SoundTracker | Code Like It's 198x

“Have you ever wondered how games writers get the atmospheric tunes in them written?” Amiga Computing asked in June 1990. “Or where all those demo tracks come from? Well, 99.999 per cent of them, and I think I’m being quite conservative here, are written with a utility called SoundTracker, or one of its many derivatives or lookalikes.” The program was Karsten Obarski’s Ultimate Soundtracker, a German music editor for the Amiga. It was a commercial product, yet most of the people who used it had never bought it. They used versions that crackers had copied, patched and renamed, and those versions, with NoiseTracker and ProTracker after them, set the way music was made on the Amiga and gave the tracker scene its file format.

Fast facts

Author: Karsten Obarski, Germany.
First sold: end of 1987, published by EAS, according to later accounts; promoted in North America by MichTron/MicroDeal in December 1988.
Price: £29.50 by mail order in Britain in 1989.
Channels: four, one for each of Paula’s sound channels.
Instruments: up to 15 samples per song in the original.
Output: a “module”, the song and its samples in one file, the start of the MOD format.
Descendants: the hacked Soundtrackers, NoiseTracker, StarTrekker and ProTracker.

Obarski and the first version

Obarski was a musician as well as a programmer. In February 1989 the American Commodore Magazine quoted George Johnson of the publisher DigiTek: “If you listen to Amegas, you hear what we think is excellent sound from a man named Karsten Obarski, who is also working on a music program for us.” In later accounts, Amegas, a game by a friend, is the reason the tracker exists: Obarski wrote Soundtracker to make its music. He also said he had used Chris Hülsbeck’s Soundmonitor on the Commodore 64, and public accounts describe its vertical layout as the model for his own.

How a tracker works

A tracker shows music as a table that scrolls up the screen. Each of the four columns is one channel, and each row is a moment in time. A row in a column can hold three things: a note, the number of the sample to play it with, and an effect. Amiga Computing described the layout in 1990: “a musical note (C#, D, and so on), a hex number representing a sample in memory”, followed by hexadecimal digits “used for various effects like vibrato and arpeggio”. A block of rows is a pattern; a list of pattern numbers, played in order, is the song.

The design follows the hardware. Paula, the Amiga’s sound chip, has four channels, and each one plays 8-bit samples from memory at a rate set by a period register. A tracker stores that period value for each note and writes it, with the sample’s address, length and volume, straight into the chip’s registers as the song plays. Nothing is synthesised, so any recorded sound can become an instrument, and a whole song can be carried in one file with its samples. The MOD format entry sets out the file byte by byte.

The first version was not easy to use, and Amiga Computing did not pretend otherwise: “trackers make no concession to the non-programmer”, and they were “really assembly hackers’ tools”. The original Soundtracker accepted only raw sample data, not IFF files, and its instruments had to be declared in a separate “Preset List” editor before they could be used. Amiga Format’s review of Games Music Creator in November 1989 counted that among “the complaints that surrounded the original Sound Tracker”. Samples came on disks named ST-01, ST-02 and so on, and trackers went on looking for disks with those names: CU Amiga told readers in 1991 that ProTracker “automatically detects samples stored on disks named ST-00, ST-01, ST-02 etc.”

Commercial product, pirated tool

Ultimate Soundtracker was on sale. MichTron/MicroDeal showed it beside their A.M.A.S. sampler in Toronto in December 1988, and British mail-order firms listed it at around £29.50 through 1989. But most copies in use were not the real one. “In the hands of these generally hateful people,” wrote Amiga Computing’s public-domain columnist of the crackers, “it has slowly mutated to become something slightly more useful. The name has mutated, too… the list gets longer daily as more crackers insert their names in the code and then claim to have written it.” He counted at least 20 variants.

Nobody was sure what was legal. In March 1990 a reader told Amiga Format that he had bought the original but had since “got hold of many other hackers’ versions that are much better”, and asked whether he could give them to friends. The editors replied that however much the hackers claimed to have rewritten the code, “Sound Tracker (in all its incarnations) still remains on dodgy ground. Legally, Sound Tracker is still a commercial product.” In November 1990 Amiga Computing said the program had “become famous among both crackers and demo writers”, that “chances are that even the games you buy contain tunes produced using Sound Tracker”, and that because “nobody seems to know whether Sound Tracker is now PD or not” it had become “almost impossible to obtain”.

The descendants

The later versions changed the format as well as the program. One raised the limit from 15 samples to 31 and marked its files with the letters M.K., whose origin is still disputed (see MOD format). Obarski himself released a second version, The Ultimate Soundtracker 2, in November 1988, public reference works say. The best-known successor was NoiseTracker, written in 1989, those works add, by two Swedish programmers, Pex “Mahoney” Tufvesson and Anders “Kaktus” Berkeman.

By December 1990 Amiga Format’s public-domain column found three on one disk: NoiseTracker; StarTrekker, which turned out to be “Noisetracker V2.12, rewritten by a Norwegian who goes by the alias Exolon of Fairlight”; and “Protracker V1.0, which bears a distinct resemblance to the infamous SoundTracker”. The columnist called the lot “a noble continuation of the Tracker saga”. ProTracker became the standard, and trackers on the PC later read the same modules.

Obarski did not stay in the scene. In 1993 Amiga Format noted that the disk magazine AM/FM, edited by the MED author Teijo Kinnunen, had interviewed “Karsten Obarski, who wrote the first soundtracker program”. In a later interview he said that he now worked as an electronics specialist for an industrial company.

Sources

Stewart C. Russell, public-domain music sequencers, Amiga Computing vol. 3 no. 1, June 1990, p. 99: “99.999 per cent”; the original released commercially by Obarski; the crackers’ versions; raw samples and preset files; the layout of a row.
Amiga Computing vol. 3 no. 6, November 1990, pp. 120–122: sequencer round-up, SoundTracker’s legal position.
Amiga Computing vol. 2 no. 7, December 1989: mail-order advertisement, Ultimate Sound Tracker £29.50.
Commodore Magazine vol. 10 no. 2, February 1989: DigiTek profile, George Johnson on Amegas and Obarski.
Amazing Computing vol. 4 no. 3, March 1989, p. 49: Ed Bercovitz’s report from the World of Commodore show, Toronto.
Amiga Format issue 4, November 1989, p. 83: Games Music Creator review. Issue 8, March 1990, pp. 136–137: letter, “Whose domain?”, and reply. Issue 17, December 1990: public-domain column (NoiseTracker, StarTrekker, ProTracker V1.0). Issue 48, July 1993: public-domain column on AM/FM issue 11.
CU Amiga, June 1991: ProTracker coverdisk tutorial (ST-00, ST-01 sample disks).
Wikipedia, “Ultimate Soundtracker” and “NoiseTracker” (web, secondary): the December 1987 release, The Ultimate Soundtracker 2, NoiseTracker’s authors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Soundtracker
Xavier Borderie, “Soundtracker origins, part 1: Where in the world is Karsten Obarski?”, 2021 (web, secondary): EAS, the November 1987 demo and December 1987 release, Amegas, the ST-01 disk, Obarski on Soundmonitor and on his later job. Wikipedia, “Music tracker” (web, secondary): Soundmonitor’s vertical layout as Obarski’s model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker https://xavier.borderie.net/blog/2021/09/22/soundtracker-origins-part-1-where-in-the-world-is-karsten-obarski/