Coders: those who code the format, player, and also happen to be a musician

Interesting notion... All of the aspects you mentioned are important, but if I had to order them, here is the order I would pick and my reasoning why:

#1 - The Musicians
Quite frankly, music wouldn't exist without people making it. If there was no music, there would be no necessity for any of the other three aspects as there would not even be a tracking scene. :P

#2 - The Trackers
Although tracking came about as a method of taking advantage of Amiga sound hardware, it's kept its relevance not because of the sound cards, as the sound cards became more advanced fairly quickly, but because of the technical aspect of being able to fit more music into a smaller space without having to resort to MIDI, which even nowdays STILL sounds different depending on the hardware and software being used to play it back.

#3 - The Soundcards
Obviously, you can't play music on a computer without a soundcard, but given that some trackers have the ability to use devices as rudimentary as the PC Speaker, the tech behind the sound cards is not the leading factor behind the quality of the trackers throughout the years, which is why I put this below the trackers.

#4 - The Players
The reason this is at the bottom of the list is because most people who actively download and listen to tracked music likely have an interest in making music and tracking to begin with. If tracked formats were more popular in general and a large number of average people listened to them on a regular basis, media playback programs would support the various tracker formats more readily, but alas, that's not the case. Not to mention, you can play back tracked music in tracker software itself and some players which can render multiple tracked file formats don't render all of them 100% perfectly, the IT format being the most notorious given what was done to it by future IT-compatible trackers.

Again, all four aspects are important, but this would be the order I would put them in.

your guess was impressive, Gemini000! It made me remember the fight between the player and the tracker. I think I would switch #2 and #3, but on an amiga system paula was PCM, but my target when I wrote the question was about a PC using a Gravis Ultrasound, SoundBlaster AWE, Turtle Beach, whatever, my point was about hardware /dev/sequencer mixing versus software /dev/pcm.

Gemini000: do you think that it was the GUS and the sbAWE that killed the amiga audio ?

ElBrunzy wrote:

Gemini000: do you think that it was the GUS and the sbAWE that killed the amiga audio ?

I don't know enough about later Amiga computers to answer that. :/

I would say that the hardware came first.
Trackers as we know them today, as in sample/pattern-based music editors, arrived as a response to the Amiga's new audio hardware.
So:
1) Hardware - creating a demand for a new type of music editor
2) Coders - designing and building the music editor
3) Musicians - making music in the new format, which made tracker music popular
4) Players - people started wanting to play music standalone, rather than just listening to the music in-game or in a demo/cracktro

I don't think the PC had a whole lot to do with trackers in the early stages. They were just trying to mimic what people were doing on the Amiga.
Once PC hardware became more powerful, PC trackers would get extra features. I'm not really sure if the GUS and SB AWE were deliberately designed for the tracker scene, or if they were meant more as a 'generic MIDI' wavetable device, and trackers just happened to meet them halfway.
But again, it would be the hardware (mostly faster CPUs on PC, because all the important new features such as 16-bit samples, interpolated sample mixing, ping-pong looping, up to 32 channels etc were already available before GUS/AWE were on the market, all done in software) that enabled coders to push tracker technology further.

Scali : I like your way to see things. So the hardware manufacturer offer a framework for coders to use and make interface so musicians can use it.

I would like to quote that word you say "mimic" I was thinking about that exact concept lately. If a chiptune was done on the amiga it sound in a way, you port that music to pc, it can play but does it sound right ?

chip music modules (.mod chip) play heavy with hardware stuff to achieve something we can call a "sample", so many players play them wrong because they dont interpret the transformation instructions all right.

