Sorry for the late reply, I would recommand Famitracker for begginers as it is the most user friendly out there. For a modern tracker try Renoise, it is basically your every day DAW in tracker form.
It's software used to create music. Typically you build sections that you loop and intermingle. It's kind of like writing small sections of sheet music for multiple instruments at a time, but unlike many Midi composers, the notes aren't shown as notes. It's basically what came after manually programming all the chiptunes as part of the game's code. Instead using general parsing of a format that described the audio in terms of pitch, volume, dropoff, echo, etc. of samples (at least samples were usually used with later trackers anyway).
A 'tracker' is a usually-sample-based music making software. AFAIK they were originally developed by demoscene groups (concurrently to game studios that used the code privately whereas the demogroups would release binaries for others to use for music-making with few limitations) These 'sample mixing engines' were developed in order to be able to add music to their productions (demos and games), and it became it's own whole-world. Fully agree with sibling comments, module trackers can be huge fun! Near zero barriers-to-entry.. and there's still some great stuff being made in this format too!
Why is there this need for humans to be involved at all stages of production?
Do we still need humans to knit and handwash our clothes? To live in a caboose or lighthouse? To operate our elevators? To deliver the milk?
Why should anyone have to learn to draw in the future when machines promise to do a better job? There are so many better uses for our time, and too many things to do for our short lives to handle.
I want to compose music, despite no practice or formal training. I want to make an entire movie by myself with no other humans involved. Tech that enables these things will be empowering.
It may be empowering, but it is not yet clear that the result will be appealing. Not trying to be an AI-skeptic, but I find art to still be mostly about communication; when I listen to some music I enjoy I feel like I have some shared experience with the author which they are able to communicate via music. I have yet to see this effect in AI-produced stuff, but even if the effect would be fully imitated, it is still not clear that it would have the same appeal.
An analogy: chess AI's are clearly superior to human chess by any reasonable measure. I still enjoy playing with other people (even online, even anonymously) infinitely more than playing with an AI, no matter how well calibrated/tuned to my level.
These AIs will only ever be as good as what gets fed into them. It follows that without something going in, they will output nothing. That source material will always be human in nature, at least until these neural networks get large enough for emergent consciousness to exist, at which point we might see actual creativity from a machine.
An AI without new inputs to consume will not evolve creatively, and you will get bored of its output quite quickly, I think.
This might be something people arrive at at different ages, but at the end of the day other humans is ultimately why you’re doing what you do.
Yes, today ML can write you some run of the mill music and design assets, tell you how to develop the game, it can even play your game and write a review on it, but what’s the fun and/or point in that?
