Longtemps je me suis levé de pas si bonne heure, mon seul objectif restant, une fois les nuages dissipés, de me poser devant le téléviseur familial et de tremper l’une après l’autre mes deux tartines matinales dans mon mug de chocolat chaud (et matinal). Petit-déjeuner classique, certes, à cet âge, mais petit-déjeuner de champion quand même.
Cette coutume m’a suivi une fois le nid parental quitté et le CDI trouvé. Ce dernier a d’ailleurs eu une forte influence sur mes matinées : je me devais d’arriver à l’heure au bureau malgré la distance en trains de banlieue, mais je ne voulais pas pour autant sacrifier mes heures de sommeil. J’ai donc choisi le sacrifice ultime : fi des tartines tartinées ; fi de la poudre de cacao lactée. Juste le lait, frais, dans un verre, siroté en regardant pensivement par la fenêtre.
Toujours le même verre, bleu ; toujours le même format de bouteille de lait, avec une poignée. Consistency is key.
J’avais à l’époque cette curieuse compréhension, sans doute d’influence familiale, qu’il ne fallait pas retirer entièrement l’opercule afin de mieux préserver le lait1J’en vois qui se moquent, mais selon un sondage auprès d’une large population de pas moins de 38 personnes sur Mastodon et sur Twitter, près de 42% de la population française l’a fait (41,25%, pour être précis), voire le fait encore.. Je l’ouvrais donc seulement à moitié, versais le blanc nectar, repliais l’aluminium de l’opercule pour recouvrir l’orifice de la bouteille, et vissais le capuchon par-dessus l’opercule plié avant de ranger le tout au frigo, bien à la verticale, jusqu’au lendemain matin.
Combien de bouteilles bues ? combien d’opercules semi-ouverts ? je ne saurai l’estimer…
… si ce n’est pour cette courte période de ma vie où je les ais comptées.
Opercule
Comme l’a rappelé Jeff Buckley en introduction de Night Flight, l’une de ses reprises du Sin-é EP, « If you do anything regularly for a while, sooner or later, the weirdoes will show up« .
Bon, là, seul dans ma cuisine avec ma bouteille de lait, il me revenait de jouer le rôle du weirdo.
En l’occurrence, cet opercule me questionnait. Surtout, le placement de la languette du-dit opercule, qui faisait que l’on ouvrait icelui dans un sens ou dans un autre.
À force d’ouvrir moult opercules pour moult bouteilles à l’aide de2Vous l’aurez deviné. moult languettes, j’en suis venu à un questionnement fondamental, pendant le pensif sirotage matinal de lait devant la fenêtre :
Les bouteilles de lait sont-elles majoritairement conçues pour les droitiers ou les gauchers ?
Source : tkt frer
Bear with me for a minute, and you’ll see what I mean.
Voyez-vous, la languette n’est pas toujours placée exactement au même endroit sur l’orifice. Résultat, si l’on se repose systématiquement sur celle-ci pour ouvrir à moitié l’opercule, on se retrouve avec un versement idéal du lait qui se fait tantôt vers la gauche, tantôt vers la droite de la poignée de la bouteille.
Ainsi, certains matins tout va bien et l’on peut verser le lait avec sa main dominante. Et certains autres matins, on ouvre l’opercule pour se rendre compte que, pour les quelques verres à venir, on devra faire le versement à l’aide de l’autre main3Qui n’a même pas de petit nom scientifique, semble-t-il.. Ewww…
Deux images valant deux mille mots, voici :
Opercule favorisant les gauchers.Opercule favorisant les droitiers.
Comment savoir si la filière laitière de l’industrie agroalimentaire mondiale ne fomente pas en ce moment même un complot visant l’une ou l’autre de nos chères préférences manuelles4Venues de la petite enfance, rappelons-le. Ils s’en prennent aux enfant ! ?
Oui, vraiment, comment ? Qui pour nous défendre ? Quel chevalier blanc aura un destrier assez fier pour mener à bien ce combat pour les générations futures ?
Oui, qui ?
*soupir*
Notule
J’ai donc commencé à garder les bouteilles que j’ouvrais (et buvais), prenant soin de les nettoyer et surtout de les conserver avec leurs opercules encore attachés.
Lorsque j’ai décidé de mettre fin à mon inlassable collecte de données, j’avais 73 bouteilles en stock, dans je ne sais combien de cartons — mais en tout cas, ça prenait de la place dans ma cave.
Pourquoi les avoir stockées ? Pourquoi ne pas avoir, pour chaque bouteille ouverte par la languette de l’opercule, simplement pris note du sens de la-dite ouverture, et puis jeté la bouteille une fois les notes terminées ?
Parce qu’il est facile de falsifier des preuves. Je voulais agir en bon scientifique, et pouvoir montrer des preuves de ce que j’avançais. Cela supposait une photo finale, regroupant toutes les bouteilles.
Cette photo, en somme :
C’est le bon moment pour vous rappeler de lire de préambule de ce texte.
Ou, pour la science, celle sans capuchons (attention les yeux) :
Point de crainte à avoir pour l’odeur, toutes étaient nettoyées.
Notez que toutes les poignées des bouteilles sont dans le même sens, mais pas les languettes ! #complot !
J’ai bien d’autres photos, que j’enverrai à toute publication scientifique sérieuse qui voudra se faire l’écho de cette étude sourcée. Haha.
Calcul
J’avais donc plein de bouteilles en stock, mais pas de notes. Clairement, je faisais de la collectionnite en attendant la motivation pour La Science.
Cette motivation est venue non pas au premier déménagement de mon charmant couple, mais juste avant le second, en 2017. Allais-je déménager à nouveau avec X cartons de bouteilles de lait vides5Et propres, j’insiste. ? Non, non, soyons raisonnables6Le fait que l’alors-futur appartement n’ait pas de cave n’a aucunement joué de rôle en faveur de l’épée de Damoclès qui surplombait alors ce projet lunaire. Du tout..
J’ai donc pris mon courage à deux mains une après-midi, tandis que nous commencions à mettre en carton nos affaires utiles, elles.
J’ai étalé les bouteilles sur notre table du salon, comme le montre si bien la photo ci-dessus, et j’ai débouchonné avec ténacité, et j’ai pris des photos, et surtout, pour reprendre la citation elle-même ci-dessus, j’ai (enfin) pris des notes. Science!
Quelles notes prendre ? On pourrait se limiter à la base : le sens de l’ouverture, indiquant qui celle-ci favorisait.
Cela nous donnerait les statistiques de favoritisme suivantes :
D pour les droitiers,
G pour les gauchers,
A pour les ambidextres (meilleur scénario matinal),
et AA pour un opercule anti-ambidextre (pire scénario au réveil).
