tracker

track +‎ -er

• Rhymes: -ækə(r)

tracker (plural trackers)

1. Agent noun of track; one who, or that which, tracks or pursues, as a man or dog that follows game.
   1. (US politics) A person employed to follow and monitor a political rival.
2. In an organ, a light strip of wood connecting (in path) a key and a pallet, to communicate motion by pulling.
3. (computing) A type of computer software for composing music by aligning samples on parallel timelines.
   • 2004, "dilvie", new.scene.org (on newsgroup alt.music.mods)

     Trackers have broken out of the demoscene, are are^[sic] now in use by thousands of professional musicians. It's not uncommon to hear about people using trackers on DJ forums, and electronic music production communities […]

   • 2008, Karen Collins, Game sound

     Although there were a few game companies outside the Amiga scene that used a tracker format (Epic Mega-Games, for instance), the majority used the better-supported MIDI.

4. (computing) A musician who writes music in a tracker.
   • 1999, "Adrian Dunn", Re: Using a scanned picture in your demo (on newsgroup comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos)

     You can always find musicians. There are more trackers than coders, pixelers, organizers, couriers, and designers combined.

5. (computing) A computer program that monitors something.
   1. (file sharing) Server software that coordinates peers in the BitTorrent protocol.
6. (finance) A tracker mortgage.

• startracker

• retrack