Why are notes written as C#4?

[Ahornberg]

Does anybody know why are notes written as C#4 and not as 4C#?

[Saga Musix]

Do you mean in trackers like OpenMPT or in general? OpenMPT and its predecessors just copied existing conventions, i.e. scientific pitch notation or MIDI key names, which both follow the same scheme (but what is considered to be "middle-C" differs between different notations ranging from C3 to C5), i.e. a key name followed by an octave name. Why scientific pitch notation works the way it does - I don't know, but it has been around for some centuries. Other similarly old notations like the Helmholtz pitch notation follow the same pattern, but express the octaves as a set of different symbols rather than numbers.

[Ahornberg]

I mean in trackers. Because hex values are written in high-nibble followed by low nibble, why not write note values as octave followed by note name?

[manx]

I mean in trackers. Because hex values are written in high-nibble followed by low nibble, why not write note values as octave followed by note name?

Well, you could interpret the C#4 notation as actually following a high-nibble first, or big-endian, or most-significant first notation, because the note name is musically actually more important than the octave (at least in musical systems that are octave/12-semitone based).

[Saga Musix]

As cryptic and efficient as tracker interfaces may be, using existing conventions that users will already be familiar with does seem like a reasonable thing to do. Even the very first trackers did it that way. Essentially you are asking why trackers didn't deviate from an existing, well-established standard - and answering why someone didn't do a non-obvious thing seems impossible to answer to me without being in that person's head.

[Vad1m_1719]

See information from AHOY here.

[Saga Musix]

While that video may be very informative, it does not answer this question at all.