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TRACKMAN

Sequencer by Hollis Research

Trackman

Sequencer
By Hollis Research
Released as Freeware

While this excellent sequencer has been available for a long while, I feel it needs more attention, thus the addition of the this page to TAMW.

Trackman, while being a "basic" sequencer does the job. You don't need to pour over a manual just to use it, while having features that are available even in the more prestegious sequencer packages.

Trackman was developed by John Hollis, basically to satisfy his own needs in a sequencer. Soon it developed into a full blown commercial package. With the demise of Atari, he had decided to release it as Freeware, which of course is much appreciatted by the Atari-MIDI community.

Here in Johns own words is his story on Trackman:

It took about 6 months to get a prototype up and running. A few friends were also using it so the requests for new features started rolling in. It soon grew to a full blown commercial product and was released as Trackman for the Atari ST. It closely mimics the operating procedures of the LINN 9000 (rather expensive and quite amazingly unreliable integrated sequencer and drum machine) I was using previously, but is very stable and obviously includes many things you cannot do with a 2 line LCD display. Trackman enjoyed rave reviews from all the music magazines and much acclaim from users. In the studio I continue to use Trackman in preference to more recent PC based sequencers. It's very quick and intuitive to use so you spend your time making music instead of fiddling with the computer. If you have an Atari ST/TT/Falcon download Trackman (90K) and try it yourself.

NB: This is the full commercial version 2.5 release but with the copy protection removed. Trackman is not a current Hollis Research product and there is zero technical support. The Trackman trademark is now owned by Logitech SA.

Features include an excellent "key-edit" screen (above), a drum-remapper screen, many types of quantise, including shuffle, multi-channel record, chaining patterns to make a song, a looping mode,copy, erase and delete tools.Bounce, extract as well as an unusual command: rotate sequence! You can also save to standard MIDI files. Trackman also comes with a utility to convert MIDI Files to Trackman SNGS, so you can import material done on other programs into Trackman.

Trackman is a welcome addition to the "Bread and Butter" tools of the Atari Platform. Trackman is also "Steem" compatable, meaning it works on a PC under the Steem emulator software.(see my Steem page) We are very thankful to John Hollis for making Trackman available and not disappearing into software oblivion.

MIDIman

John Hollis also developed MIDIman as a companion to Trackman.
MIDIman is a universal editing controller supplied as a desk accessory. It comes complete with over 40 profiles for different synths and general purpose MIDI control. It integrates fully with Trackman enabling you to connect them together in various ways. No Docs are available yet for MIDIman.

Go here for the download :

Download Trackman

Download the Docs in TXT format: thanks to Gregorie Rayee of the Atari-MIDI Forum for translating it from the original Calamus Docs.

Download Trackman Docs in Text format

Download MIDIman

Trackman Page at Hollis Research

John Hollis's Homepage