Software with Tracker

Arkos Tracker 2 writes music for the AY and YM sound chips of the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, MSX and Atari ST, and for a handful of other machines. It comes with the player routines needed to get the music into a real program on those platforms, which is the part that usually stops people.

BambooTracker writes music for the Yamaha YM2608, the FM chip in NEC's PC-8801 and PC-9801 machines, and its relatives. It has a full FM instrument editor alongside the tracker, and exports to the formats those machines and their emulators play.

Bosca Ceoil is aimed squarely at people who have never written music. Everything is on one screen, the instruments are chosen from a list, and the scale and chord helpers make it hard to play a wrong note. Blue is the maintained rebuild of the original, and it runs on desktop and in a browser.

PICO-8 bundles a code editor, sprite editor, map editor, sound effect editor and tracker into one tiny virtual machine with strict limits that keep games small and finishable.

Picotron is a fantasy workstation from the makers of PICO-8: a small imaginary computer with its own desktop, file system and built-in tools - a sprite editor, a map editor, a tracker and a code editor - all inside fixed limits. It is roomier than PICO-8 and keeps the same deliberately constrained feel.

Schism Tracker is a faithful rewrite of Impulse Tracker that runs on modern machines and keeps the original keyboard layout, so muscle memory from the DOS original still works. It is sample-based, reads and writes the old module formats, and is a common way to write chiptune that is not tied to one chip.

SunVox combines a pattern tracker with a modular synthesizer, and runs the same on desktops, phones and the web.

TIC-80 is an open source fantasy console in the PICO-8 mould with a larger screen, several scripting languages, and built-in sprite, map, sound and music editors.