Mukkemann RetroTrax

The tracker with heart: Amiga feeling + C64 SID, built for today.

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version / German version

⬇ Download (Windows / macOS / Linux)

A VST3/CLAP plugin and standalone app in the spirit of ProTracker, FastTracker II and OctaMED — but modern, beginner-friendly, and available for Windows, macOS and Linux. A project from the Mukkemann universe.

Status: v0.85 — MIDI velocity + humanize: real touch counts now

• 🟢 MIDI velocity + humanize (v0.85): a connected MIDI keyboard/pad controller used to be completely ignored (always full volume) — now real velocity counts, both while previewing and while live-recording (REC). For finger-drumming on a computer keyboard (which has no real touch), the drum sampler gets a new HUMANIZE switch: a light random velocity variation instead of always stubbornly full volume

• 🟢 E6x pattern loop + EEx pattern delay (v0.84): repeat or hold specific pattern rows on purpose — classic break rows and stutter effects

• 🟢 8xx panning (v0.83): stereo panorama per track, 00 = left, 80 = centre, FF = right — overrides the fixed Amiga LRRL wherever you want it

• 🟢 Fine-slides (v0.82): E1x/E2x fine pitch and EAx/EBx fine volume, act once per row instead of per tick — the "quiet" siblings of the slides

• Four new classics in the effect column — exactly the commands that make the difference when building real songs: 9xx sample offset (start a sample mid-way — breakbeat chops; 900 = reuse the last offset), E9x retrigger (restrike the note every x ticks — snare rolls), ECx note cut (mute from tick x — tight and choppy) and EDx note delay (strike only at tick x — shuffle feel, staggered chords). All documented in the help (effect column), and the web player plays them automatically too

• 🟢 Beginner mode (EASY ⇄ PRO): one button up top switches the whole app between EASY (newcomer-friendly) and PRO (everything). In EASY the grid shows only note + instrument per track (the volume/effect hex columns are hidden, so notes sit wider and easier to read) and the song strip (pattern / LOOP / QUANT / DICE) disappears to give the grid more room; a short "let's go" box plus the on-screen keyboard get you playing in seconds. Your choice is remembered for next time. PRO stays the default — nothing is taken away, switch back any time

• 🎹 SID synthesizer: every slot can be a sound you create yourself instead of a sample — a C64 SID-style voice with waveforms (triangle / saw / pulse with pulse width / noise), an ADSR envelope and a multimode filter (low-/high-/band-pass with cutoff + resonance). Mix samples and SID freely in one song; every change plays a test note right away

• Switchable sound engine: choose per instrument between Classic (the built-in synth, the familiar RetroTrax sound) and Real Chip — an authentic reSIDfp emulation of the MOS 6581. Same controls, your pick of sound

• PWM, ring modulation & hard sync: the classic SID modulation toolkit — sweeping pulse width, metallic ring tones and screaming sync leads

• Unison stack: stack 1–3 slightly detuned voices per note for a fat, wide sound (super-saw / multi-SID idea) — on the real chip this drives the 3 actual hardware SID voices

• Chord from one note: a single key press plays a whole chord — major, minor, sus4, fifth (power chord) or octave. Uses the same stack voices as unison, and detune widens the chord further

• Factory presets & your own sounds: one click loads a ready-made SID sound (bass, lead, bell, drums, pad, sync lead, blip); REMEMBER saves your own creations into a personal SID list that's ready in every song

• Effect column: arpeggio, slides, tone portamento, vibrato, volume and tempo (classic tracker effects as hex input) with context-sensitive live help

• Song mode: chain several patterns (up to 64) into a whole song

• Block editing: select areas, copy/cut and move them directly with Alt+arrow (nudge by ear)

• Note off (key 1): lets SID voices fade out cleanly

• 16 tracks, 64-row patterns — they don't all fit at once, so the grid scrolls sideways with the cursor (a ‹/› arrow in the header means more tracks)

• Mute & solo per track: little M (mute) and S (solo) buttons under each track name — by mouse click, even during playback. Solo plays only the chosen tracks, so you instantly find what doesn't sit right in the mix

