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FamiTracker
I'm curious if anyone knows of another tracker that splits patterns up by channels like FamiTracker does. That is my favourite part about FT, but looking at things like MPT, I see that other programs save patterns in groups of all channels (not sure if I'm describing this properly).
Are there other trackers that do what FT does? If not, is it a fundamental limitation of .mods and related formats?
Jeskola Buzz Tracker lets you group your patterns pretty arbitrarily like that.
I don't think I've seen it in any others. It's a limitation of some formats, but I mean, if you're designing the format and you want it you'd put it in.
I guess FamiTracker has the ability to produce small data in mind. Buzz Tracker does it because everything is modular. Other trackers probably didn't really have these things in mind... they probably figured cut and paste was easy enough.
Raster Music Tracker is a sequencer for Atari POKEY that has per-channel patterns as well. And curiously enough, each pattern you do can be used on any and all channels, not just the one channel it was made in.
Per-channel patterns as well as patterns in general were needed for trackers that were running on simple computers like C64, with small amount of RAM and slow CPUs. On modern PCs music compilers can easily detect and remove repeating patterns automatically, and editable module sizes does not matter that much anymore, that's why you don't often see per-channel patterns in modern trackers.
I find buzz machines to be kind of hit and miss that way. Not all of them work properly. Once I figured out which which ones do, though, it has worked pretty well for me.
To me it is also a necessary factor to have a per order channels list in trackers, I don't use trackers without this features anymore.
Here is my list.
Renoise: After the 2.5.1 release (April, 2010), this modern tracker supports per channels order list.
SunVox: SunVox has a sequencer at the bottom of the tracker, and that's a very powerfull pattern position generator, it lets you to mix, even, patterns with differents lenghts. Great.
Famitracker: :D
BoyScout: A very underated GameBoy tracker for Windows, that have a per channels sequencer.
GoatTracker: This SID tracker has per channel pattern list too. But is very difficult to use if you don't know well the SID capabilities.
Adlib Tracker: This old FM Tracker has a per channels order list, it is awesome but it's old. So I'm trying to include it features on my own tracker.
DefleMask Tracker: My own tracker, and obviously has support for per channel order list, I call it the "Pattern Matrix" like in Renoise.
