used for
the cycling.
I'd do it in a similar, but more flexible way: Allow the user to select what
tracks to enable for recording. Possibly, a smart channel allocator could be
used as an alternative to the "insert note; next channel;" approach. This would
still work in real time record mode as well as step time. The algorithm would
searchback the enabled tracks to the last safe point and then scan forward,
taking effects, instruments and pitches in account, until it finds out which
track is best to steal for the particular note to insert.
Another solution is to enable mapping of tracks to multiple channels
(polyphonic tracks), but that more or less breaks the entire tracker concept...
OTOH, perhaps having full control over every single channel isn't all that
important these days? Back when I started designing my own tracker, I couldn't
get more than 8-12 quality channels out of my Amiga. And that was a 25 MHz 68030
box... 4 tracks was the only viable format for games and demos. We have a few
more cycles to play with these days... :-)
//David
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