• WAV export: the WAV button renders your whole song to a stereo WAV — ready to share, upload (Ko-fi/YouTube) or process further

• Spectrum display: the SPECTRUM button opens the frequency bars — the "dancing bars" from the old trackers/demos. Purely visual, shows at a glance whether the bass has punch and the highs are there (lows left, highs right)

• One LOAD menu: a single LOAD button bundles everything — load a sample, the sample browser, open a song, and an Import submenu (MOD/XM/TFMX). Keeps the strip tidy instead of many buttons side by side

• IT/S3M import: Impulse Tracker (.it) and Scream Tracker 3 (.s3m) can be imported too (LOAD ▸ Import) — samples, patterns and order. Packed IT samples/envelopes are not handled yet

• Faithful module playback ✅: MOD/XM/S3M/IT play with pattern break and position jump, and shorter patterns (<64 rows) run correctly — songs sound the way the original intended

• MOD import: load classic Amiga .mod songs (LOAD ▸ Import) — samples go into the slots (up to 31), patterns + order are taken over. Play it right away, keep building and save as .retrotrax

• Live recording: hit play and play along on the keyboard — notes are recorded straight onto the row that's currently playing (in the cursor's track), like a captured piano performance. When stopped you type step by step as before

• Amiga-style stereo: tracks are spread across the stereo field automatically (LRRL like ProTracker) — your beat sounds wide and lively on its own; every note gets a tiny fade in/out so nothing clicks

• Undo/redo (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y, up to 64 steps) and copy/paste/cut track (Ctrl+C / V / X)

• 16 instrument slots, loads WAV / AIFF / FLAC / OGG / MP3 plus the native Amiga format 8SVX / IFF (openly documented)

• SoundFonts (SF2): add a .sf2 bank (via + FOLDER), browse its sounds, preview and load them — the chosen sample is extracted to a WAV, so you can remember it and save it with your song too

• Built-in ST-XX sample disks: browse the legendary Amiga sample disks (ST-01 through ST-XX, 96 disks / ~5,900 sounds, public domain) and load any sound with one click — samples are fetched individually from the Internet Archive and cached locally, so the plugin itself stays small

• Sample browser with search: one search box finds a sound across all disks and your own folders at once; a click previews it instantly

• Your own folders & "My Sounds" collection: add sample folders from your hard drive (they survive restarts), and REMEMBER favourite sounds into a personal collection — inside the collection that button becomes FORGET and sends a sound back to the trash

• Save & open songs: store your work as a .retrotrax file and reopen it anytime. Self-contained: all samples are embedded compressed into the file — a portable mini-file (drawn/grabbed sounds are kept too); SID songs need no sample data at all

• Built-in help (? button): topics for every feature, in your language, growing with the app

• Bilingual (German / English): switch any time with the DE/EN button; follows your system language on first start

• Instrument colors: every instrument gets a fixed color from a 16-color retro palette — notes light up in their instrument's color in the pattern grid, and a color dot next to the instrument selector shows your current "paint"

• Pattern grid in classic ProTracker style: the cursor row stays centered, the pattern scrolls

