News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video] by kleiba on Monday November 22, 2021 @07:13PM (#29313173)
In my younger days, I used to spend hours and hours playing with trackers on the Commodore Amiga. Over the years, I've always toyed with the idea of firing one up again but the one thing that's keeping me from doing that is the lack of sample banks.

Admittedly, I've never spent too much time looking into it, so I might be wrong (I actually kind of hope it), but it seems to me that getting hold of a tracker program is not an issue, but getting a hold of any useful samples is. Typically, it involves either spending money (which is fine, I guess, but maybe not if you really just want to appeal to your nostalgia) or painfully wading through online archives of single sound samples in the hope of eventually gathering enough to create your own sample bank. That's a cumbersome process though, that would take toooo long for someone who just wants to casually try out a tracker again.

In the olden days, and maybe that was just because the Amiga trackers I had came from less than official sources, always came with at least one substantial sample bank included. Probably not the greatest samples, but you got a decent amount of bass sounds, some drums (kicks, snares, hihats) and some lead instruments. Granted, there were also many garbage sounds that you could probably never use (I remember samples from Star Wars movies, etc...) but besides those, there were enough actual musical sounds/instruments that you could use to make your own songs.

Like I said above, maybe it's just that I'm not looking in the right places, and I really hope that I'm just doing it wrong. So if you know how where to get samples for any tracker program (like, a comprehensive mixed set, not just single samples and not just a bank of 1024 bass sounds or so), please post a link.

Re:Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video] by _0ffh on Monday November 22, 2021 @07:21PM (#29313218)
There's always the way how I got most of my samples at the time: Extract them from your mod collection. The downside is, you'll have to name and organise them yourself, as the sample names are usually (ab)used for text, ascii art, and maybe greetings.
Re:Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video] by motogpjimbo on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @07:07AM (#29316877)
Maybe not quite what you're after, but Bassoon Tracker is written in Javascript, runs in a webpage without installation and has access to thousands of mod files in modarchive and modules.pl, including their samples:

https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/

Re:Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video] by roberto on Monday November 22, 2021 @07:27PM (#29313265)
There are some starter sample kits that you can download for free, eg https://www.samplephonics.com/products/free/wav/hand-picked-.... Should have a little bit of everything.
Re:Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video] by egypturnash on Monday November 22, 2021 @07:20PM (#29313208)
If you wanna be a traditionalist then search for “st-01 adf”. Try other numbers instead of 01. That should find you both the sounds that came with the original Soundtracker and a bunch of peoples’ personal collections that they posted.
Re:Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video] by livindub on Monday November 22, 2021 @08:28PM (#29313630)
Pair the Ableton free version with samples from Legowelt for maximum profit. http://legowelt.org/samples/
Re:Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video] by wernsey on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @11:28AM (#29319730)
The MilkyTracker homepage's Downloads section has some links to sample archives in torrent form that I looked at last time I played with trackers.

https://milkytracker.org/downloads/

Re:Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video] by dylan604 on Monday November 22, 2021 @07:37PM (#29313327)
Isn't Ableton Live what trackers grew up to be as an adult?
Re:Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video] by nyanpasu64 on Monday November 22, 2021 @08:28PM (#29313633)
I have the same problem collecting VSTs/presets/sampled instruments, as I do collecting tracker samples. See my past comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29053430.