From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Impulse Tracker 3 is a one-solution package to compose and produce music, it's been worked on since 1997. Impulse Tracker 3 is also an internal working title, it could very well be that the final title will be a different one.

Contents 1 Introduction 2 History 3 Progress 4 Future

From the moment development for Impulse Tracker halted, a small group of people have been working on Impulse Tracker 3. Over the years, IT3 has been widely regarded as vapourware by the tracking-community, due the absence of any IT3 news. As of today, the current developers are located in the Czech Republic and in The Netherlands and the project is funded by a company located in Prague.

Since the start, the IT3 project traveled around the globe, though its primary location has always been the Czech Republic. Since IT3 is being worked on full time by a single person, funding from a company was required. In the early years there was a cooperation with Impulse Tracker's original author Jeffrey Lim from Australia. Eventually this cooperation halted due internal disagreements. Next, the project moved to the United States, but cooperation halted after communication problems and lack of faith in a sound future. Then IT3 moved to the Netherlands in 2001, but after half a year financial problems halted this cooperation again, a result of decline of business after the attack on the Twin Towers in New York. Since this moment, the project's financial backbone returned to the Czech Republic where it still is today.

While conventional trackers are products of the demoscene, IT3 has always been aiming for the professional market. It would be have been easy for the developers to quickly produce a tracker and be done with it, this has however never really been the objective of IT3 and it's what sets it apart from alternative trackers. An application of this scale and scope has a few relevant things that require attention prior to the actual development:

• Being developed with a only a few persons, one has to find suitable means of functionality discussion and documentation.
• An application like this will span many years, which programming language will survive all those years? C++ is said to fade away in the next years to come, C# is Microsoft-only. One can't easily change compiler with a program the size of IT3, so now is the time to choose which compiler to use in the future.
• Which platforms are to be supported? Which platforms do musicians use? Fifteen years ago, answering this question wouldn't be very hard, but today?
• Will musicians use a common PC? Perhaps they will prefer to use an embedded system in a 19" rack they can plug into their studio and carry around on stage: no OS bugs, no background issues like firewalls and virus scanners.
• Will musicians accept the functional- and visual design of the software? If not, do they wish to change this design in real time to their own liking? (the concept of the artist making his own tools, not to have to rely on choices made by someone else)
• How could and should it interface with today's common standards like MIDI and VST?

Suffice to say, IT3 has never been aimed at the tracking scene alone, although the developers remain sure that tracking is a fast means of composing that has yet to earn its respect from the industry.

Currently, a release date remains unknown. It is not vapourware, it's scale and scope however dictate that it's not an everyday application either, and a similar development path is to be expected.