Yeah, Sunvox is great, and Alexander Zolotov (its developer) has also made a lot of other innovative and interesting audio apps.

I've been using a Polyend Tracker for ~6 months and it's been such a fun experience. I'm by no means someone old enough to have been using trackers back then but the Polyend Tracker is has a really thought out interface enabling rapid prototyping as well as whole song production on it.

I know what a DAW is since I use Logic Pro X, but what is a tracker? What are they good for?

If Logic and other DAWs are like a modern IDE, trackers are like vim/emacs

A different way of working that is considered outdated or arcane by the mainstream, but proponents of them love the faster workflow and ability to control them with only the (qwerty) keyboard

Trackers came before modern DAWs, a tracker used to be a sort of different way to compose music on computers, a sort of different kind of DAW, using a sort of notation, with time scrolling down, instead of to the right. It was popular for making music for early video games, especially when size was a big factor in creating music for computer games. But with the layout and and function you could do unique tricks that are very familiar with early VGM and Demoscene music

So sort of composing something by sort of laying down samples in a sort of time line?

unique tricks?

I think they mean tricks things like reversing samples, or having a segment of an audio sample keep looping after starting playback so you could "stretch" it longer. Also pitch-shifting samples so you can play them at different notes.

Trackers were strange kinds of sequencers that were very focused on using samples to make music, and they were created at a time when memory was expensive, so you'd typically have fairly low resolution samples (8-bit 22KHz?), and people tried to use those samples creatively because you might not have many of them, both because of memory and hard drive space, but also because they weren't as easy to get as they are today. Most people didn't have the internet at home before the mid-late 90s, and even when people started to have the internet at home, it wasn't like today, the music making community was smaller.

I first discovered trackers in a French gaming magazine around 1997 or 1998, but they had already been around much longer. Said magazine had came with a CD that contained multiple different tracker programs and a collection of music files in different formats (MOD, XM, etc). The compelling thing was that these files were small, because they contained a few audio samples and the data on how and when to play them, so you could fit a tune that was multiple minutes in 1 megabyte or less.

For an example of what tracker software looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NjqNwHidpk

Here's a good recap of what sampling looked like in the time of Amiga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs

“Ta-da-da-da... aaaaaaand we're out of memory.”

Likewise apparently DJ Shadow pulled off quite a feat with his Akai MPC60 on ‘Endtroducing’, because the sampler could store something like twelve samples, also not too long.

A sorta related anecdote is how the British ‘mind the gap’ was this terse because it was recorded on a solid-state memory, costing dearly in '68 even for the small amount by today's standards.

Trackers allow note data to be annotated with various "effects", triggered via special codes. Some of these effects are things like pitch bends and filter adjustments, which can easily be done in any sequencer. However, effects like retriggering the current sample from an arbitrary offset or rapidly alternating notes in an arpeggio are fairly unique to the tracker workflow. It's not that you can't make those sounds in a conventional DAW, it's just that you probably wouldn't in practice.

Wikipedia has a good overview / history [1] and BasoonTracker [2] has a good demo if you want to have a go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker [2] https://github.com/steffest/BassoonTracker

Simplistic explained they are sequencers that can use samples. Trackers were used in the day to make old school Jungle/D&B songs.

I'm a NerdSeq user: looking forward to the NerdSeq hardware tracker. The one I'm using is the Eurorack module.

That said, I've been a Renoise owner for years now. It didn't end up clicking for me as far as composing music on it, but that's mostly because I'm not really DAW-minded. I should probably see if I can use it as a live mixer as I think it'd be more efficient than Logic Pro :)

I have a needseq as well, without having been a tracker user before and I still got the hang of it pretty quickly.

As far as DAWs go I totally recommend looking at bitwig, because it has the modulation capabilities someone coming from the modular synth domain would like to have

I'm not into modular, but I'm definitely looking out for the nerdseq portable!

I thought SunVox is closer to low-level-ish purely modular synths/effect graphs like Max/MSP and Pure Data.

Do you know of any tracker like options for the Eurorack modular format?

NerdSeq