• Computer keyboard as piano

• MIDI input for previewing notes

• Runs as a VST3 and CLAP inside any DAW and as a standalone program

Roadmap

• Done in stage 2: real C64 SID emulation (reSIDfp) alongside the built-in synth, ring modulation, hard sync, PWM, factory presets, your own SID sounds, the unison stack ✅, the chord from one note ✅ and 16 tracks with side-scrolling ✅ (was 8), MOD import ✅, XM import ✅ (FastTracker 2: more channels, 16-bit samples, finetune), the CLAP format ✅ (in addition to VST3, via clap-juce-extensions) and the Akai sampler filter ✅ (resonant low-pass in S900/S950/S1000 style + 12-bit crunch, per sample), sampler effects ✅ (reverse + grain/sample-rate reduction), loop ✅ (forward + ping-pong) and analog warmth ✅ (drive saturation + vintage pitch like the old samplers) and pattern quantise ✅ (snap live-recorded notes onto the grid)
• TFMX playback ✅ (Chris Hülsbeck — Turrican, Apidya …): load .mdat/.smpl and hear the original songs. Uses a vendored open (GPL) TFMX replayer, wrapped by RetroTrax; the file reader, diagnostics and UI are RetroTrax's own
• TFMX grabber ✅: extract the individual sounds from a TFMX module and save them as WAVs (Renoise plugin-grabber idea). LOAD menu → Grab samples from TFMX; the folder opens right away in the sample browser to preview/load/remember
• Loop crossfade ✅: the SMOOTH slider in the Akai panel blends the loop end gently into the start on a forward loop — short samples loop smoothly instead of choppy (Fairlight feel); default 0 = hard jump as before
• Drum kit (16 pads) ✅: the KIT button opens a 4×4 pad grid in MPC60/ SP-1200 style with its own samples — click or finger-drum on the keyboard (pads light up on hit). → SLOT / SLOT → move sounds freely between pad and track slot; the kit is saved with the song. Velocity: where you click the pad matters — top = hard/loud hit, bottom = soft
• SP-1200/Emu sound per pad ✅: each pad has its own TUNE (semitones), GRIT (sample-rate reduction), 12-BIT crunch and an SP-1200 button that applies the classic crunch in one click — the dirty drum character
• Fairlight sample tool ✅: the FAIRLIGHT button opens a waveform editor — select a range and trim, normalise, reverse, draw the wave with the mouse (light-pen feel) and above all chop into 16 kit slices (slice a break → drum pads, the MPC/SP-1200 idea)
• Time-stretch ✅: in the Fairlight tool, make a sample longer/shorter without changing its pitch (granular overlap-add) — for any sample
• Slice → Pattern ✅: chop a break into 16 slices, put them into instrument slots AND write them as notes into the pattern — the break becomes playable and rearrangeable (Recycle/Page-R idea)
• Master FX (echo & reverb) ✅: the FX button opens effects for the whole mix (like Renoise's master track) — echo (delay with feedback) and reverb, and a 3-band EQ (low/mid/high), off/flat by default, saved with the song
• Waveform generator ✅: create simple single-cycle waves (sine/saw/square/ triangle/pulse) into a slot — loops as an oscillator, with no sample at all
• Random melody (DICE) ✅: rolls a minor-pentatonic melody into the cursor track — instant inspiration against the blank page (Ctrl+Z to undo)
• Swing / groove ✅: the SWING slider (next to BPM) offsets even/odd rows against each other — the MPC/SP-1200 shuffle that brings the beat to life (tempo stays the same, 0 % = straight)
• Beginner mode (EASY) ✅: one click strips the interface down to note + instrument and hides the song strip, with a "let's go" box and the on-screen keyboard — a gentle way in for newcomers; PRO stays the default and takes nothing away
• Later: more sampler effects (time-stretch), real beat detection, .sid player + .retrotrax replayer for your own demos

Controls

Key	Function
Z X C V B N M row (+ S D G H J for semitones)	Notes, current octave
Q 2 W 3 E R 5 T 6 Y 7 U …	Notes, one octave up
Arrow keys / PgUp/PgDn / Home / End	Move cursor
Tab / Shift+Tab	Next / previous track
Space	Play / stop
Del / Backspace	Clear cell
+ / -	Change octave
Digits (on instrument/volume column)	Type a value
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y	Undo / redo
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V / Ctrl+X	Copy / paste / cut track

Building from source

Requires: CMake ≥ 3.22, a C++17 compiler, and on Linux the usual audio/X11 development packages (libasound2-dev, libx11-dev, libfreetype-dev, …).

git clone --depth 1 --branch 8.0.8 https://github.com/juce-framework/JUCE.git libs/JUCE
# Optional for the CLAP format (otherwise it is simply skipped):
git clone --depth 1 --recurse-submodules --shallow-submodules https://github.com/free-audio/clap-juce-extensions.git libs/clap-juce-extensions
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j2

Results end up in build/RetroTrax_artefacts/Release/: Standalone/ (app), VST3/ and CLAP/ (plugins for your DAW).

Support ❤️

RetroTrax is free and always will be. If it brings you joy, you can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi — every cup keeps the Mukkemann universe running.

License

GPL-3.0 — free for everyone.