Those crazy Amiga artists were ahead of their time. The lightweight real-time music engines and formats they began were uncommonly efficient, and allowed the exchange of elaborate electronic music using a minimum of resources – with some accompanying compositional and sound design ingenuity required, as well. As a result, getting a phone handset to reproduce their work today is a pretty manageable task, and some of the music available is concise and clever. Pop on some headphones, load up some tunes, and you may feel you’re starring in your very own Amiga point and click adventure the next time you hit the grocery market.

There are a number of trackers and mod players for mobile platforms from iPhone to Windows Mobile, but Android is now in on the game thanks to Xmp (Extended Module Player). Using Android’s JNI-based NDK interface for accessing native code from Java, the “experimental” queue up some files and play back on your SD card. My sense is that this hasn’t been widely tested, which is where you come in: got an Android phone? Ideally, got some obscure models of Android phone? Load this up and see if you’re getting the retro tracker music love. Let us know in comments how it goes.

Full downloads and code for Xmp, a command-line mod player for Mac, Windows, Linux and pretty much every OS every invented, along with the experimental Android port:
http://xmp.sourceforge.net/

Thanks to Dan Galpin, developer advocate at Google, for pointing this out to me.

Now, this brings me to my open question. Suffice to say, someone could build a pretty player interface for Xmp, with playlist support and the lot. But what about actually editing files on your Android device, as you can on iPhone, PSP, GamePark, PC, Mac, etc.? It’s possible that the Xmp code could be used as a template for porting the engine of something like LittleGPTracker. But looking through quickly, I wonder if Xmp itself might serve as a real-time engine? It’d also be interesting to design a tracker interface that took the UI patterns of platforms like Android to heart, rather than just reproducing interfaces designed for other platforms. If you’re interested in such a project or have some insight into what might be practical, let us know in comments.

Here’s a phrase you won’t hear often on, say, Download Squad:

"PS The AmigaOS port will be up in a few days."

Welcome to the wacky world of trackers, the music production tools time forgot. While the rest of the world frets over the environmental impact of computing and the cost of digital tools, the music community has a solution: recycle that garage sale / $50 eBay computer as a powerful music tool that might even be better than what you’ve got now.

If you have something with a CPU, odds are pretty good MilkyTracker runs on it. That includes Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel), Windows Vista and XP — oh, and 2003, 2000, NT, Me, 98, and 95, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, FreeBSD, and emerging builds for popular Linux distributions and, yes, AmigaOS. It’s not just cross-platform. It’s pan-platform. (Hey, just for old time’s sake, anyone want to start a Mac versus Amiga flame war in comments? Go for it. Be brutal.)

MilkyTracker has some other good news: as of this weekend, it’s fully free and open source (GPL).

The new release (unceremoniously titled 0.90.80) has new features, too: tabbed modules so you can see up to 32 modules at once on the desktop version, playing simultaneously and copying-and-pasting between, new resamplers (even including Amiga-style resamplers) for better sound quality, direct rendering, and lots of other goodies.

So, this means MilkyTracker is the tracker to beat, right? Wrong. Tracker preferences are personal and nuanced, and competing tools offer subtle, unique workflows, plus features like the ability to run as plug-ins or support ReWire, and support for gaming platforms and other devices. But if you’re looking for a tracker to try, this should definitely be on your list. And soon you may be able to get that Amiga out of the closet. Reusing beats recycling any day.

MilkyTracker

Proof in pictures that MT can run on lots of different platforms