I love the top down tracker UI. For some more you can look at Aphex Twin using PlayerPRO [0] and Hitori Tori using Renoise [1]
[0] https://vimeo.com/223378825
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJY5u6cC7A
Both are mindblowing.
This program doesn't look top down to me, it seems like the main sequencing interface is piano roll, although the sample editing looks tracker-inspired. It'll be interesting to see what people do with it. Maybe fans of piano roll will find a lightweight way to get their ideas down that feels simpler than a full Ableton setup?
For me I still find piano roll awkward to read. I can't visualize what the music is going to sound like the way I can with a tracker pattern. Perhaps it's because my eyes need to scan left and right and up and down too much to see what each note is? Let's not even get into the problem of having effects configured on a totally different screen. When I transitioned from tracker to hardware and later to Ableton I felt like I wasn't really writing music any more, I was just rearranging sounds till they eventually turned into music. It made for perhaps more surprising and interesting results, but I never really got back the feeling of control and finesse that I had with trackers.
I bought playerpro and we used it for a while, been a long time since I thought of it. I just checked my old Mac CD case and it's not in there, oh well. We also switched to reason around version 3-5.
It's open-source now, but never made the transition to 64-bit APIs.
If you ever do find that disc I'd love to buy it from you lol.
at the very least, you've made up my mind that i need to photograph every 4 disc page in all of my cases, and label the cases. Right now it's like "MissingHandleCase" and "RightLockBrokenCase" and "LocksIntactWithStrapCase" and "LargestUnderBedCase"!
I do have discs from that era, as i have 680x0 Mac Performa OS discs - the ones that are silver and black with pixel / icon art of the mac smiley face on them. When i still had an actual SATA optical drive on a machine i was contemplating indexing all of my optical media. I started with some software on windows and it wasn't very good, i looked around for other options and came up with nothing. So i rely on my (admittedly non-perfect) memory of what i had on disc, up to ~30 years ago.
I may as well admit: I tried to "patent" an optical media "case" that mechanically held the middle of the disc, like a laptop cdrom spindle does, but with a button to release them so you didn't need to "bend" the disc to remove it. I had cad drawings and everything. But the vaultz cases are "good enough" for my usage - where i rarely, if ever, remove discs from their sleeves. As long as the cases aren't jostled regularly, and never left open and exposed to dust, and kept in a controlled environment (not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry), i don't forsee any issues from the storage of the discs. Whether or not the foil layer or glue or any of that holds up - well, my optical disc case design was actually gasket sealed, and had something like a Schraeder valve to pump air out, or nitrogen in; this probably would have made the foil and glue last longer.
I had completely forgotten i had invented that until i started commenting on the longevity of my optical media. Sorry. Amateur archivist, here. Nice to meet you.
Well now I need one. I used PlayerPro even before I started experimenting with the terminal based trackers (FastTracker, etc).
It’s so weird, but I can still see an image of the tracker screen from a specific time in my life, and feel echoes of the way it made me feel.