Mais la Science requiert la Vérité Totale. Alors j’ai noté toutes les métadonnées que je pouvais trouver sur l’étiquette ou le bouchon :
Marque (toujours Candia)
Produit (toujours GrandLait)
Type (toujours demi-écrémé)
Contenance (majoritairement 1L, avec de rares 1,5L)
Code barre
Date DLC
Et d’autres indications que je n’ai pas su déchiffrer : F16, F21, D.12181.F, DE, T64, etc.
Par la puissance de Google Sheet7Et de StackOverflow, car je n’y pifre rien aux formules Excel., voici le graphique qui révélera à vos yeux ébaubis toute la triste vérité :
« Nombre de bouteilles par sens de l’opercule », Xavier Borderie, 2023, pixels sur GIF.
Force est de constater qu’il y a :
presque autant de G que de D,
presque autant de A que de AA.
Il appert donc que le distribution de la languette permettant l’ouverture sereine d’une bouteille de lait GrandLait de Candia se fasse de manière tout a fait aléatoire.
La triste vérité est donc que nous obtenons un résultat tristement normal.
Mpff…
Ou alors… Il y a 4 G de plus que de D… Serait-ce là la marque d’un complot plus insidieux et subtil que je n’osais l’imaginer ? Les gauchers sont-ils à très long terme une menace pour les buveurs de lait droitiers ?
L’enquête doit-elle vraiment s’arrêter là ?
Voilà, c’est fait, toutes les données ont été saisies, je vais pouvoir vider quelques cartons et… remplir une poubelle verte.
Ceci étant fait, je m’empresse de finir mon déménagement, laissant promptement toute cette petite histoire se perdre dans les limbes du Pacifique…
Pédoncule
Mangez des pommes.
Postambule
2023.
J’ai depuis longtemps oublié ces relevés, ces bouteilles et ces opercules — ce malgré les litres de lait écoulés depuis pour l’Enfant. Mais le lait est maintenant acheté en briques de carton, pour des questions de compression et de place dans la poubelle, et point d’opercule en vue.
… Jusqu’à ce que j’achète une bouteille de lait, par manque de brique cette semaine-là au magasin, j’imagine. Candia GrandLait, très bien, ça fera l’affaire.
Un matin je sors la bouteille du stock afin de préparer le biberon du Saint Enfant. Je retire le capuchon et… je me retrouve face à l’opercule, qui protège hermétiquement le contenu liquide. Et à nouveau, face à ce questionnement cosmique d’antan.
Je suis ramené à ce délire d’il y a quelques années, je me demande où sont passées les photos8Et si mon disque de backup fonctionne toujours., je me rends compte que depuis j’ai compris que l’opercule doit être entièrement retiré9D’autres se posent toujours la questions., je me souviens de toutes ces bouteilles qui occupaient plusieurs tiroirs10J’avais une cuisine démesurément grande. puis des cartons entiers11J’avais une cave., cartons qui ont déménagé d’un appartement à l’autre avant que je ne me décide à les prendre en photo et jeter le tout12Mon épouse peut être très patiente avec mes délires. Un temps..
Je retrouverai le soir-même sur mon GDrive le fichier GSheet des relevés. Il est daté du 14 mai 2017, presque 6 ans jour pour jour avant le début de la rédaction du présent article. Les relevés des données des bouteilles indiquent des dates limites de consommation allant de 2012 à 2104, soit 10 ans avant ma redécouverte de ce fichier. J’ai donc conservé ces bouteilles pendant 3 à 5 ans avant de prendre des notes, des photos, et de jeter le tout13Trrrrrès patiente..
Et je me retrouve ce matin, par les hasards du Temps et du Destin, face à la 74e bouteille. La dernière bouteille.
Peut-être est-ce là l’occasion de l’écrire, cet article trop long résumant tout ce projet ridicule ? Il me faudrait une chute.
Allez, le petit réclame son petit-déjeuner.
Je retire l’opercule en commençant par la languette, et :
It’s high time I write part two of this series of articles on the origins of Soundtracker, since the content itself has been lying in my inbox for well over two years now…
As a reminder: I’ve been writing about my « quest » of looking for the missing link between what seems to be the first « tracker-like » interface1The Page R sequencer, from the Fairlight CMI Series II workstation. At least, according to Wikipedia. and Karsten Obarski’s Ultimate Soundtracker tool, which introduced a cheap tracker interface2Meaning: patterns formed of per-channel columns and single-note rows. But fret not, this loose definition of tracking will soon change. to Amiga musicians back in 1987.
So, where were we?
In part 1 of this series, we learnt more about Karsten Obarski, who became the « Father of the Soundtracker » at age 22. Through existing interviews, we got to understand where he came from, how he came to create his Ultimate Soundtracker tool on Amiga in 1987, why he called it quits a few months afterwards… and where he probably took his inspiration for The Ultimate Soundtracker.
Version 1.21, from December 1987.
Said inspiration was, by all accounts, an earlier tool named Soundmonitor, which German developer & musician Chris Hülsbeck wrote and released on Commodore 64 in 1986 — a year before Obarski’s own Ultimate Soundtracker. Hülsbeck was 18.
Soundmonitor 1.0, released in October 1986. I guess kids those days didn’t really need a manual.
Now you know why I chose that title for this article.
So that’s the status of our quest: Soundmonitor seems to have been the original tracker.
Or was it?
Writing computer game music in the 80’s
There’s much to learn about Chris Hülsbeck’s context at the time when he wrote Soundmonitor, back in 1986.
The context is: there were no music tools for the general public — even for seasoned amateurs. The first tools were very expensive and inaccessible to most musicians — let alone people who wrote computer game music. The Fairlight CMI that I mentioned above4In a footnote in the intro. As you do. was only used by a handful of people, for instance, and they were wealthy household names already: Peter Gabriel, Herbie Hancock5You can see him demonstrating the workstation, with some guy named Quincy Jones looking over, Stevie Wonder, Kate Bush6Yes, « Babooshka », of course « Babooshka »!, etc. Anecdote: The Miami Vice theme was composed on that tool 7See the Fairlight (and the theme’s composer) in action in the official music video 🙂.
Before the arrival of affordable tracking software such as Soundmonitor and Ultimate Soundtracker, game musicians had to rely on their programming skills to write their music. Game musicians were, for what it’s worth, programmers before anything else. Eventually they did write their own music software, however crude and just for themselves, compiling their usual tricks into something easier to use on a regular basis, so as to be more productive. But in the early days, they simply wrote their music in machine code, adding one hexadecimal value after the other in the code, in order to change volume, pitch8La note, pour faire simple., or type of soundwave.