I had the chance to own an amiga1200 ntsc for some time and I compared many chip music from the aminet.net that I ever only listen on a PC computer and I found that they play the same on the amiga. The amiga of course using software rendering. I was then concerned with the idea about what music was used to make sure the conversion was done properly,

Indeed, most PC trackers/players don't play mods entirely correctly, and especially chiptunes tend to go wrong.
The best tracker on PC is 8bitbubsy's ProTracker Win32: https://sourceforge.net/projects/protracker/

The tracker itself is based on the actual Amiga code, and tries to do everything 100% the same as in the original.
The mixing engine is also very accurate, and takes the Amiga hardware into account in great detail.
So it processes all effects with perfect accuracy, and the generated sound is also a very good approximation of the Amiga sound chip.

Before this 'port' of ProTracker came around, I tended to just use the real ProTracker in WinUAE on my PC, which amounts to pretty much the same thing.

Scali : yes your post seem very nice, but I'm gonna be very blunt and tell you that amiga have nothing to do with real chip music interpretation.

it is a brain maze into my head about how chip music played onto the amiga sound exactly the same as played onto the pc scene with a gus nor a sb32, I think the paula chip suck ass compared to the pc alternative!

https://youtu.be/kEBW8A3bw-Q?t=974

ElBrunzy wrote:

Scali : yes your post seem very nice, but I'm gonna be very blunt and tell you that amiga have nothing to do with real chip music interpretation.

I thought you were talking about so-called chip mods. Those are by definition mods made on/for Amiga and its Paula chip. So they have everything to do with the Amiga.

ElBrunzy wrote:

it is a brain maze into my head about how chip music played onto the amiga sound exactly the same as played onto the pc scene with a gus nor a sb32, I think the paula chip suck ass compared to the pc alternative!

Does that matter for mods? They were made on Amiga, and GUS or AWE cards may have had more advanced chips, but for playing mods you're not using anything that the Amiga's Paula chip can't do. It's just 4 channels with 8-bit samples, 65 volume levels and a fixed set of effects.

ElBrunzy wrote:

I think the paula chip suck ass compared to the pc alternative!

Apparently the Paula chip was released in 1985. The first Sound Blaster wasn't released until 1989. So in 1985, when Paula came out, the PC alternative was the PC speaker. In other words, never mind the GUS, what you're saying is that you prefer the PC Speaker to Paula 😜

Yes, the GUS was the first card for PC that could play MODs with hardware mixing instead of CPU routines (which at that time were generally poor quality because of limited CPU resources).
The GUS arrived on the market in late 1992. The YouTube you're linking to contains a MOD from 1991. So before there even was a way to play a MOD with hardware on a PC 😀
The AWE was even later, and in fact so late that the heyday of tracker music was already over (it was the CDROM era), and the most popular trackers such as FastTracker 2 and ScreamTracker 3 never got support for the AWE. Making the GUS the only proper hardware for tracker music.

In fact, I'm rather surprised the AWE is so popular on these forums. I had one PC with an AWE32 P&P, and I found its sound quality to be worse than the various GUSes I had, and it was also useless, since it wasn't supported in most of the demos, trackers and players that I used. The GUS is hands-down the better card.

Difficult question, but I'd be inclined to use the time line, design, production and influence of the Fairlight CMI as an acceptable pattern after which the issue of importance could potentially be resolved.

As far as I'm concerned, there's no way it would have gotten anywhere without "Page R", that is, the tracker, what effectually closed the gap between metal and musician.

exactly Malvineious : I'm sorry and I appologise, I understand my comparison made no sence, but yet was funny as I listen to amiga music now with a gus or a awe on a pc.

I always feel like that guy who use an vinyl table to listen to his techno when I insist on using the gus or awe hardware to listen to a module music.

I think the GUS or AWE is a rather arbitrary choice.
I mean, if your rationale for using a GUS or AWE is that it has better specs, and therefore better audio quality than an Amiga (which in itself is debatable), then why stop at a GUS or AWE?
I would argue that a modern soundchip with high-quality software mixing routines would be far superior to the GUS or AWE.
Namely, even onboard chips these days are capable of 24-bit 96 KHz, and 192 KHz hardware is also common.
CPU power has long stopped being a limiting factor, so you can easily mix hundreds of channels in realtime, while having high-quality hermite spline interpolation in full 64-bit floating-point resolution, which can then be post-processed to a 24-bit signal. This will give much better quality than the simple linear interpolation with 16-bit and 44.1 KHz (or even lower in the case of a GF1 running many channels) mixing.

