I vividly remember FastTracker II, and how intuitive and tactile it felt to get things done in it, despite the minimal user interface real estate. As an example, there were no sound effects. So, I routinely manually created echo effects by copying the sounds from one channel to another one of the available channels, offsetting the notes by a few ticks and lowering the volume. It was simpler times.
Intuitive? I never thought anyone would ever describe something as arcane as a tracker intuitive. I can't think of something worse. Pure Data comes close.
I would also consider trackers as being very intuitive in a lot of ways compared to DAWs, coming from the perspective of someone who isn't great at playing midi controllers live.
I do find tracker software to not be as immediate compared to a DAW for quickly producing a loop or initial idea, but beyond that initial hump the workflows for fully fleshing out and completing a track seem simpler and intuitive compared to a DAW, IMO. Once you have established the beginning of an idea the UX feels like editing a spreadsheet. The difference between using a DAW or tracker, for me feels like the difference between coding in a text editor versus using a node based UI. They are both intuitive in very different ways.
Loading a module and playing it in a tracker is how I learned to make music. You see what notes and samples are triggered when and whatever effect commands are used to make it sound the way it does.
Besides, once you've memorized screens and hotkeys (which happens pretty fast, because there aren't that many) you don't need it to be intuitive.
A couple of years ago I downloaded SchismTracker. The muscle memory from Scream/Impulse Tracker from 20-25 years prior, coming back in an instant was one of the most wonderful computer interactions of my life. <3
Like, you load or generate a sine wave as a sample and just keep changing the numbers until you've got a rough idea of what does what?
I guess nowadays it's easier to read the source code of mikmod or milkytracker. But back in the day, heck no. MIDI sorta worked, but not great. My recordings were an awful mess because the timings were always slightly off such that it was impossible to have a bar with normal 1/4 notes.
Being an impatient teenager, I did brute-force the note-key layout, but I didn't have to - each context/screen had it's own help page. You could view all screens (and their respective shortcut) by pressing ESC.
I'd rather label it "experimenting" than "brute-forcing", testing what would happen if I were to put this or that value to this or that effect. Perhaps others would do it differently but I'd go by ear almost all of the time and adjust bit by bit.
Since you could save samples from downloaded modules, you could quickly build a starter library - although "ripping" samples was considered "lame". In lack of (expensive) synthesizers, some musicians would buy Sample CDs.
In my experience (90s Sweden), of those fortunate enough to have a home computer (usually a 486 66 MHz w 8 MB), few also had MIDI. I knew of one person who ran Cubase on Windows 3.11 with hardware samplers etc, which I found immensely exotic!
If you have no serious problem to wrap your head around the columnar presentation of data than "intuitive" is not an unapt way to describe the whole deal. Say, where music theory and practice intersect with something like a spreadsheet, for example... two things one might've already been exposed to before.
I have always found https://www.futuretimeline.net/ to be very, very, interesting in the gradual tangent to sci-fi. In the same vein, I wanted to understand how different LLMs think about the future, and where they potentially agree.
Any idea what kind of revenue this potentially brings in, assuming this is the rationale begins this decision? In contrast to tarnishing the Filezilla name (albeit this could mostly be controversial in the hn crowd)
Around $0.01 per active user per year from open source donations. Many factors: depends on the type of open source (infra vs user-facing) and the technical ability and geographic location of your users.
PPI malware seems to go for around $0.40/install [0]
Most likely not: those japanese companies make a ton a different products in a ton a various domains, contrary to most american/european companies, so they can do cars and robots and ships and pens and whatever else without many links.
Also it's most likely that Apple will use Hyundai as they did use Intel for some time, until they make their own.
In Sweden we have a similar drink called "julmust" or "påskmust" which many people go for, over international beverages, during Christmas and Easter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julmust
If you do not mind me asking, as a fellow artist, how have you reached the point of getting this regular influx of listeners on Spotify? Through external promotion or is this solely driven by the Spotify platform and its algorithms?
Hey! I'm enjoying some of your music on spotify. Going to be added to my work + relaxation playlists! Really nice ambiance.
What are some pointers on getting started? I really don't have any background but interested.
