• 09 Dec, 2025 *

I have been into music trackers for about as long as I have been dabbling in producing music. to me, the tracker paradigm feels most natural; punching in individual notes and effects commands in a top-down orientation brings an air of familiarity to a programmer. though their heyday has long passed - they first emerged on the Commodore Amiga and became a big part of the 90s demoscene - there are still actively maintained tracker projects today, like MilkyTracker and Schism Tracker. (there is also Renoise, which melds the tracker workflow with modern DAW amenities.)

Renoise has been my bread and butter for learning music production and experimenting with sound design. its powerful sampler, native DSP effects, and VST support have made it an indispensable asset to me. but, as with any DAW, the endless availability and variety of third party plugins can and does lead to more analysis-paralysis than music-making. pure trackers, like the aforementioned examples above, are much more constrained - maybe a little too much for my taste. sample manipulation is limited to modulating pitch and volume (vibrato, tremolo, portamento).

enter the simply-named Tracker by Polish company Polyend. originally released in 2015, it’s an all-in-one music production workstation that stays faithful to the tracker ethos, while also providing a few modern conveniences. in addition to the 8-track sequencer, you get a mixer, non-realtime effects processing, and delay and reverb sends. the more recent iterations double the number of tracks, and also add a handful of synth engines, making it more or less on par with what I imagine an amateur dance producer would have had access to in the 1990s. it’s also these newer models (the upgraded Tracker+ and the portable Tracker Mini) that I have personally used and will offer my thoughts on.

my motivation behind this post is to mostly offer a perspective beyond surface-level impressions, which is surprisingly hard to come by - Polyend are fond of sending demo units of their products to YouTubers, so many of the video reviews available online are by/for people unfamiliar with trackers, and thus drag the viewer through the same tired "wtf is a tracker lol??" rigmarole.

okay here is the actual ‘review’

you can easily find video reviews online that go into the build quality, workflow, MIDI capabilities, I/O, etc. I will instead offer a more scatterbrained collection of things I have thoughts on.

the synth engines

in the current firmware (v2.2), there are 5 engines available: 2 virtual analog synths, 1 FM synth, a monophonic single-oscillator engine for acid sounds, and a drum machine. each has a bank of presets you can utilize, which is nice, because I find all of them to be extremely tedious to program. they also seem quite CPU hungry, as having a couple loaded up & playing multiple voices will start to trigger the CPU usage warning. (in all fairness though, I haven’t heard the audio suffer when the usage indicator starts popping up, and a forum post from a Polyend engineer suggests it’s not as scary as it seems.) it’s nice to have synth engines as options, but I’d rather create my own patch on my desktop computer and render it as a sample for use on the tracker.

no concept of ‘lines per beat’

you can adjust the number of lines per pattern, but adjusting the resolution of your composition is not possible. this is a great feature of Renoise, where, for instance, you can set the number of lines per beat at 12 if you like doing triplets.

granular sample playback

the familiar sample playback modes are available - looping forward, backward, pingpong - but you also get a granular mode. it’s nice for generating glitchy sounds via randomizing the grain position, but also pretty limited in that you only have a single grain to work with.

works well with JACK

in a Linux environment, individual track audio and MIDI are routable in JACK. this means that, if the built-in synths and effects aren’t cutting it, you have the option to integrate with standalone applications or a plugin host like Carla. in fact, this is the only pure tracker I’m aware of that allows per-track routing with JACK, so I consider it a pretty big plus.

effects commands offer common patterns

each track has 2 effects lanes, and the commands available are really convenient and well thought out. example: a common pattern is to retrigger a drum sample, while sliding its pitch upward or downward. in the Tracker firmware, this is bundled into a single command. it helps to avoid writing ‘boilerplate’ patterns over and over.

the non-realtime effects can surprise and delight

I’ve kinda grown to like the ‘punch in some parameters and see what you get’ approach to sound design that the limitations of the Tracker forces upon the user. making electronic music is often experimental, and discovering a completely unanticipated sound can often take you down a completely different path. it also reminds me of Aphex Twin’s use of CDP to mangle sounds.

resampling is incredibly easy

obviously samples are the main mode of expression with this kind of software. sequencing samples and resampling what you’ve programmed is as easy as highlighting the area of interest and hitting a button to render it. this makes it very easy to get into some very experimental sound design with the aforementioned effects processing.

audio over usb with exportable stems

my philosophy of using the Tracker is that it’s great for getting things started, but I’d ideally like to finish a good idea off in Renoise, where I have more freedom to add additional flourishes and do some mixing and EQing. audio over usb is a great feature for integrating with DAWs, and it’s especially easy to export the stems of a track you’ve started on the Tracker as uncompressed .wav files.

sample organization

this is more like a pet peeve, but I’m not a fan of the way the factory samples (of which there are many!) are organized on the filesystem. I’m still not sure which organizational structure works best for me, but it certainly isn’t breaking things down by the musical genre they’re supposed to fit in with. sometimes I’ll be looking for a particular sample I used in a previous track, struggling to recall whether it fit into the ‘idm’ or ‘synthwave’ paradigm. on the other hand, many of the sample packs sold by Polyend revolve more around themes or utility, e.g. ‘ambient pads’ which feels more sane to me.

turnaround time on bugs

Polyend are a small team, so it can get frustrating when you encounter a bug, report it, and find that it has already been documented and is in the pipeline for some future firmware release - maybe. I described it that way because that’s the sequence I went through after finding a rather significant bug within a few days of receiving my first Tracker. (to their credit, it was finally fixed in a recent firmware release.)

design/features specific to the Tracker Mini

I humbly posit that the Mini is the best model to get, because it has a couple things that the others do not. most crucial is the portable form factor and built-in (but not easily replaceable) battery. because the workflow makes it very easy to quickly lay down rhythmic and melodic ideas, being able to break it out and use it anywhere is a killer feature. you can use the full size Trackers with an external power bank, but it’s a very clumsy setup.

the Mini also sports a built-in microphone in lieu of the Tracker+’s FM radio. another no-brainer for me, as it’s quick and easy to grab unique and unconventional found sounds and manipulate them into usable samples. in contrast, getting a cool sample from the FM radio is something that feels more serendipitous.

in summary

the Polyend Tracker is an excellent case for ‘less is more.’ I find it really fun to use, to work up against its limitations, and refine ideas in cozy spots that are not my home office. but I’m not really a hardware or ‘DAWless’ oriented guy, so I sometimes struggle to justify using it when I’ve got Renoise at my disposal - especially when I want to do any kind of sound design with a synthesizer. even so, I can’t resist its charm. I bought two of them. ideas flow surprisingly readily despite the absence of a mouse and (MIDI) keyboard. and for the 90s jungle/dnb enthusiast, it’s a complete workstation - especially if you can scour archive.org and find some of those old sample CDs.