"I mean, if your rationale for using a GUS or AWE is that it has better specs, and therefore better audio quality than an Amiga (which in itself is debatable), then why stop at a GUS or AWE?"
did you say that ?
the amiga paula chip had a kind of dual 8bit sound that you never find anywhere else and this gave the music from this station, especialy the chip one, a very sweet sound not found anywhere else.

it's not just a matther of performance, it's a matter of legacy!

Well I used an early AWE32 for tracking initially and when you're trying to use 8 channels of 16-bit audio on a 486DX4/100 things start to struggle. Also I used to listen to a lot of music disks. Radical Rhythms by D-lusion, which used their own X-Tracker, would not play the songs correctly on the SB. On the GUS: perfect. So there are more factors to consider in this debate.

brassicGamer wrote:

Well I used an early AWE32 for tracking initially and when you're trying to use 8 channels of 16-bit audio on a 486DX4/100 things start to struggle. Also I used to listen to a lot of music disks. Radical Rhythms by D-lusion, which used their own X-Tracker, would not play the songs correctly on the SB. On the GUS: perfect. So there are more factors to consider in this debate.

That is probably because of what I referred to earlier: AWE isn't supported by most popular trackers/players.
It probably ran in SB16-compatible mode, using CPU mixing, in which case it would be inferior to the GUS in both performance and sound quality.

Scali : I'm a big fan of Lada Kopecky who programmed a player for the emu8000 and the emu10k, it's player is a favorite of mine. There is also awemp32 for dos. I had some sbpnp32, sbawe32 and sblive and what Lada coded always succesfully determine the ram and the card type of those kind of card. I'm pretty sure there was a driver for cubic player to use the hardware emu, but I'm not sure.

I cant remember of any tracker that could use the emu, I dont even think impulse tracker could do it. My guess is that the emu featured about the same capability (hardware mixing that is) as the gus but was more oriented for video games rather than the gus who more popular for demo scene.

Scali: (yes you again). The gus and emu are arbitrary choice but where they any other for the average teen wanting to game listen to modules and demos ? I know there was some card that did it better, like turtle beach, but they wherent cheap and unsuported in video games and demo. Also I once own a PAS, saw this card in a very small bunch of video games being supported. I think it add nothing at all over an opl, so I never bothered to test it.

ElBrunzy wrote:

Scali: (yes you again). The gus and emu are arbitrary choice but where they any other for the average teen wanting to game listen to modules and demos ? I know there was some card that did it better, like turtle beach, but they wherent cheap and unsuported in video games and demo. Also I once own a PAS, saw this card in a very small bunch of video games being supported. I think it add nothing at all over an opl, so I never bothered to test it.

I think you need to put things on a timeline. Something like this:
1985: Amiga is introduced
1987: Ultimate SoundTracker is released, kicking off tracker music as we know it today
1989: Sound Blaster 1.0 is introduced, finally a decent way to play digital music on PC (although still mono and 1-channel). This kicks off development of MOD replay routines and tracker clones on PC.
1992: Gravis UltraSound introduced, first time tracker music can be replayed with hardware mixing on PC.
1994: Sound Blaster AWE introduced, finally a Sound Blaster with hardware mixing. The problem of software mixing had more or less ceased to exist though, since we had Pentium CPUs by now, which aren't bothered by a bit of software mixing in the background.

Because there's a few years between all these separate events, you shouldn't just lump everything together.

The PAS was actually quite a decent alternative to the Sound Blaster. It was compatible with SB (also digital sound), but was of considerably higher quality than the real thing (which wasn't that hard).