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XM!

10 (50%)

IT!

10 (50%)

Total Members Voted: 19

[Saga Musix]

Yeah, old question, sure, but how's it nowadays? I think we already had this kind of question back then in the "old" mod archive, but how's it now?

XM or IT?

[m0d]

I have no idea

[woolters]

Tough choice

I prefer .XM, but that is mainly because I got used to its effect commands. Switching to .IT means learning all commands all over again.
And there are some commands that .IT doesn't have (I think), which .XM does. But then again, same goes for .IT.

[Saga Musix]

when coming to commands, IT is far superior to XM imo, i can't think  of anything that XM can do but IT doesn't, except pan slides in the volume column

[drspa44]

My tracker, being a bit ancient, has the odd trouble playing ITs. They always sound a bit different to what they are supposed to sound like. It plays MODs, S3Ms, XMs fine but has always distorted other formats. For this, I vote XM - even though IT seems to be the "wave of the future!"

[raina]

Oh wow, like this topic still didn't surface too often without doing it on purpose..
Dunno what .IT would look like now if it wasn't for all the features introduced in .XM but its development continued for longer so it's only natural .IT is the superior format. Too bad there's no decent tracker for working with it.

[Ceekayed]

Jojo: IT does pan slides in the volume column too, in a way.

And yeah, it never should've been a debate whether of .it or .xm is superior since .it is techincally far superior and that's a fact, not a matter of opinion. Whether fasttracker or impulse tracker is better is debatable though. Each to his own.

[Saga Musix]

Jojo: IT does pan slides in the volume column too, in a way.

well, i'm not speaking of pxx...

one feature of the XM format one may also like are the delta-stored samples which make it harder to grab samples directly from XM files (f.e. modules stored in one big file are not visible anymore).

[pailes]

Oh wow, like this topic still didn't surface too often without doing it on purpose..
Dunno what .IT would look like now if it wasn't for all the features introduced in .XM but its development continued for longer so it's only natural .IT is the superior format. Too bad there's no decent tracker for working with it.

I second that. The early versions of IT were just an improved ST3, and for a very long time XM was still the format with more features. As time went by IT took over the features from FT2 and introduced new features as well.
I guess Triton was just too busy programming games at that time

FT2 was the first tracker to really leap ahead from the old regular module formats which only offered samples without any fancy instrument attributes like envelopes, auto-vibrato etc.
Also FT2 had a way more professional look and it takes way more time to code an FT2 style GUI than a simple text mode interface.

[barryvan]

OpenMPT has certainly... "extended" the IT format a lot. I use OpenMPT exclusively now. Of course, all of its extensions mean that it's essentially a new file-format, but still, it's got its roots in IT.