A successful Rob Hubbard. I would totally trust this guy with my register. Wink wink.
Let’s take Rob Hubbard9Not to be confused with that Dianetics guy. Yuck., for instance. A professional studio musician by trade, he got interested in computers in the early 80’s, at roughly 27. He learned to program in Assembly language10No small feat, even at the time., wrote music tooling, got hired as a game musician, and within a handful of years became of legend11I mean, the guy has recently toured with a symphonic orchestra, conducting his own arrangement of his tunes of yore, for Zeus’ sake! of what is now known as « chiptune » music — music that exploits the sound chip included in computers at the time. Rob was a master at that.
Here’s an example of what great C64 game music sounded like in 1985:
You might want to lower your expectations of what « sound » means before clicking, just in case.
He became a master because he knew about analogue synthesizers before he got into computer music, and thus he understood the possibilities offered by their sound chip — namely, the equally legendary SID chip, whose sound is still very much appreciated today12See for instance this Instagram post from my friend Ema, an electronic musician, where she shows how she wired a vintage C64 computer into her setting so as to exploit the unique sound of its SID chip. Hubbard knew he could program the chip’s registers, and he did that aplenty.
« I knew all the chromatic pitches pretty much all by heart in hexadecimal. 30x would be a C, 3Cx would be the octave above that, 48x would be the octave above that… I knew all the numbers: I could get a machine dump and recognize exactly what was going on. »
« I used to know the SID chip inside & out. The filters were always different on the SID chip, you could never rely on them. »
« The Atari has an 8-bit register, so as you got higher in pitch, the resolution got less and less, it becomes very difficult to get certain notes in tune. You write your music around the fact that as you went higher, you could only rely on 3 or 4 pitches. »
« Three channels is basically all you had at your hand, so there was no choice. Later on I did manage to squeeze more out of it because I developed a digital channel as well. People were doing digital audio, using digital samples, and I was the first person who incorporated that into music, so that I could try to get a rock guitar in there with the SID chip, which was just unbelievable pain in the ass, because you’re using four bit, so the volume register (…)
Sounds like a tedious way of writing music — but not that far off from the Soundmonitor screen you see at the top of this article, ain’t it? And Soundmonitor was easy in comparison. Rob Hubbard, and the other genius composers of that golden era, wrote their music right in the code, in hexadecimal if need be.
write directly with the C64 by poking bytes using a machine code monitor;
write using a pen and paper;
sit at the keyboard and play until the ideas come out.
« Poking bytes using a machine code monitor ». Let that sink in. Now tracker programs look more visually pleasing, for sure.
And, well, the man himself described the musical landscape of the times in this interview:
Kenz: How did you go about composing your C64 tunes? Did you have a music editor that you used, as there were often rumours you used one you made yourself? Rob: No, I just used an assembler and edited the source code – most people in those days did the same. There really wasn’t time to sit and write an editor, as there was so much work to do.
« No, because I can’t think of any way to make my methods accessible enough to the average punter to make it worth while. »
Another Commodore Zone interview.
Music-making was thus confined to the programming elite. Says Rob:
« It’s taken me [a] long while to develop my routines, and I’m not about to give them away! » (Rob hinted that one company which had made free with one of his demo disks might shortly regret having lifted his routines!).
Still that Commodore Zone interview.
Trackers were a few years away, because Chris Hülsbeck had yet to release his paradigm-shifting tool.
Let’s get to that.
The birth of Soundmonitor
Chris Hülsbeck was 18 when he « released »13I’ll explain the reason behind those fancy quotes in a minute. Or two, depending on your reading speed. his Soundmonitor tool, in 1986. What does a teenage geek do in his spare time? Painstakingly type down type-ins from computer magazines of course!
« Type-ins« ? Old farts like me remember buying magazines full of source code, hundreds of pages of them, that you would bring home and then type for hours on your computer, eventually compiling this code into a program or a small game — or a set of system-crashing errors if you typed something wrong. When it did work, that feeling of pride was immense: You had typed it; it was your work of art. To many, this was the first introduction to programming — as well as English.
If you were lucky, the type-in used regular words14Such as LOCATE, REM, or GOSUB — y’know, regular, everyday words., making it easier to transcribe. This one is from the French Amstrad Magazine n°01, from July 1985.
Of course the Internet existed since 1983 for some happy fews, and BBSs (bulletin board systems) were already a thing, but modems were still expensive in those days, and consumer-centric machines such as the C64, Atari ST or Amiga 500 weren’t equipped for global communication out of the box.
Magazines started to feature covermounts15Yup, totally a legit word. (a cover cassettes or floppy, eventually a cover CD-ROM) in the mid-80’s. But still, type-ins were quite popular in the 8-bit era.1616-bit computers had much more memory and power, and programs became too complex to have their source code printed and shipped around.
A blessing! A blessing from the Lord!
Alright alright alright, why am I rambling on about type-ins, you ask? Because that’s how Chris Hülsbeck got his start in the computer music world.
See, in early 1986, German computer magazine « 64’er » launched a music competition. You guessed it, the winner was 18-year-old Christopher Hülsbeck, with this piece of music:
Don’t click unless you are ready to face History, my friends.
If that doesn’t sound like much to your 2022 ears, read what the jury had to say:
It wasn’t easy for us to decide which song was the best – until we heard « Shades » by Chris Hülsbeck. A short breathless moment of silence, a restart, another short listen and then it was clear to us: this is the winner!
The truly unique composition of « Shades » deserves a lot of credit. Comparisons with the creations of professionals like Jean-Michel Jarre, Eberhard Schöner and similar synthesizer jugglers are not even that far-fetched. « Shades » also compares favourably with the creations of the well-known C64 music professionals Rob Hubard (he wrote the music for the game « Thing on a Spring », for example) and Martin Galway (« Comic Bakery »).
About the future of the young Chris Hülsbeck one can assume: He can become one of them.
(…) One more point that needs to be said: When we presented « Shades » for the first time to the C64 fans at the CeBIT fair in Hanover, many thought that this piece of music had been « borrowed » from some professional game. But this is not the case.
Ah! That Amstrad type-in above doesn’t look so daunting after all, does it?
Even more interesting to us, right in the article presenting the winner, the editorial staff wrote: « Chris Hülsbeck, der Programmierer des Musikstückes »Shades« arbeitet derzeit an einem Editorprogramm » (« Chris Hülsbeck, the programmer of the music piece « Shades » is currently working on an editor program. »)
And, what do you know, five months later came this:
Behold! A vintage Chris Hülsbeck, seen here in his natural habitat.
When we started to evaluate our music competition a few months ago, the piece of music « Shades » by Chris Hülsbeck amazed us with some fantastic sounds. Until then, we were only used to something like this from professionals such as Rob Hubbard.
