In a previous post we saw that Taketracker was listed as the second most popular Amiga tracker, which was odd since it’s an obscure DOS-software. According to Redneckerz it was the most powerful 16-channel-tracker that used the MOD format.
I looked into it a bit more. According to Stone Oakvalley, the SOAMC collection used Deliplayer 2 to identify the music format. Other programs identify these “Taketracker-songs” as either Sound-, Noise- or Protracker. Below you can see Stone’s screenshots.
There are TT-songs in SOAMC that were made by Maktone, Dubmood, Zalza, Josss, Zabutom, Nagz and Cerror. Atleast some of their songs are made in Fasttracker II, saved as MOD. Also, if an FT2-songs are loaded into Protracker and saved again, they are still identified as Taketracker (according to Deetsay aka Tero).
On the other hand, Beathawk’s ambient-tune says in the sample-info “hopefully ucan play this right with pc”. Rez says that his TT-songs were made with Protracker 3.52. And if you search the TT-songs’ sample-infos for “amiga” you can find more songs that were definitely made on the Amiga. There are songs by Allister Brimble and Moby, but also those pioneerings works by 4-mat around 1990 (which were made in Protracker 1.3b).
The header of a MOD file only seems to have rough details about which tracker was used. Afaik, there’s no way to know for sure which tracker was used to make the songs. But there are obviously different ways to go, since the TT-songs are identified so differently by various software.
Stone decided to relabel all the TT-songs as Protracker. You can see a list of all the the conversions here. Hopefully someday there’ll be a proper MOD-identifier around. Until then, the Taketracker mystery is not solved!
CHIPFLIP 
April 23, 2011 at 6:25 pm |
A job well done, Master Detective!
April 28, 2011 at 3:48 pm |
hehe, cheers
May 10, 2011 at 1:26 pm |
taketracker says “M.K.”, “6CHN”, “8CHN”, or “16CH” in its own modules… it seems too unlikely that anyone would want to identify anything as being taketracker just from those. the mystery is still mysterious, to me…
May 10, 2011 at 1:40 pm |
Yeah, it is. I didn’t know that it was so different between the different programs. I wonder if there’ll ever be a good detection for all those MOD-formats…
May 20, 2011 at 11:23 am |
[…] Taketracker – 6300 [wrong - see update] […]
June 5, 2011 at 7:35 pm |
A bit late on the reply, but anyhow:
@ ant1: 6CHN and 8CHN arent TT-specific. these are mostly from Fasttracker 1 (who introduced such an 8CHN format, thats for sure)
the M.K. identifier is being something (i believe) that got introduced in Noisetracker. this is also not TT-specific at all.
16CH, however, is something from TT. when you see a module with this header, its most certainly from TT.
for 6 channel and 8 channel modules, you can forget all the Amiga soundtrackers: Except for Startrekker, no Pro/Sound/Noisetracker program supported this.
Afaik, the only problem into IDing these numbers (You have seen that not 2 programs ID the module the same way) is to see whether its an Fasttracker 1 song (which made 6CHN and 8 CHN markers possible) or a TT song. its more likely they are FT1 songs though, because that tracker was a bit more known back in the days, afaik :)
June 6, 2011 at 11:56 am |
There are other trackers than Startrekker that support 8ch on Amiga (Protracker, OctaMED), but I assume you already knew that? Do you know of a good way to ID the songs properly? It’s not just about TT or FT1, since some of the songs were made in various versions of Protracker aswell.
June 6, 2011 at 7:25 pm
Yeah, Octamed had 8 channel, but was that .mod too? i think so.
i know that some Protracker versions had some support for 8CHN modules, but i dont know if there was a proper Protracker release on it.
as for IDing: my first and foremost only thought is just trying to play them in XMplay and see what it says. the other track could be that you play the module in MPT and look at which specific effects an 8CHN module has.
November 24, 2011 at 9:44 am |
Jumping in late, but this is too funny. TakeTracker was made by a friend of mine and myself when we were 14-15 years old, so beware this is the work of kids. I don’t think it was used by many people as better alternatives came along pretty soon after.
