I really need to carve out some time to look at this and compare to Renoise. The in-line representation of automation/effects look absolutely killer to me as I usually have to manage a lot of that in my head when working.
Does Logic Pro or Ableton Live not fit your bill? Not a pointed question, I’m genuinely curious. I don’t know enough about trackers mainly coming from a sequencer background.
Neither have anything remotely similar to a tracker interface. The closest "current" DAW would be something like ReNoise, but it lacks a bunch of the ideas that Radium uses, like working graphically inside the tracker UI.
Voting on HN is not a like, it is about getting the good posts which produce good discussion at the top of the thread so we do not have to scroll through pedantry and nitpicking to get to the content. These posts offering old content are handy things to have in a thread but rarely produce good discussion and the best place in a thread for them is at thee bottom of the worthwhile posts but before the garbage posts which is where a single downvote should get it in an ideal world but people probably just downvote such posts in an attempt to counter the upvotes such posts always get.
Cakewalk has been scripted with a LISP (CAL) from the early days, at least through the 90s. I see hints that it still is but not sure with all the changes from Bandlab.
never tried Radium, but in Apple's Logic Pro you can write Javascript to do stuff to the MIDI as it comes in or goes out. I've found it quite useful. I once wrote a small script (at the request of another Logic user) that turned a monosynth that only supported "low note priority" into "last note priority." I'd be interested to see what Radium can do.
For those asking how this is different than other non-tracker DAWs, the answer is basically "this is a tracker".
For those not familiar, trackers are a type of music composition software that's been around in one form or another since maybe the mid-80s. [1]
Used very heavily in the demoscene, chiptune, and adjacent parts of game development scenes.
The power of trackers is in the workflow, which provides an incredibly fast interface for writing music compare to other interfaces like piano rolls, staves and notes, multi-track DAWs and so forth. They take a bit to get to used to, but allow you to compose basically as fast as you can type notes. This speeds up iteration in testing musical ideas substantially. The interface concept also lends itself to a very compact representation of multiple tracks allowing a composer to see what's happening elsewhere in their composition.
It can feel a lot like programming in many ways, and like you are working a level "below" almost all other composition software and closer to the music and instruments.
The format lends itself very well to compositions in 4/4 time, but most tracker software lets you change the time signature, tempo, and other things so that very complex compositions with weird rhythmic patterns are not too hard to pull off.
There are dedicated tracker software for all kinds of musical workflows: sample-based, chiptune, NES, MIDI, VST, modular synths, etc. and tracker software exists on pretty much every platform and targeting nearly every output audio device you could possibly imagine.
There are literally millions of tracked pieces of music in the world, covering an innumerable number of genres.
Best of all, most tracking software is free, or incredibly cheap, well documented with videos showing you how to do things and thousands to hundreds of thousands of examples you can open to see how a particular musician accomplished something.
2 - Here's a tracker I particularly like who works in a lot of styles, especially tracks "Living, again and again" (both mixes), "Accidental Ray of Sun (Piano Mix)", "Aurielis (lf box mix)", and "Transitory"
According to a comment, he did most of this in a tracker called "Impulse Tracker" which is now replicated for modern systems as "Schism Tracker" - a completely sample based tool.
> Information to warez groups: Since the source is open, it should be simple to turn the demo into a fully featured version. Please let me know of any problems.
Makes sense as their name suggests that they are affiliated with one of the original warez crews, Radium, who were around in the late 90s. Or that the name is an homage to Radium, who did a lot of massive releases that these developers may have grown up on.
Bummer about the reported Mac issues. Anybody have experience with it there?
I have Logic, so I will probably never devote the time to trying to fix this. But maybe if I understood the "tracker" interface it would be more appealing.
I have a smaller tracker app that has similar problems on mac.
When you use the keyboard for navigation , holding down a key brings up the accent dialog thing. It also starts doing that “bllllllllllpppppp” noise like you’re doing something wrong.
If you try to add sandbox and harding the SDL timer seems to go nuts, loops too fast and crashes often.
Also, a lot of old tracker code uses 32 bit tricks that arm64 just doesn’t like and there doesn’t seem to be a nice way to force a 32 bit mode.
If you dont build with sandbox or harding it behaves better, but then of course you can’t validate or distribute it.
This DAW has been in development for a long while but it's never been stable enough to be used seriously. I thought the project was dead until five minutes ago. Worth giving a try again, maybe.
Around a decade ago I used it for about a year, don't recall any stability issues on linux. So far no issues with my first few hours of use since reinstalling.
This is almost exactly what I've been dreaming of: a tracker with a linear composition timeline and automation/modulation effect guides.
Last year I even thought of just making my own, then got sidetracked. Hope this works as well as I dream.
Not sure how I've never come across this one before.
>Not sure how I've never come across this one before.
From what I can tell, he has never put any real effort into making it known, it is primarily a personal project.
I really need to carve out some time to look at this and compare to Renoise. The in-line representation of automation/effects look absolutely killer to me as I usually have to manage a lot of that in my head when working.
I assume you've seen ReNoise.
Yes, and it's phenomenal as a tracker, but doesn't have the automation guides or the horizontal linear composition editor.
Does Logic Pro or Ableton Live not fit your bill? Not a pointed question, I’m genuinely curious. I don’t know enough about trackers mainly coming from a sequencer background.