On an enclosed note, Chris Hülsbeck asked if we would like to have the music routine for publication. At that time Chris was programming the routine in an uncomfortable way with a machine language monitor. On the phone, he promised to write an editor around the « music master » (as Chris christened the music routine).
When the sound monitor was finished, we were so impressed that we wanted to make it available to other readers. It became the listing of the month.
Fortunately, you could mail-order a cassette with the program on it. Phew. Enough type-ins already!
Thus was first released Soundmonitor, true father of the trackers. Or is it?
While I started my exploration thinking that Karsten Obarski came up with the tracker layout, it seems Ultimate Soundtracker mostly re-used the layout introduced by Soundmonitor, improving it thanks to the Amiga graphic abilities — and benefiting from the Paula chip, meaning 4 audio channels and the ability to use samples rather than synth sounds.
Now, to find out whether Chris Hülsbeck, in turn, found inspiration elsewhere…
More context setting18I promise you this gets somewhere eventually.
Chris’ « manual », published in the 64’er magazine, offers some information of how Soundmonitor came to be, and how advanced it was at the time.
The sound chip of the C64 offers considerable possibilities, but unfortunately the comfort of programming leaves a lot to be desired. There are already several programmes that support the programming of the SID. Most of them are designed in such a way that you can place notes on the corresponding staves or play sounds via the keyboard. Even complete music studios are simulated, but all known programmes have a decisive disadvantage: the composed music can only be played if the complete programme is in the memory. If you want to place a piece of music in a self-written basic game, for example, you are ill-served with these programs.
That’s why a completely independent playback routine was programmed, which is called « Musicmaster ». With the appropriate data, results are achieved that can even surpass background music from professional games. However, it would be extremely uncomfortable if the music data had to be entered with a normal machine language monitor, such as SMON. The piece of music « Shades » was composed in this way, which was time-consuming work.
For this reason, a « monitor » had to be developed that specifically supports the input of music data: the « sound monitor ». The programme differs from other sound editors in some essential features. The main part of the programme, the playback routine, runs completely independently in interrupt. This means that the song can be listened to at any time, even during editing. This is an excellent control possibility, you can immediately hear what you are typing. In addition, the sound monitor contains a « realtime-record » (recording of music while playing on the keyboard).
Still, nothing about a possible predecessor, or an inspiration, or anything. Could it be that our quest ends here? That a passionate teenager simply came up with the tracker-format idea by himself, out of thin hair?
As you could see at the bottom of the first part of this series of article, I contacted Chris Hülsbeck back in 2019 through his website, not really expecting an answer — and getting one within 5 hours! Imagine being able to talk directly19Well, through emails. But still! to someone whose music filled quite a few hours of your teenage years!
I’ll skip the overly long intro and context-setting from my email, since, well, I’ve already written that into this article 😅
To the first question, then!
XB: Did you come up with the tracker layout for Soundmonitor, or did you get inspiration from the Fairlight CMI (or any other tool)? Were you in contact with Karsten Obarski, or any other « music-programmer » of the time?
CH: Let me start a bit earlier – despite having had 2 years of piano lessons when I was 5 years old, I never got to properly learn or appreciate musical notation. By the time I was starting to compose and « program » music on the C64 (around age 16), I had developed my own musical understanding and language, otherwise I would probably have tried to represent the notes in a graphical way just like other musical software at the time.
I didn’t know about the Fairlight sequencer page at the time, but the inspiration for the note representation came from an early C64 midi sequencer by Steinberg, which didn’t display notes as symbols, but as a list of single letter note name, an optional « sharp » symbol if needed and a number for the octave. This made the most sense to me for computer music and the rest came together just by needing a simple layout for the song data and the patterns.
I didn’t meet other music software programmers until years later.
Private e-mail interview from June 201920Yes, I’m that late in publishing this..
🚨Alert, alert, we have an inspiration! 🚨 Chris used a tool by Steinberg, the editor of Cubase, the world-famous DAW21Digital Audio Workstation, and inventor of the de facto standard for digital audio plugins, VST22Virtual Studio Technology.
Back in the 80’s, Steinberg wasn’t the software superstar23At first I wrote « software behemoth » here, but when checking about it, they seem to have 200 employees — which, sure, is big, but not quite behemoth-y. So let’s go for « superstar » instead. that it is today. It was founded in 1984 by Karl Steinberg and Manfred Rürup, who were musicians and studio engineers, and their passion for the latest musical gear led them to write audio software, starting with the C64.
Their first best-selling software was « Pro-16 » from 1986, a tool able to manager up to 16 tracks of MIDI instruments…
Looks like a stepping system on the right, if I’m not mistaken…
… but their very fist tool was indeed named « Midi Multitrack Sequencer », and released in 198424The MIDI standard dating from 1983, you could say that Steinberg were at the forefront of the DAW revolution, as told by the history written at the bottom of this page..
Are we seeing some kind of sequencing here? Oh right, « sequencer » is even in the name, duh.
So, any of these two tools could have been the inspiration for Soundmonitor, it seems, since they date from before 1986. It’s hard to find any resemblance with the tracker layout of Ultimate Soundtracker or even Soundmonitor, but the inspiration might as well come from the way those earlier tools operated.
Let’s try and get some details from Chris.
XB: So I understand you came up with the tracker-like layout, inspired by « an early C64 midi sequencer by Steinberg ». Do you remember the name of that sequencer? Was it Pro 16, Trackstar, or even an earlier tool?
CH: I’m actually not quite sure… maybe it was the « MIDI Multitrack Sequenzer ». I did also work with and loved the Pro-16, but I don’t remember if I did before or after the Soundmonitor.
Private e-mail interview from June 2019.
So, MIDI Multitrack Sequencer is the next step in our quest, it seems. And it’s not a small one, since Steinberg is a whole other kind of thing today.
It’s one thing to contact a music composer who is very much present online; it’s a whole other thing to contact the co-founder and CEO of a company whose later tool, Cubase, is used by a large portion of professional and amateur musicians today.
I’ll try my luck anyway. But that will be a topic for another post here — I don’t know if you noticed, but this article is quite long already 🙂
Continuing with the interview
Of course I had a few more questions I wanted to ask to the man whose music livened quite a few of my teenage gaming evenings, so here goes!
XB: Your first tune, Shades, was as far as I understand, written directly in machine code — all for a music competition for the 64er magazine, which you won. What was your journey between writing your own music, and writing your own editor? And which came first, the song or the editor? 🙂
CH: The creation of Shades was actually quite painful, because I had to edit the hexadecimal numbers representing the note data and everything else directly in the computer memory using a program called a « monitor ».
