digger
Experienced Member
Whether you were into the Amiga, the Atari ST, or PC's back in the early nineties, you probably remember the time when no one had even heard of MP3 yet. Those were the days of the music tracker modules, more commonly known as MOD files (as well as any other more sophisticated variants, such as S3M, ULT, FAR, 669, XM, IT, and what have you).
Originated on the Amiga, these music modules contained all the instruments of the song as samples, as well as the multi-channel (originally 4-channel) track sequences, telling the player what instruments to play at what point in time and at what pitch. The MOD players would then mix these tracks together and send them out to the sound hardware in realtime, basically making them software-based wavetable synthesizers. I believe the Amiga had a dedicated chip for that, but I'm not sure. (Any amiga experts who can clarify or correct this?) The bundled sampled custom instruments made MOD files generally much richer, more lifelike, and more diverse in sound than their contemporary MID counterparts.
It was amazing what virtuous masterpieces could be created, using so little disk space. Not being a "professional" format, most MOD files originated in the demo scene and hobbyists, although some games used MOD files as in-game music.
Those of you who have grown a bit tired of all those MP3s and wish to relive those times with some groovy tunes of old can find a major archive at the following site:
http://modarchive.org/
I found quite a few of the goldies on this site that I used to have on my disk, but got lost over time.
If you have any collections of MOD files which are not in this archive, please consider uploading them, as long as you respect any copyrights that may still be in effect.
Another interesting tidbit: what if you combine the oldschool MOD format with the newer MP3 codec? Well, the MO3 format. MO3 files are MOD files of which the samples are compressed to MP3 or Vorbis format, resulting in even smaller music files than MOD files, yet with even better quality samples (16bit as opposed to 8bit).
Please share your experiences with MOD files (and derivatives) in this thread, and post some personal favorites for the rest of us to rate. :listen:
Also, the above information is all based on personal knowledge and experience, both of which is admittedly limited. :mrgreen: Feel free to extend and/or correct any information about MOD files in this thread.
Oh, and those of you who don't have any vintage hardware on hand that can play MOD files (PCs need to have at least an 8MHz 80286, IIRC), there are also many MOD players available for present-day hardware. VLC (http://www.videolan.org) includes a MOD player that can play most common MOD-like formats. However, that implementation apparently doesn't get the pitch bending right with some MOD files.
Originated on the Amiga, these music modules contained all the instruments of the song as samples, as well as the multi-channel (originally 4-channel) track sequences, telling the player what instruments to play at what point in time and at what pitch. The MOD players would then mix these tracks together and send them out to the sound hardware in realtime, basically making them software-based wavetable synthesizers. I believe the Amiga had a dedicated chip for that, but I'm not sure. (Any amiga experts who can clarify or correct this?) The bundled sampled custom instruments made MOD files generally much richer, more lifelike, and more diverse in sound than their contemporary MID counterparts.
It was amazing what virtuous masterpieces could be created, using so little disk space. Not being a "professional" format, most MOD files originated in the demo scene and hobbyists, although some games used MOD files as in-game music.
Those of you who have grown a bit tired of all those MP3s and wish to relive those times with some groovy tunes of old can find a major archive at the following site:
http://modarchive.org/
I found quite a few of the goldies on this site that I used to have on my disk, but got lost over time.
If you have any collections of MOD files which are not in this archive, please consider uploading them, as long as you respect any copyrights that may still be in effect.
Another interesting tidbit: what if you combine the oldschool MOD format with the newer MP3 codec? Well, the MO3 format. MO3 files are MOD files of which the samples are compressed to MP3 or Vorbis format, resulting in even smaller music files than MOD files, yet with even better quality samples (16bit as opposed to 8bit).
Please share your experiences with MOD files (and derivatives) in this thread, and post some personal favorites for the rest of us to rate. :listen:
Also, the above information is all based on personal knowledge and experience, both of which is admittedly limited. :mrgreen: Feel free to extend and/or correct any information about MOD files in this thread.
Oh, and those of you who don't have any vintage hardware on hand that can play MOD files (PCs need to have at least an 8MHz 80286, IIRC), there are also many MOD players available for present-day hardware. VLC (http://www.videolan.org) includes a MOD player that can play most common MOD-like formats. However, that implementation apparently doesn't get the pitch bending right with some MOD files.
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While I've ported Tinyplay to 8088 (mixes at 9KHz), the best 8088 MODplayer is Galaxy Player 2.12 (glx212.zip) which can mix at roughly 12Khz mono (higher in stereo, since there's less mixing to do).