I put an answer here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44505703
Neither have anything remotely similar to a tracker interface. The closest "current" DAW would be something like ReNoise, but it lacks a bunch of the ideas that Radium uses, like working graphically inside the tracker UI.
Not OP but none of those have native linux support.
Bitwig does and it works really well. pretty much a replacement for live.
I'll second Bitwig. It's not often I pay $400 for something and regret nothing, let alone software. But Bitwig has proven its worth.
A thread in 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9493536
Why are you downvoted? I like how we can find past thread about the same topic
Voting on HN is not a like, it is about getting the good posts which produce good discussion at the top of the thread so we do not have to scroll through pedantry and nitpicking to get to the content. These posts offering old content are handy things to have in a thread but rarely produce good discussion and the best place in a thread for them is at thee bottom of the worthwhile posts but before the garbage posts which is where a single downvote should get it in an ideal world but people probably just downvote such posts in an attempt to counter the upvotes such posts always get.
> Scripting in [...] Scheme
Interesting, does anyone have experience with this? How well does this work?
https://github.com/kmatheussen/radium/blob/master/api/protos... gives some clues as to what can be done with Scheme/python. I never tried the scripting back when I used it years ago but it looks pretty useful, on my list of things to explore.
Cakewalk has been scripted with a LISP (CAL) from the early days, at least through the 90s. I see hints that it still is but not sure with all the changes from Bandlab.
never tried Radium, but in Apple's Logic Pro you can write Javascript to do stuff to the MIDI as it comes in or goes out. I've found it quite useful. I once wrote a small script (at the request of another Logic user) that turned a monosynth that only supported "low note priority" into "last note priority." I'd be interested to see what Radium can do.
For those asking how this is different than other non-tracker DAWs, the answer is basically "this is a tracker".
For those not familiar, trackers are a type of music composition software that's been around in one form or another since maybe the mid-80s. [1]
Used very heavily in the demoscene, chiptune, and adjacent parts of game development scenes.
The power of trackers is in the workflow, which provides an incredibly fast interface for writing music compare to other interfaces like piano rolls, staves and notes, multi-track DAWs and so forth. They take a bit to get to used to, but allow you to compose basically as fast as you can type notes. This speeds up iteration in testing musical ideas substantially. The interface concept also lends itself to a very compact representation of multiple tracks allowing a composer to see what's happening elsewhere in their composition.
It can feel a lot like programming in many ways, and like you are working a level "below" almost all other composition software and closer to the music and instruments.
The format lends itself very well to compositions in 4/4 time, but most tracker software lets you change the time signature, tempo, and other things so that very complex compositions with weird rhythmic patterns are not too hard to pull off.
There are dedicated tracker software for all kinds of musical workflows: sample-based, chiptune, NES, MIDI, VST, modular synths, etc. and tracker software exists on pretty much every platform and targeting nearly every output audio device you could possibly imagine.
There are literally millions of tracked pieces of music in the world, covering an innumerable number of genres.
Best of all, most tracking software is free, or incredibly cheap, well documented with videos showing you how to do things and thousands to hundreds of thousands of examples you can open to see how a particular musician accomplished something.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker
2 - Here's a tracker I particularly like who works in a lot of styles, especially tracks "Living, again and again" (both mixes), "Accidental Ray of Sun (Piano Mix)", "Aurielis (lf box mix)", and "Transitory"
https://soundcloud.com/elblanco5
According to a comment, he did most of this in a tracker called "Impulse Tracker" which is now replicated for modern systems as "Schism Tracker" - a completely sample based tool.
I use https://www.renoise.com/
I'm familiar with Reaper but not this- can anyone who's used both give any color to the differences between this and a DAW like Reaper?
> Information to warez groups
Oh wow!
> Information to warez groups: Since the source is open, it should be simple to turn the demo into a fully featured version. Please let me know of any problems.
Makes sense as their name suggests that they are affiliated with one of the original warez crews, Radium, who were around in the late 90s. Or that the name is an homage to Radium, who did a lot of massive releases that these developers may have grown up on.
Yes, makes sense and I don't mind at all - was part of the same scene.
Bummer about the reported Mac issues. Anybody have experience with it there?
I have Logic, so I will probably never devote the time to trying to fix this. But maybe if I understood the "tracker" interface it would be more appealing.
I have a smaller tracker app that has similar problems on mac.
When you use the keyboard for navigation , holding down a key brings up the accent dialog thing. It also starts doing that “bllllllllllpppppp” noise like you’re doing something wrong.
If you try to add sandbox and harding the SDL timer seems to go nuts, loops too fast and crashes often.
Also, a lot of old tracker code uses 32 bit tricks that arm64 just doesn’t like and there doesn’t seem to be a nice way to force a 32 bit mode.
If you dont build with sandbox or harding it behaves better, but then of course you can’t validate or distribute it.
Thanks for the info!
Never heard of "harding" though.
I use it and love it. Worth the money!
This DAW has been in development for a long while but it's never been stable enough to be used seriously. I thought the project was dead until five minutes ago. Worth giving a try again, maybe.
Around a decade ago I used it for about a year, don't recall any stability issues on linux. So far no issues with my first few hours of use since reinstalling.
How does this compare to Nodal ? https://nodalmusic.com
No comparison at all, but thanks! I've been looking for a good generative music tool for a while and this looks very interesting.
Hardly
the most popular one would be Renoise
https://youtu.be/dw4A97V8mhM
Coming to a theatre near you this Summer... The Curies.