So my idea was to make a similar program, but tailored to sound data, hence the Soundmonitor was born. When I told the writer for the magazine who was responsible for the music contest about my plans he was very excited and suggested that I should submit it to the sister magazine Happy Computer for their « listing of the month » and it was accepted right away.
XB: In an interview, Rob Hubbard said that he composed his C64 tunes directly in assembler, « most people in those days did the same. There really wasn’t time to sit and write an editor, as there was so much work to do. » Obviously you took the time to do it. Is it because you weren’t a professional at the time — and thus had more free time?
Who else was making a popular editor at the time?
CH: I was still in school and on Summer break when I created the Soundmonitor, so I wasn’t bogged down with professional music jobs yet (as Hubbard said).
I honestly don’t know of any other editors during that time. The first scene music tracker I became aware of was actually just a hack of the Soundmonitor called Rockmonitor, which added one track of a rather crude sample playback (different from my own sample playback system, which I never released to the public).
I like the idea of professionals not having the time to take a step back and write a proper tool, and being beaten to the finish line by a teenager on Summer break 🙂
XB: By the way, on your SID Anthology vol 1, Shades is only the second track. Does it mean Planet of War, the first track, is your first officially released track?
CH: Planet of War was composed and programmed before Shades, with a much simpler player, but it was actually released after Shades because of a delay to find a publisher for the game. But for the album I felt it needed to be chronological in terms of when it was composed.
XB: So, just as for Shades, I understand that all musicians at the time were actually programmers with a gift for melody — which might explain why they were few and fondly remembered (Hubbard, Galway, Follin, etc.) How much of composing at the time was a result of trial and error?
CH: It was very inspiring if I would find a cool new sound or trick when composing, but often I would develop my melodies just with a piano sound on my keyboard synth and then translate that melody into the machine. In any case it was a very tedious and technical way of creating music and I think that is one reason only a handful of people developed the skills that truly set them apart from the rest.
XB: The published source code for Soundmonitor takes 5 magazine pages long (albeit, with 3 columns). I find that impressively small for a full musical program! Did you already introduce optimizations in there?
CH: The listing is not a source code, but an actual compressed binary… I never released the source code itself and it’s actually a horrible piece of mess because I was so young that I didn’t care about readability or that I would need to ever go back and understand it… 😉
XB: As I understand it, one of the great step forward was that Soundmonitor could save and load files, with a separate playroutine, saving both time and space for other musicians. Was that also a creation of yours, or did you get inspired from others?
CH: That was just a very cool idea I had to give people the ability to put music into their own games or demos, even if they had only very basic programming skills. It also made it very easy for people to share their music and recipients didn’t even need the editor to listen…
XB: In an interview in 1992, Karsten Obarski said that « Even today’s trackers work in that same way, and still use the tone-event data structures which I invented. (Which is a very simple one.) » Do you understand what he means by « tone-event data structures »? I have an idea, but maybe that talks to you more?
CH: No exact idea, but I assume it’s got something to do with how his sequencer triggers notes and modulations. The Soundtracker format was much more streamlined compared to the Soundmonitor and had real memory management, so you couldn’t easily crash it by making mistakes, but I feel that also made it somewhat less flexible. Because trackers are easier to learn and use, the format has understandably surpassed the Soundmonitor.
XB: I found out that different waves produced different sounds (who would have thought? 🙂 ). Sine, square, triangle, sawtooth… Did you make use of these? Did Soundmonitor solely relied on such sounds, or could you import other sounds? (I understand TFMX could load samples, for instance).
CH: I took advantage of all the wave forms and possibilities that the SID chip offered and added sample playback to my own developer version of the Soundmonitor. By the time I developed my next tool TFMX, samples had actually been on the way out because they did not work on a new revision of the SID (until a different way was developed much later) and they took too much memory and CPU power to be included in the ever more complex games that were created. So TFMX doesn’t actually include sample playback, but instead I invented a new way of manipulating the SID chip with every screen cycle through something I called sound macros and it could result in complex instruments that almost sounded like samples (particularly drum sounds). This system lived on with later music I created for the Amiga, game consoles like Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive as well as on the Nintendo 64 with a new tool that I developed with Factor 5 called MusyX. This sound tool still featured the concept of the TFMX sound macros and Nintendo actually bought a license to use it for their third party developers.
So that’s it for now!
Karsten Obarski’s Soundtracker took inspiration from Chris Hülsbeck’s Soundmonitor, who in turn took inspiration from Karl Steinberg’s MIDI Multitrack Sequencer. Phew!
What’s next? Will I find the missing link between the Fairlight CMI hardware workstation and later software audio tools? It’s a mystery!
Let’s just say that I closed my emails exchange with Chris Hülsbeck with this small spoiler:
As an aside, I’ve been interviewing the creator of the Fairlight CMI, and I think I know the exact moment when the whole « pattern of samples » format made the jump from a physical drum machine to the Fairlight’s sequencer, and who’s behind it! It’s a small thing, but this is exciting 🙂
En ce temps d’incertitudes envers les plates-formes de publication en ligne, je vais me remettre à publier des contenus courts ici, afin de ne pas faire profiter uniquement Instagram ou Twitter.
Comme chaque année, il y a des applications qui reprennent les données sociales que l’on stocke sans vraiment le savoir, et nous permettent de les mettre en forme. La dernière en date est Instafest.app, qui crée une affiche de festival à partir des artistes les plus joués dans Spotify sur les 4 dernières semaines, les 6 derniers mois, ou depuis le début — il y a une éternité, en ce qui me concerne.
Voici donc mon résultat, pas vraiment surprenant :
Pas vraiment surprenant, donc, car je stocke sciemment ces informations sur Last.fm depuis des lustres — avant même l’éternité de Spotify, donc, d’où la disparité.
Ah tiens, d’ailleurs on peut aussi le faire avec Last.fm directement. Let’s go:
Publié sur Twitter avec le titre « Je tiens la barre depuis 1997 » (date de sortie d’OK Computer), un mien camarade commenta que je suis « surtout RESTÉ en 1997 », ce qui est très vrai, étant donné que, quand même, 1997 est la meilleure année pour la musique — aucun lien avec le fait que ce soit l’année de mes 20 ans, bien sûr.
Je remercie cependant ces stats de ne pas avoir pris en compte les heures de bruit blanc que j’écoute en boucle lorsque je dois me concentrer…
Avec l’âge, les envies de cadeaux changent. Les raisons sont nombreuses : on a déjà tout ce que l’on veut, on a déjà trop de choses qui attendent que nous nous y consacrions, on n’a plus envie de gros cadeaux qui prennent la poussière…
Terminés les gros trucs qui prennent de la place, les livres qu’on ne terminera jamais, les abonnements qui s’empileront dans un coin, les gift-box qui obligent à réserver un week-end entier à 300 bornes dans 4 mois, etc. Passé un certain cap, on veut quelque chose d’utile immédiatement ou sur la durée, tout en étant quelque chose qui fasse « cadeau ».
