Music tracker

Music trackers (usually referred to simply as trackers) are a type of music sequencer software used to create music. They represent music tracks as an arrangement of discrete musical notes positioned in one of several channels, at discrete chronological positions on a timeline. The file format used for saving songs is called a module file.

A music tracker's musical interface is traditionally numeric: both notes and parameter changes, effects and other commands are entered with the keyboard into a grid of fixed time slots as codes consisting of letters, numbers and hexadecimal digits. Separate patterns have independent timelines; a complete song consists of a master list of repeated and concatenated patterns.

Later trackers departed from module file limitations and advantages, adding other options both to the sound synthesis (hosting generic synthesizers and effects or MIDI output) and to the sequencing (MIDI input and recording), effectively becoming general purpose sequencers with a different user interface.