Well, herbman's writeup is kind of derogatory.

FT2 is a mod format tracker which allows you to sequence digital samples at certain times, and have them play at a certain pitch to get different notes. Other effects such as vibrato and arpeggio and volume slides and panning are available.

It was written by Mr. H and the group Triton.

It uses the XM format.

...and was utterly fantastic!

It supported multiple formats, including S3M (Scream Tracker 3 Module) and MOD (traditional Module format) with full backwards compatibility where relevant (ie you could save in the older formats as well as load them).

It had builtin drivers for the most popular PC soudcards - primarily the SoundBlaster 16 and its forebears, and also the Gravis Ultrasound if memory serves. You could also do something with the parallel ports as well, though I never figured out quite what. In later versions you could pump to WAVs on the harddisk.

The GUI was totally rock solid, and you could be forgiven for forgetting that you were still in DOS. It was fully customisable (well, you could change all the colours, and the mouse pointers), and offered a very efficient and easy to use information display.

It had a decent swath of effects and utility features to help leverage ones innate artistic abilities. It had MIDI support, sample envelope and filter editors, and a kind of sample 'drawing' tool.

It had a builtin game of nibbles with various different modes of play to ease away the writer's block, or just to play head to head with a friend whilst listening to that funky early 90s techno!

It got as far as version 2.09 Beta before the project was permanently shelved (and work also ended on the windows port, Fast Tracker 3.0.25 Beta which was being developed simultaneously). A good replacement for FT2 is MadTracker which is suitably feature rich and similarly easy to use (and only a little buggy).

It was also that decent kind of shareware, where you get all the features for free straight away and registration is more of a gesture of thanks. As far as I can tell it was written by some school kids. That just makes me sick.

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