Mais que demander au Père Noël ou pour son anniversaire ? Comment guider vers ce qui à la fois fera plaisir et sera utile sur la durée ?
J’ai posé la question il y a quelques jours1Bon, le 10 octobre 2021. Oui je prends mon temps quand j’écris ici… sur Twitter :
Question #idéeCadeauNoel : Que puis-je (m’)offrir de vraiment utile ? Quel est ZE achat 2020 qui a amélioré votre vie ou votre quotidien ? Quel est LE truc que vous auriez dû faire il y a des années ? Qu’est-ce qui rend vos semaines plus simples ? Je prends toutes vos idées ! 🙂
4 personnes ayant aimablement « liké » le tweet sans pour autant y répondre, je me dis que l’idée intéresse2QUATRE PERSONNES, rendez-vous compte !, et donc autant stocker tout ça sur Internet.
Les réponses au tweet
Déjà, une erreur de ma part dans le tweet initial : mon idée était soit d’offrir à quelqu’un quelque chose de pérennement utile, soit de faire en sorte que quelqu’un m’offre le même type d’idée. Sous-entendu : un budget « cadeau » raisonnable, et facile à emballer.
Seulement, haha, j’ai écrit « que puis-je (m’)offrir »3Notez l’insidieux ‘m’. Satané Fritz Lang., impliquant par là même que, grosso modo, le budget et l’espace requis étaient illimités. Nenni ! Mais de belles âmes, pensant bien faire, sont donc parties sur des idées pécuniairement et papiercadeaulement hors-normes. Je les cite tout de même par honnêteté, dans le chiffre qui termine cette phrase4Une chaise de bureau Herman Miller, un vélo Brompton, une moto, un chat..
Les réponses qui rentrent dans le cadre furent quant à elles :
Un Leatherman et une soufflette rechargeable par USB (c’est très précis).
Une tondeuse (à cheveux plus qu’à gazon, je pense).
Des dons à des associations.
Bien !
Aller plus loin
Mes questions dans ce tweet n’étaient pas vraiment originales, car ce n’est pas la première année que je me les suis posées, et j’avais déjà cherché réponses à icelles sur les interwebs. Où donc, me demanderiez-vous ? Voici mes sources d’idées des années passées, trouvées au fil de l’eau…
Tout d’abord, un tweet posant cette simple question :
What’s your “it’s expensive but it’s worth it” product?5Quel est votre produit « c’est cher mais ça vaut le coût » ?
Mais surtout, j’ai trouvé une chouette source d’idées sur Ask MetaFilter.
MetaFilter
MetaFilter, si vous ne le connaissez pas, est un site de partage de liens intéressants, avec une communauté assez incroyable. Lancé en 1999, c’est l’un des derniers bastions de l’âge d’or des blogs communautaires8Soit avant que Loïc Le Meur ne rachète U-blog..
Ask MetaFilter est un site annexe mais très vivant, où les membres peuvent poser n’importe quelle question (même anonymement au besoin), recevoir des réponses de la communauté — et marquer les réponses correctes pour elles/eux.
Trois questions en particulier m’ont tapé dans l’œil en vadrouillant.
I hate shopping, and only relatively recently have had disposable income. So I’m pretty unaware of what goods and services are out there that could improve my quality of life (defining this as giving me more time to focus on other things, efficient tools, things that will bring joy into my life).
« Seulement » 48 réponses à cette question, mais l’on y trouve quelques pépites. Petite sélection parmi les utiles :
Un robot culinaire. « Up your homemade hummus and pesto games. »
Un autocuiseur, un batteur électrique. « I have a KitchenAid stand mixer and a Vitamix blender. Neither are cheap. Both are essential to my life. »
Un mélangeur à immersion. « Because life is too short to ever have to clean a blender again. »
Un hachoir.
De bonnes serviettes de toilettes. « Goddamn there is nothing like a quality towel after taking a shower. »
Des draps de lit agréables, avec un nombre élevé de fils. « Anything that improves your sleep is a good thing. »
« Higher quality versions of things you use a lot. » ou, dans le même ordre d’idée : « Less stuff. Higher quality of the same stuff you like. » ou encore, lu dans une autre page : « “Where is the good knife?” If you’re looking for your good X, you have bad Xs. Throw those out. »9Mais attention : si vous vous faites offrir des couteaux, pensez à donner une pièce en retour ! « I consider it a major lifestyle upgrade, being able to process fresh foods easily and safely. »
Une inscription à une AMAP locale.
…et parmi les hors-normes :
« Build up a 3 – 6 month emergency fund. Start or bulk up your retirement savings. Pay down debt. These things pay off well in the long term. »
Un bidet. « Squeaky clean ».
Un service de ménage deux fois par mois.
Des cours réguliers de musique / cuisine / céramique / etc. Des choses qui ouvrent le cerveau par la créativité.
Un vidéoprojecteur plutôt qu’une télévision.
Et parmi ces réponses se trouvait un lien vers une autre question AskMeFi, posée peu auparavant, et que voici :
I’m looking for suggestions for changes in your life or home or work or whatever that seemed like small things but ended up being really impactful.
Donc, cela dépasse le cadre des cadeaux et on entre plutôt dans celui des bonnes habitudes, des idées, des petites astuces… mais toujours dans l’idée d’améliorer sa vie par petits bouts accessibles.
Donc je vais en piocher quelques-uns que je trouve pertinents/amusants :
« Buying a shit-ton of nesting Rubbermaid containers instead of a bunch of mismatched Tupperware. » On a fait ça, ça améliore effectivement la vie cuisinale.
« Getting a Brother Label Maker and labeling everything in my home so can always find stuff. » Vrai. Surtout pour les câbles.
« Separate twin-size duvets for you and your partner instead of one big shared one. » L’amie Fabienne valide. Ajoutons aussi les housse avec attaches, comme on peut apparemment en trouve au Québec.
« Bought a squatty potty and my life improved x10000! » On appréciera l’étude qui va dans ce sens.
« I decided to try the Marie Kondo method of folding clothing, and I’m honestly shocked at how much better my wardrobe is. » Rien de tel qu’un tiroir bien rangé.
« Quit wearing shoes in the house » On fait ça depuis que l’Enfant est arrivé. C’est cependant plus compliqué de le demander aux invités.
