::|CONTENTS
- Engines Supported
- See Also
1tracker is a multiplatform music tracker for creating tunes for ZX Spectrum's beeper. Just as
Beepola, it features .tap/.asm exporting, as well as a pretty decent range of beeper engines, only this time, you don't get to manipulate just two channels with an extra one for drums - that's because the whole bunch of supported engine contains from three up to nine (!) channels!
The workflow in 1tracker is slightly different than in other trackers, and may seem quirky at first glance. Instead of a pattern matrix, 1tracker uses just one large continuous pattern. You can use a feature called "markers" to organize your song into different sections of arbitrary length. The advantage of this approach is that you don't need to take care of size optimizations - 1tracker does those automatically for you. So just track away merrily and don't worry about technical details.
1tracker's back end is modular. With some AngelScript knowledge, you can add your own beeper engines without recompiling the software.
See
zxbeep (format) for more info on what the hell is all about.
Engines Supported
"First-party" (i. e. added by Shiru)
-
Earth Shaker - a zxbeep engine made right when the commercial era of ZX Spectrum was about to fade out, i. e. 1990.
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Lyndon Sharp 2ch - only one year older than the above, this one produces quite an obvious (and loud) "poppy" sound. The drum samples sound pretty powerful, too.
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Tim Follin 3ch - used for the man's older works, such as Vectron. If you wanna pull off a Chronos, Raw Recruit or Agent X - this one's not for you. Oh, and it doesn't feature any drums, sadly.
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Octode - the biggest ass amount of channels on a 1-bit speaker since ZX-7, which is: eight (!) channels of tone with one drum channel. ZX-7 had all that without the drums, so that's a relief, I guess. :D
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Huby - the tiniest zxbeep engine alive, less than 100 bytes in size! Make sure you don't squish it.
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poww - an experimental beeper engine by utz, which has roughly the same functionality as Earth Shaker - albeit with different sounds.
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ntropic - another engine by utz, with 2 tone channels, 1 noise channel, and an additional click drum.
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ZX-10 - another engine by Ján Deák, the author of ZX-7. 4 channels, no drums.
So far, none of the above have instrument support. ,_,
"Third-party"
-
Electric Duet by krue - used to make 1-bit music on Apple II computers, features just two channels of tone.
See Also
A thread on the 1-bit Music Forum on how to properly port 1tracker on UNIX systems.
