BeRoTracker

What it does

A tracker, and then the room around it

Everything a tracker of this kind is expected to have, and beside it the things it was always missing: drum patterns of its own, a modular route, plugins from the outside world, and an FM chip that counts as a channel like any other.

Pattern editor

The grid as it always was, with 256 channels numbered in hex from 00. Selections transpose, vary, roll and amplify, a block grows to the length of the clipboard, and a whole pattern goes back out as a sample.

Drum patterns

A second kind of pattern beside the note grid, with drum instruments and an order list of its own. A second press on the same key leads over to them and back again.

Samples and instruments

Envelopes with tools for doubling, halving and ADSR, jump points, note maps, and a waveform editor that carries effects and a small synthesizer. Resampling where other trackers only resize.

Modular routing

Operators wired into a route: the amplifier, a parametric EQ with presets, the effects the engine brings along, and single FM voices among them.

Plugins

VST2, VST3, CLAP and the tracker's own BTP. They are scanned once and remembered, they open their own window, and their parameters lie open to automation.

MIDI, in and out

MIDI files come in and go back out, controllers drive automations picked per column, and what the tracker plays can leave through a MIDI port to whatever is listening.

The FM chip

OPL3 is a channel like any other: its own instruments, kept in the BRT file, answering to ^^^ and === the same way a sample does. Eleven of the AdLib tracker formats come in from the outside, from HSC up to AdLib Tracker 2.

Its own screen

Everything is drawn through OpenGL, at whatever size the window has. A high-resolution font for large screens, the 8×8 oldschool look kept beside it, and sixteen colours that come out of a palette file.

Portable, in the plain sense

Unpack it somewhere and start it. Settings, caches and the log lie beside the executable, and nothing else on the machine is touched.

The engine

What happens between the note and the speaker

The mixer is the part that has been rewritten the most often, and it shows: the interpolation is a choice, not a fixed quality, and it reaches from nearest neighbour to a windowed SINC over a thousand taps.

Mixing: 256 channels, volume ramping and click removal, retro low and high pass beside the biquad filters
Resampling: Nearest, linear, cubic spline, polyphase FIR, and windowed SINC from 8 up to 1024 taps
Effects: A parametric EQ with presets, the amplifier, and every plugin that was found, wired where you want them

Audio, Linux: ALSA, PipeWire, PulseAudio, JACK
Audio, Windows: WinMM, WASAPI, DirectSound, ASIO
Export: WAV and MIDI, the whole song or one channel, one instrument, one sample at a time

Sixteen colours, and which sixteen is up to you

Palettes are read from files and can be written back. Seven are built in; Camouflage is the one the tracker starts with.

Camouflage default

Light Blue

Midnight Tracking

Volcanic

Formats

What it opens, and what it leaves behind

BRT is the only format wide enough for everything the tracker can do; the others reach as far as they reach.

Load: BRTMODS3MXMITMT2MTMDMFIMFOKTSTM669MIDI
Load, the FM ones: A2MA2TRADFMKCFFAMDSATSA2DFMMTKHSC
Save: BRTMODS3MXMIT
Plugins: BTPVST2VST3CLAP

Import: SF2DLSWAVFLACOGGMIDI
Export: WAVMIDI
Archives: ZIPMDZS3ZXMZITZ

Everything in the load list is also taken out of a ZIP, an archive inside an archive included, and a module goes back into one when the name it is saved under ends in .zip or in a z.

The AdLib trackers, and how far they come over

Eleven formats out of the FM world, from the plainest of them up to the one the whole family ends at. They land in the tracker's own OPL3 instruments and are played from there, beside the samples and everything else.

A2M, A2T: AdLib Tracker 2 and its small brother. Up to twenty tracks, up to 256 rows to a pattern, and the register macros the tracker is built around. Every packer a module may carry is taken apart: SIXPACK, LZW, LZSS, aPLib and LZH.
FMK: FM Kingtracker. Eighteen tracks, so a whole OPL3 and not half of it, with the four operator voices and the drums of the rhythm mode among them.
RAD: Reality AdLib Tracker. Nine voices, and rows which are written down only where something stands in them.
CFF: Boomtracker 4, whose files name themselves a CUD-FM-File. Squeezed with YsComp or lying plainly, and both ways are read.

SAT, SA2: Surprise! Adlib Tracker in its first, fifth and sixth version, and its second in the eighth and ninth, which keeps single tracks instead of whole patterns.
AMD: AMusic, and the XMS files of MaDoKaN96 with it. The patterns are packed, out of a table which says where every track of them lies.
DFM: Digital-FM. A cell is one byte or two, and the tick rate is 135 — which is what makes these songs play at their own speed and not at a third of it.
MTK: MPU-401 Trakker. A packed image of what the tracker held in memory, squeezed by Ross Data Compression.
HSC: HSC-Tracker, the plainest of them all. No signature anywhere — a file says it is one by the arithmetic of its size.

These eleven are read best effort and not one for one. What an AdLib tracker keeps as an effect this one may keep as instrument data or the other way round: what has a home here is brought over, what has none stays behind — the two HSC effects which set the level of a single operator, say, or the commands of Boomtracker which its own songs never use.

And they may not sound the way they did where they came from. This tracker is a sample tracker underneath and stays one: a note is a period, time is speed and tempo counted in ticks, and the effect column is the one of Scream Tracker and Impulse Tracker — everything, the FM voices included, is built on that. So the rate a song was written at, fifty calls a second for HSC, a hundred and thirty five for Digital-FM, eighteen for the MPU-401 Trakker, becomes a tempo here; an effect comes over as the nearest one this tracker has, and slides and vibratos are then counted in its units and not in the ones they were written in. AdLib Tracker 2 brings the most of itself along — its register macros play, its volume is the level of the carrier as it is there, and its notes keep to the fixed table of twelve the songs were tuned against by ear — while the older formats are played at the exact pitch instead of the fourteen and a half cents under it that table sounds at. They play, and they play recognisably. They do not come back out as the file that went in, and there is no way back at all: these formats are read and not written.

Requirements

What the machine has to bring

Graphics: OpenGL 4.3, compatibility profile. Cards have carried it since 2009 and 2010; where it cannot be had, the tracker says so and stops rather than draw half a screen.
Linux: 64 bit x86, an X server or a Wayland compositor. Under Wayland libxkbcommon and EGL are wanted; without the first there is a window but no keyboard.
Windows: 64 bit x86. Nothing has to be installed beside it — the executable asks only for DLLs which belong to Windows itself.

Audio: Whichever of the backends above the system has. One of them is usually already there.
Keyboard: The note keys follow the layout, set as QWERTY, QWERTZ or AZERTY. Alt Gr counts as an alt key, on every system.
Disk: What the archive unpacks to, and beside it the handful of files the tracker writes for itself.

Download

One archive, both systems

The Linux binary and the Windows executable travel together, with the icons, the desktop entry and the equalizer presets. Unpack it where you like.

BeRoTracker.zip · 13.2 MiB · version 1.00.2026.08.31 SHA-256 7186d09278bab24ccba5222c5f617a5b456d2cc02e4ada1c251522289f7f6bfc

Download BeRoTracker ZIP

Linux

$ unzip BeRoTracker.zip
$ cd BeRoTracker
$ ./BeRoTracker

# the icon and the menu entry, if wanted
$ ./install-desktop.sh

Windows

Unpack the archive, open the folder,
and start:

BeRoTracker\BeRoTracker.exe