TakeTracker was a generic MOD-tracker. The only TakeTracker-specific IDs are for MODs with 1-3 channels, which use TDZ1-3 (TDZ meaning “Twaddler&Dr.Zon”). All other ID’s are also supported by other trackers, making it rather hard to determine the origin of a mod.
I assume if a track is listed as “TakeTracker”, its always wrong. Imo there is no reason to refer to a MOD as a “TakeTracker-module” when there are X other programs that write the same format. It would be like refering to .txt as “Edlin documents” or some other obscure editor :).
November 24, 2011 at 1:23 pm |
Hehe, thanks for that input! Your teenage adventure became a super popular tracker there for a while, sorry for revealing the scandal :)
January 12, 2012 at 2:23 am |
DeliPlayer2 which was used for detection on PC for SOAMC=, was the 2.03beta version and the Players/dpTracker.dll is what identify certain M.K. modules to become TakeTracker.
If I however, delete that .DLL and add the “Protracker (external)” player engine from Wanted Team instead, it identify as “Protracker (external)” within DP2.03b. http://wt.exotica.org.uk/players.html
If the development of DeliPlayer2 had not ended sometime in 2006? the detection bug might had been fixed…oh well.
It is my belief that a certain version of Protracker or clone on Amiga manages to save some bytes that looks like TakeTracker for DeliPlayer2 detection.
And so it begins: I saved a empty module from TakeTracker 0.9e DOS, as 4, 8 and 16 channel. The 4 channel version added M.K, the other 8CHN and 16CH.
4 channel M.K. was identified in DeliPlayer2 with the dpTracker.dll as “NoiseTracker”. The 8 and 16 channel versions was identified as “TakeTracker”. With the Wanted Team player, only the 4CHN was identified as “Protracker (external)”, the two other “unknown”.
The funny thing is that the 4CHN module was not detected as TakeTracker even it was saved 100% from TakeTracker. It means that a certain type of NoiseTracker/ProTracker/SoundTracker/StarTrekker on Amiga managed to save some bytes that makes DP2 believe it’s a “unknown” not true TakeTracker 4CHN M.K. module.
I guess if one were to save an empty module from a bunch of NT,PT,ST versions on Amiga we might end up finding out that the original claimed TakeTracker in SOAMC= of today (now: Protracker) is actually a certain version of NT, PT or ST instead.
January 12, 2012 at 1:04 pm |
Yeah, it would be interesting to clarify the original format as well as possible, for preservation purposes. I read somewhere that a lot of early ST/NT-songs were re-saved in PT-format, and therefore sounded incorrect because they were identified as PT-songs instead. (Can’t remember exactly, but I think some effects were misinterpreted, etc)
January 13, 2012 at 12:49 am
I noticed the mod format saved from TakeTracker DOS added some strange bytes at the end, like so “‹¾´º‹¾¼´ºº»ÿ¨¶«·ÿ©º¬¶°±ÿïñæºþþþþþ”
So, I did a text search through the entire SOAMC= file archive and ended up with the following hits, perfectly possible of being authentic TakeTracker modules :-)
Trackers_Modland\Calvin\mod.synth_experiment
Trackers_Modland\Dr._Zon\mod.30_minutes
Trackers_Modland\Unknown_Composer\mod.doom1
And indeed they do have at the very end of the modules, that specific ID. Seems like I just made a TakeTracker identifier in Total Commander and search.. might just as well create a nice dos command tool this night, so others can benefit from this *cough* “detection breakthrough” :-)
Further, some links from the online collection to verify it all:
http://fonix.dyndns.org:40000/soamc/scanraw.php?query=/Trackers_Modland/Calvin/mod.synth_experiment_T01_
(says composed in TakeTracker)
http://fonix.dyndns.org:40000/soamc/scanraw.php?query=/Trackers_Modland/Dr._Zon/mod.30_minutes_T01_
Says composed in TT
http://fonix.dyndns.org:40000/soamc/scanraw.php?query=/Trackers_Modland/Unknown_Composer/mod.doom1_T01_
Don’t say TakeTracker, but at least .WAV
It should mean we must delete completely these entries in todays SOAMC= since TakeTracker is a specific PC format.
January 13, 2012 at 10:21 am
Haha, great detective work. Thanks for sharing!