Personally, I have never liked trackers, but I haven't tried many. Which tracker(s) have you found work better than QWS for your purposes and why? Do you have useful vision which would make these things easier to work with?

The trackers I"ve tried are Famitracker and Open MPT. While it is posssible to use both as a blind person, it is difficult at best and migraine-inducing at worst because once you're in the tracking grid, you're on your own. While extensive keyboard navigation is supported allowing you to physically do a lot of things, screen readers won't even begin to tell you what you're doing, so you have to do it all by ear and by mind. If you mess up and need to go back, it takes more concentration than I possess to go back and fix it. The hardest part for me is keeping track of what columns I am on, and not being able to  immediately see where I'm going. If you've ever done MML, which is what I used before playing with trackers, then you may have a better understanding of what I'm trying to describe, but even then with MML the concentration goes the other way. i.e. in trackers you primarily are listening and using your memory to know where you are because screen readers can't read stuff to you, while in mml the screen reader tells you everything you'd ever want to know and it is up to you to keep everything in a musical context. They're both very interesting challenges, and actually fun if you're in the right headspace for it.

In QWS if I want to work like a tracker I use the note editor. While by no means a tracker, it is a grid-like approach to entering notes, which I often find myself using when doing heavy sequencing work. While I play stuff on a midi keyboard, I end up delicately sculpting it so much that I might as well have just sequenced it in note editor, but I digress.

In note editor you are in a sort of grid where left and right arrows move horizontally between steps which you can set the size of with the snap value. Up and down arrows move chromatically through notes and will play one if it is touching the horizontal position you're at. Alt left and alt right will make the cursor jump to the next note so you don't have to find your notes on the grid. Pressing K, L, S and V will focus on the key, length, start time or velocity property of a note respectively, f5 and f6 moves that property by small steps, and f7 and f8 move it by larger steps. In the case of the length and start time property, F5 and F6 will change them by one unit of the snap value, while F7 and F8 will snap them to the nearest beat. D is used to delete a note, I is used to insert a note, and M is used to memo a note, useful for copying a note and its properties.

People will sometimes complain that screen readers don't speak enough in the note editor, but I'd rather have that than break my concentration. Every change you make gives you audible feedback so you're not stumbling around wondering where you are, like you would in my experience with trackers. Unfortunately the QWS manual isn't very helpful in describing how to use the note editor, as it focuses more on the GUI. But, if it confused you as much as it did me, you can download a set of tutorials from James Bowden's site which explain in detail how to use the tool. It also covers other useful topics well.

Now, just because I am a huge fan of the note editor doesn't mean I have an opposition to learning how to use trackers. In fact, I really want to get into tracking, but I haven't found an effective way to do it that's not exhausting. It must be pretty darned easy for sighted musicians to use trackers... just look at Famitracker and Open MPT demos. I am particularly impressed by Virt's nes music. While I know it takes a lot of skill to be able to make those things, I know I could do similar things in the realm of QWS, but for a blind person, using a tracker seems to be much, much harder than any of that. Which is unfortunate, because my favorite computer music formats, for the most part, are tracker based.

I am confused. What is easier, and which trackers have you used to bass your experience on?