Hi, I've re-formatted your HTML email to plaintext, sorry if I messed anything up. On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 11:11:30AM -0500, oktyabr(a)linux-studio.org wrote: Thanks. :) I was a little afraid I'd subconciously ripped off another song, but I still can't figure out any specific tune so I think I'm safe. The formant filter is called JSHumanizer and is a free, but not Free VST from around 1999. You can get it here: <http://membres.lycos.fr/jeje1999/index.htm> Tracking gives you very fine grained control over the temporal characteristics of a tune, so basically I just hand-programmed the gating of the formant sound. That's what I like best about tracking - it's sample accurate. When it was open sourced one of the coolest features to come to modplug tracker was the ability to program VST effect changes at the same level of detail using hex codes for the slider value. This means that I can do stuff like set the exact formant mixture at any given point in the track. I have used Cheesetracker, Shaketracker (MIDI), Schism tracker, and Soundtracker a fair bit before, and for the most part I like them. Soundtracker is probably my favorite in terms of interface, but lacks the features of Modplug tracker, and is not very speedily developed. Plus newer versions tend to crash under Debian for me and I can't figure out why. I have used it to do a few remixes when I didn't need to apply any effects other than those fake kind of effects you can do with a tracker. Cheesetracker has many more of the features of Modplug, but I've always been more of a FT2 person than an IT person and so Cheesetracker feels slightly clunky to me. Schism tracker is a direct impulse tracker clone and hence has the same problem for me. If Cheesetracker had have had the ability to hand-program effect changes like Modplug can I probably would have put more effort into getting used to the interface. Shaketracker I used to use to send Midi events into Puredata, but after I discovered seq24 I started using that as it feels better for that kind of thing, and takes less work to write music. Modplug just has a really beautifully developed interface. I find that the speed at which I can write tunes is an order of magnitude higher using it, and I never get bogged down trying to do something complicated that should be simple. It has a really intuitive access to your sample/instrument library, for example, and key strokes do what you expect them to. You can edit patterns pretty much solely using the keyboard (e.g. holding down shift to select rows and ctrl-cut and paste) which you can't do in some of the Linux based trackers. I just find it really non-annoying to use. When it a) started working under Wine and b) went FOSS a year or so ago I was sooo happy as I hadn't been able to use it for three years before that since I switched to Linux. An even better treat was that I can now write effects in Puredata using PdVST. The best of both worlds - tracker interface with Puredata power! Best, Chris. ------------------- chris(a)mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx