Ultimate Soundtracker

Ultimate SoundTracker, or SoundTracker for short, is the grandfather of all tracker programs. It is the creation of Karsten Obarski, a German software developer who was part of a team called EAS. It started life as a commercial product for the Commodore Amiga in mid 1987. After little success in the market, the source code was released to the public domainFact|date=December 2007, where it was instantly hacked, debugged, and spread across the burgeoning Amiga underground, part of which became the demoscene.

SoundTracker allowed for four-channel hardware mixing on all Amiga computers, but unlike its followers, limited the number of samples/instruments in a song to 15. An official disk of samples was spread, containing the infamous "ST-01" samples that are prevalent in almost any MOD file from the 1980s.

SoundTracker was succeeded on the Amiga by NoiseTracker in 1989 and ProTracker in 1991.

"SoundTracker" is also the name of a modern FastTracker-style music program written for Unix-like operating systems.

References

Mark Wright, "Retrospective - Karsten Obarski", March 1998. [http://www.textfiles.com/artscene/music/information/karstenobarski.html]