5 of the Best Software and Hardware Trackers (Attack Magazine)
Adam Douglas for Attack Magazine, 2026-07-22 — a buyer's roundup of five trackers spanning free-to-$999 and software-to-hardware. It seeds the tracker class here, and its useful move is refusing the genre stereotype: trackers are "not all that hard" to learn and are not only for fast music like jungle.
The five
| Pick | Form | Price (2026-07) | What distinguishes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| **[[sunvox | SunVox]]** (Alexander Zolotov) | software | free desktop, $5 iOS |
| TRX-12 (Electronisounds) | software | $29.99 Mac/PC | standalone tracker DAW; 35 step-FX commands, three synth engines, a multi-sample synth, slicer tracks, mixer, 4GB of samples |
| **[[renoise | Renoise]]** | software | $88 (Redux sampler $56) |
| Dirtywave M8 (Model:02) | hardware | $699 | portable groovebox/sequencer hybrid — eight monophonic tracks, 255 patterns, chiptune / FM / sampler instruments |
| Polyend Tracker+ | hardware | $999 (Tracker Mini $799) | 16 tracks, four synth engines, drum machine, stereo sampling, FM radio; the Mini adds a battery and a field-sampling mic |
Prices and versions are a 2026-07 snapshot from a press roundup, not maker documentation.
What the piece establishes about the form
The history it gives is short and specific: Ultimate Soundtracker (1987, Commodore Amiga) came first, OctaMED became the most popular, and the audience that took to it hardest was jungle and breakcore producers. The mechanism it offers for that is not taste but typing cost — the vertical grid makes "pitch rolls, volume swells and other quick changes typical of genres like jungle and IDM" cheap to enter, because a per-line parameter change is one number in a column.
Where it lands in this spoke
- SunVox is a routing instrument (modular-routing) that reached the corpus through its sequencer. It is the clearest evidence that "tracker" names an interface, not an engine — the same patch-modules-together design the spoke has traced through vcv-rack and rackdroid, wearing a text grid instead of cables.
- Renoise is a DAW, and the first one here that isn't laid out as tracks-and-mixer. The DAW node was waiting for comparisons to collect against Cubase and Reason; this is a third layout, after Reason's virtual rack.
- M8 and Tracker+ are grooveboxes by the integration test — self-contained, no computer, sound source plus sequencer plus effects in one box. What makes them a distinct corner is that the sequencer is a tracker rather than pads-and-steps, which is where the MPC lineage sits.
Thin spots
It's a shopping list. No listening notes, no hands-on time, no losers — five picks, all
recommended, each with a "best for." Nothing is said about MIDI or CV on the hardware, about
file interchange between trackers, or about the tracker's real cost (an interface that requires
memorizing hex effect commands). The 35 step-FX commands figure for TRX-12 is the only number anywhere that quantifies a
tracker's command vocabulary. Retracted 2026-09-03 (absence-claim drain). The figure is not
this article's alone: Electronisounds' own product page carries it, and TRX-12 has been covered
since by gearnews, MATRIXSYNTH (twice, June and August 2026) and The Beat Community. So
the number is corroborated — by the maker and by outlets relaying the maker, which is a different
thing from being independently checked.
What still stands is the narrower version, and it is the one worth keeping: 35 is the only command-vocabulary count published for any tracker. Renoise, Polyend and the rest are described in this article by what their command systems do, never by how many commands they have, so the figure cannot be compared against anything. A number with no denominator is not yet a measurement.
Related
tracker · daw · sampler · modular-routing · attack-magazine · adam-douglas · akai-mpc-one-g2 · reason