Polyend quietly updated their cult hit Tracker with a smartly-designed feature for keeping settings organized as instruments. What might really matter about that is the chance to exchange your instruments with other Tracker users – a big deal in this passionate community.
This is worth a signal boost not least because I really wish hardware makers generally thought this way. It’s often weirdly hard just to save and structure your own sounds
But “instruments” is even a little narrow – this gives you a single way of storing and organizing all your sound settings, all in a neat folder structure you can put together from your computer if you wish.
Envelopes, automation, filter, FX, and other parameters are all there. You can move them from computer to hardware and back. You can move them between projects – meaning this is a great way to save presets and load them elsewhere. And you can share them with other folks. It’s not unlike the Favorites and preset system and browser in Ableton Live, for instance – but often something missing on hardware.
Once you have that setting, you can play as chords or chromatically on the grid (an approach familiar to us from other Polyend stuff, like Medusa).
Equally important, Beat Slice mode now lets you select slices for sample playback.
There are plenty of other tweaks and fixes, plus a sample Instrument included to give you an idea how to get started. That latest update and everything else is on the downloads page, with complete changelog:
And if you missed it, Polyend posted a neat little tutorial on getting the Granular Beat Stretch effect on Tracker, too:
Heh, I just played that at 2X speed on YouTube accidentally, which is – terrific.
Enjoy, and if you are a Tracker user making some interesting stuff or jamming, send it our way. Happy Jamuary, everybody.