Tracker Modules

Tracker Modules can be described as packages of audio samples that have been modeled, arranged and sequenced programatically. The family of file formats was initially introduced in the 80's Amiga computers and has been very popular in the early game development and demo culture.

Tracker Module files are similar to MIDI files in many ways. The tracks are scores that contain information about when to play the samples, at what pitch, volume, effect, etc.; essentially information about what melody or rhythm each instrument should play. However, the shortcomings of MIDI are that the sounds are dependent on the sound bank that are in the hardware that outputs the sound, so MIDI music can sound different on different computers. The power of the Tracker Module files lies in the fact that they embed high quality PCM samples that ensure a similar experience on all hardware.

Supported formats

Unity supports the four most used formats, namely Impulse Tracker (.it), Scream Tracker (.s3m), Extended Module File Format (.xm), and the original Module File Format (.mod).

Benefits of Using Tracker Modules

Tracker Modules distinguish themselves from the widely used PCM (.aif, .wav, .mp3, and .ogg) format by being very small despite the sound quality. Game developers can benefit from these because a module can contain a single tiny sample that can be modeled to a very wide spectrum of sounds without taking up more space and bandwidth. A PCM file that sounds exactly the same take up much more space and bandwidth.

3rd Party Tools and Further References

The most popular tools at the moment to create and edit Tracker Modules are MilkyTracker for OSX and OpenMPT for Windows. For more info and discussion, please see the blog post .mod in Unity from June 2010.

Page last updated: 2010-09-13