I messed around with the Amiga trackers back in the day. When I look at the software available today, e.g. on my iPad, I have a hard time getting anything useful out of it. Which software are you using now?
True, but SunVox is so much more than just a tracker. In my experience with (PC) trackers they rely mostly on modifying pre-recorded samples. SV on the other hand allows you to chain together a crazy array of synth modules to produce sounds "from scratch".
Well there's Renoise, there's Jeskola's Buzz (the changelog starts at 2008 but I'm sure I used it well before that), Noise Trekker had a synth as early as 1999. Adlib Tracker? You're still right in that for the most part, for a long time, tracking on the PC meant FastTracker or ScreamTracker, and those just used samples. But we've come a long way since then in the early 2000s.
Buzz was around in 1999 (I think - I first used it in 2000/2001) but circa 2001 the coder had a hard disk crash and lost his code, and finally resumed work on it in 2008 from a much older codebase or possibly from scratch. I assume that's part of why the changelog starts in 2008.
I personally have left trackers. They are fun but the learning curve! I use Waveform 9 from Tracktion. (Tracktion open sourced the engine and it works on Linux, Win and Mac.
This is the fastest DAW from nothing to something like a song, and for people just starting it has pretty much everything you need to make some kind of song. https://www.tracktion.com/products/waveform
Post trackers, I've been using Cubase since it was delivered on a single Floppy disk. Had about 13 years of silence (sold my gear, had kids) and then got back to it a couple years ago (shameless plug: https://soundcloud.com/earlofwoffington).
