It's OK, but it's more like Impulse Tracker than Buzz. (Impulse Tracker was the best of breed of its kind; Buzz was a radical departure from the traditional tracker. Buzz would better be called "Studio" than "Tracker", since it allowed you to chain modules together in endlessly inventive ways; e.g., if your CPU coped, you could have 9 reverbs in a chain feeding off a chorus that was connected to a sawtooth synth.)

On Wed October 12 2005 17:26, Mark Knecht wrote: Cheesetracker is just a traditional sample tracker. Buzz was like a tracker plus Pd (with a slightly less crappy interface) plus SpiralSynth Modular plus a pile of native effects (both MIDI-oriented and DSP) and instruments (virtual analog, sample playback, FM, etc.) plus the ability to use VST/VSTi and DX/DXi instruments and effects and render in realtime to the speaker or with higher quality to disk. It even accepted MIDI input, albeit only for step entry. Simply using all the programs I mentioned above might let you reproduce your Buzz work, but will not let you go "File/Save" and save all your instruments with all your parameters and all your routing as you could with Buzz so that you can subsequently "File/Open" mysong.buz and have everything be exactly as it was when you left off. (Neither will running Buzz under Wine, or at least when I've tried that, File/Opening one of my songs would always crash it due to some misbehaving VST effect or instrument.) Buzz is easily the most powerful free (as in beer) compositional tool I've ever used, but it was designed for like Windows 98 or something and since the source has been lost (and was never released in the first place) there's been no new code written for it and probably never will be. Fuzztracker, GNU Octal, and others have tried to pick up where Buzz left off, and somehow no one's been able to do it. I look forward to the day when someone does, because my attempts to use Rosegarden with Timidity and AMS have accomplished nothing but pissing me off. (Rosegarden is an incredibly nice and professional-feeling program, but for example, even the crap Voyetra sequencer that came with my sound card back in 1995 let me select a group of notes and drag a certain way to change their duration.) It could be that LMMS and other new software like it, combined with decent interfaces to LADSPA plugins and DSSI instruments, will eventually gain critical mass and succeed where Octal, FT, et al. have failed. In the meantime I'm just frustrated. Rob