« Dinner planning: a little magnetic whiteboard, stuck to the side of the fridge. Plan for meals for the week, then figure out your shopping list for the week. Also, track when you had meals, when trying to track the age of left-overs. » On devrait faire ça, tient 🙂
« Don’t get microfibre towels or clothes, they release microplastics into the water with every wash. Get white cotton, then you can bleach it too if needs be. »
« Getting a slow cooker. I can cook hearty healthy meals in bulk without much effort. Just toss a bunch of things in there, turn it on, leave it alone. SO GOOD, especially for days when I’m too sick/tired to function but need food. »
Un Airfryer. Décidément beaucoup de suggestions touchent à LA BOUFFE 🙂
« Make a point of reading 50 pages every day. Makes getting through books possible. »
« Ditched the television so the living space isn’t organized around an ugly appliance. »
Et une fois de plus, parmi les réponses, quelqu’un a pointé vers une question précédente dans le même esprit. Je vous présente donc…
Today my dentist told me that I needed to start wearing a nightguard and I was immediately annoyed at having another thing in my life to deal with. In an effort to balance the scales I would like to hear your suggestions for things/situations/protocols that you’ve eliminated from your life with no ill effect.
Bon, là on a clairement quitté le monde des idées cadeau ou même des petits achats qui améliorent la vie, pour entrer dans le monde des « conseils de vie » : ne plus repasser ou plier certains vêtements, faire don des cadeaux que l’on reçoit sans les vouloir, quitter Facebook, ne plus s’épiler, préparer sa semaine de repas le week-end, couper ses notifications, etc.
Vue qu’il y en a une tripotée en ce bas monde, on va s’arrêter là avec cet article 🙂 Du coup, je vous laisse cliquer le lien et explorer les réponses à cette question. Parcourez celles qui ont un grand nombre de votes « [x favorites] » à la fin !
Enfin, si vous chercher des idées simples et différentes pour vos cadeaux (on revient à la question d’origine), je suis tombé sur ce thread Twitter ma foi fort sympathique. Ajout novembre 2022 : ce thread est apparu, avec quelques idées sympa. Ajout décembre 2022 : dans cet autre thread, l’autrice demande quels sont les cadeaux quelconques, nécessaires ou décalés que ses lecteurs ont reçus. Elle n’est pas déçue du voyage 🙂 Ajout juin 2023 : pour en revenir à la question d’origine et à Ask Metafilter, une discussion intitulée « What surprise Christmas gifts have delighted you?« .
Ainsi se termine cet article. Bonne année à vous, soyez heureux et heureuses !
Note: Cet article (et les suivants de cette série) sont écrits en anglais, pour la simple raison que mes sources, tant directes qu’en ligne, sont anglophones. Par ailleurs, dans certains de ces articles, il me semble que j’ajoute du contenu original/rarement vu au corpus de connaissances, donc autant faire en sorte que cela profite au plus grand monde 🙂
My previous article on Soundtracking1In French in ze texte. was all about passion and nostalgia: presenting a couple of great Amiga demos, playing a handful of notable Amiga modules, and explaining my understanding of how soundtracking worked — you know, the whole « notes as a sequence of letters instead of solfege symbols » thing2 Or, « A#3 > 🎶 », which incidentally is the name of Elon Musk & Grimes’ next child.
SoundTracker: it’s like writing music with Excel! This is a Unix version of Soundtracker, from February 2006. (to hear this specific song, click here and press the Return key)
Today I’m starting a series of articles which is no less about passion and nostalgia, but tries to go further behind the curtains, and talks about the ones who made soundtracking possible: Mr. Obarski of course, but also those who inspired him (and those who, in turn, inspired them3Spoiler alert: It’s turtles all the way down!).
Eventually, my intent is to find out when the « tracker » way of composing music (or, the music sequencer) made the jump from a hardware, physical product to a software product. Who was the first one to dream up coding that interface? Is it really Karsten Obarski, father of the Sountracker? I want to find out.
So let’s start with the culmination of all these inspirations. Let’s start where this little « quest » of mine started.
(drumroll)
Karsten Obarski, elusive legend
Karsten Obarski programmed the Ultimate Soundtracker tool for Amiga 1000 in the Summer of 1987, and released it through German software publisher EAS in December 1987. He was 22. It was his first ever completed program. He initially wrote it to write his first music, for the first game of a friend of his, Guido Bartels.
You can almost hear the nostalgia!
Ultimate Soundtracker was the first musical program to mix the tracker format with audio samples (instead of synth sounds), and thus was a tremendous success… in terms of number of tools which stole the whole idea and built upon it, that is. Commercially, it failed, apparently due to a temperamental behavior (= it crashed all too often), and the fact that the target customers, musicians, were not interested in that way of composing.
Version 1.0 (or « demo version« ), from November 1987. Notice that Obarski used his nickname here, « Obiwan » 🙂 The first version published by EAS was version 1.21, from December 1987. Which part of your song are you going to start with? Melody, or percussions?
Nonetheless, it gave birth to a host of clones (and a name to its own genre of tools), each building upon the previous clone’s improvements. In March 1988, just 3 months after the initial commercial release of Ultimate Soundtracker, coder The Exterminator/TJC (Netherlander Mark Langerak) released Soundtracker II under his own name (removing Obarski’s full credit, shy of a mention). Exterminator had de-assembled the original program and released the resulting source code, along with its playroutine4A piece of code that makes it possible to easily integrate a Soundtracker song (or « module ») into any program. This allowed anyone to not only create music in the tracker format (fine), but they could also freely (as in, illegally) use that format in their own production (games and demos).
While illegal, this was the needed spark to trigger the Cambrian explosion of trackers: before long, several other clones appeared. Just for 1988, Amiga musicians witnessed the successive releases of Soundtracker Pro I, TJC Soundtracker I, Soundtracker IIIand IV, DOC Soundtracker (11 versions in 88), Master Soundtracker, and many others. Check out this graph!
Some would say it was « fair game » for a software that wasn’t successful, and felt abandoned. From Pex « Mahoney » Tufvesson, coder of another clone named Noisetracker:
« The basic idea of Soundtracker was delightful, but unfortunately there were some serious bugs and other shortcomings. I tried to contact Karsten Obarski with bug reports, but was told that he was not going to do anything about it and that Soundtracker was not a commercial success. Today it would be classed as abandonware, but at the time it was just frustrating. »
Pex Tufvesson took matters into his own hands and disassembled the entire program. After much effort, he had the entire assembly code for Soundtracker on his desk. He fixed the bugs, increased the number of samples from 15 to 31, and released Noisetracker 1.0 on August 1, 1989. However, this first version also contained some bugs, so version 1.1 was released just a week later.
Abandoned? Truth be told, Karsten Obarski didn’t last long in « the scene » (of which he was never a part of anyway). He released a couple more versions of Ultimate Soundtracker, including v2.0 in October 1988 which made official the famed « module » format (combining note patterns with audio samples into a single file) created in July 88 by the DOC Soundtracker IX clone (coded by Unknown/DOC, aka Michael Kleps5Update from December 2022: See this interesting thread by Thomas Cherryhomes about how the MOD format was introduced.), and then, as Keyser Söze would say, « Poof, he was gone ». He was not heard of anymore on the Amiga. Barely a year had gone by since the initial release of his groundbreaking tool.
On the right, Karsten Obarski in 1991, in the reLine offices. They are watching over a competitor for « endurance game playing » for the Guinness Book of Records. From Aktueller Software Markt (ASM) magazine, May 1991.
He kept working on games for a bit, specifically for the reLINE publisher, for which he composed the music of the game « Dyter-07 » 6For which he created another tool: « I wrote an completely new tool named « Synthpack » which used sampled audio for percussions only and realtime generated synthetic sounds for the melodic voices. It sounded more like an old 64 which I like very much. ». Then, by 1993, it seems he left the computer world for good.
What’s left of him is a legacy, both in terms of composing process, but also in terms of « sound »: Ultimate Soundtracker was accompanied by the legendary ST-01, a sound disk, which contained audio samples which Obarski ripped from his own synthesizers7Check out this audio comparison between the ST-01 samples and the original synthesizer sounds., and which came to define the early sound of the Amiga. Obarski himself provided the template: Ultimate Soundtracker came with several complete demo songs, showing that the man also had a knack for melodies. Amegas, Crystalhammer, Endtheme, Bluesong, Blueberry, etc.: Titles that bring nostalgic stars to the eyes of any kid from these days 🙂
The man behind the legend
Hi, Karsten! Picture taken from AMP, dated probably 2008.
Not much is known about Karsten Obarski, really. Only a couple of interviews are available online. Let’s dive in, and find out what brought him to create Soundtracker!
How did you get the idea of creating Soundtracker? A friend of mine (…) asked me if I could write some music for him (…). At that time I had already experimented around with a playroutine on my brand new Amiga (…) So I begun to code a simple-to-use editor to generate the data to be used by my playroutine. After some improvements, my Soundtracker was born.
AMP interview
Sounds like it came out of thin air! But let’s look at the question right before this one:
Which composing programs have you been using? In the times of the « 64 »8Commodore 64., I’ve used Chris Hülsbeck’s « Soundmonitor » to implement some music-tunes in my codings.
AMP interview
Ah ha! That’s interesting. So, Karsten Obarski had a Commodore 64 before he bought an Amiga 1000, and on that C64 he discovered Soundmonitor, which… is a tracker-style program from 1986, the year before Obarski wrote and released his own Ultimate Soundtracker!
Soundmonitor 1.0, by Chris Hülsbeck.
Indeed, while it’s much less easy on the eye, we can see similarities: channels (three, in that case, marked TRK for « tracks »), line positions on the left sidebar (SP for « song position » I guess, or maybe « step »?), and more settings.
Browsing other sources, we find that this is the same conclusion reached by others. For instance, in his book « Bits and Pieces: A History of Chiptunes« , author Kenneth B. McAlpine writes:
« Obarski simplified the interface of SoundMonitor ».
« An early model of such tracker software was Soundmonitor for the C64, written by Chris Hülsbeck. »
French blog Geekzone treads the same waters in their article « The little-known history of trackers » 9In French in ze texte., but goes one step further: author and audio producer Jean-Christophe « Faskil » Detrain relates that, for purists, Hülsbeck’s Soundmonitor was the first necessary step, but Obarski’s Soundtracker was indeed the first real tracker — because to said purists, a real tracker has to use audio samples, not synth sounds.
Still, to Faskil, « C64 wins »: the first tracker is indeed Soundmonitor.
Looks like Karsten Obarski took inspiration from Chris Hülsbeck, contributing a nicer interface around the tracker format, along with a fourth channel10Thanks to Paula, the Amiga sound chip, which was more advanced than the C64’s SID chip., right? Ergo, that would make Chris Hülsbeck the real father of music trackers?
It’s not quite that simple. Turns out, Hülsbeck got inspiration somewhere too — of course.
But before we dive into Chris Hülsbeck’s own inspirations for Soundmonitor, let’s try to understand another aspect of Karsten Obarski’s legend: after releasing such an important piece of software, why did he disappear all of a sudden, vanishing without a trace? Let’s answer the title of this article.
After releasing a key software product, Karsten Obarski more or less disappeared, never to be heard again of in the game music (or demo music) world. Why so, and where is he now?
The answer to « Why did he left? » can be found by mixing various sources.
I was very proud to have invented a milestone program.
The data structure of my MOD files even still lives today on PCs and all other music programs, after they ripped parts of my program and modified my playroutine as well.
But say – how many people who know about « trackers » and modules also know their roots? Who knows me? That’s only a few of them.
When and why did you give up the SoundTracker project? After I’d sold my copyrights to a company named EAS for a few bucks, and the Soundtracker clones started to come from all directions, I didn’t have the inspiration to code any more on that program.
Did you feel bad when other people stole your idea/program? (…) It wasn’t funny when people made some patches on the SoundTracker and then thought of it as their own program, removing my name completely. Even today’s trackers work in that same way, and still use the tone-event data structures which I invented. (Which is a very simple one.)
Do you have anything to say to the programmers of new trackers? Just try to find new ways by yourself and do not spend so much time making the same things others have done before you.
So, by the looks of it, he wasn’t too happy with the situation, and decided it was time for him to find a new hobby.
Now, « where is he now? », you might ask me, and I’m glad you did. Again, we resort to the available interviews…
Are you still active in the scene these days? I now have a job as an electronic-specialist at an industrial company. Sometimes I program a little bit at our circuit-board testing machines – that’s fun enough for me 😉
The other free time I like to spend with my wife, my motorbikes, my old house, my synthesizers and my very few left friends.
AMP interview.
Indeed, while desperately looking for anything resembling an online presence of Karsten Obarski, the closest I could find was an empty account on the Tinkercad website. Tinkercad is a free tool to create 3D models of, amongst other things, circuit boards. We can only guess that he was trying it out for fun… (Edit in 2023: the Tinkercad account has since been deleted)
But [music is] still just a hobby – and in the Summer my wife and I often prefer to ride with our motorbikes [rather] than sitting in the house.
Lacking direct interaction with Karsten Obarski himself (and believe me, I tried to track him down, or to find at least an email address), this is the best I can do. Karsten, if you read this, please contact me 🙂
Let’s move on to Obarski’s apparent inspiration for Soundtracker, then, in order to find out, in turn, his inspiration.
