Radium Music Editor

Oh wow!

Interesting, does anyone have experience with this? How well does this work?

Coming to a theatre near you this Summer... The Curies.

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.

From what I can tell, he has never put any real effort into making it known, it is primarily a personal project.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Never heard of "harding" though.

But in general use it feels slow and very unstable. I tried on Windows, as that was 'recommended'

I tried this with some of my own OctaMED files, and the experience has been ... well ... not pleasant. None of them load.

Note: I used MED, OctaMED 4, OctaMED SoundStudio, Protracker, before moving to Renoise, Reaper and Bitwig. Also used Samplitude and Sonar for a long time. Amiga user with a large collection of modules and samples I created over the decades. I like trackers and hate pianorolls. I like the Korg Gadget interface, but want a tracker for MIDI.

Renoise is probably your best option for a midi tracker, Radium (and most trackers) are meant to be stand alone and they always seem to have issues or irritating limitations when it comes to midi.

What on earth do they use LLVM for?

https://github.com/JoepVanlier/Hackey-Trackey

REAPER is available on Windows/Mac/Linux as well.