\ / \ _ _ ++ ** . / /_T_F_T_\ \ ( \ / ) /~\ || () () || /_\ / \ ( )|_|( ) ( O ) _ || () () ||__ | ___ / Disc \( ) ( ) \_/ ( /| ()(~()_ \__) \__/ / of \ ~ / DEMOTUNES ____ \ _ _ *_* /\' / ____ | / \\ )) ( \ / ) /**\ (*\ /` | |--| / (( // \ | | \_/ | )) ( )|_|( ) |----| (*)\ () | | | / (( | \_/ | | | )) ( ) ( ) | | (*) \() / \ /*##*\/ (( | | | () | | () | |____/ **_-V3-_** \____| 2019 Welcome! Six years after V2, the module mania has returned to bring you another disc of all things tracked and chipped. My name has changed to TFT or "The Free Thinker" since I'm deciding to link to this from my anonymous Gopher Phlog (if I decide to publish it), but the music remains. Actually not all of it does because I've collected so much by now that it just won't all fit on one CD, so I've cast aside my personal selections (which were always more "don't hate" than "love" anyway) for a devotion to just my complete collections of works by my favourite artists. But now there's also a second disc just for collections of modules compiled by other people or websites, as well as entries into some selected demoscene parties that still run tracked music competitions. Now I'll try to edit together the ramblings of previous years into something that makes sense. The "Quick guide to MOD-Dom" should still fit, though I'm not sure what sort of a pun "MOD-dom" was meant to be: -------------------------------QUICK GUIDE TO MOD-DOM------------------------------- *Don't wait for the vocals in these tunes, they usually never come. *"SIDs" contains music files (in SID format) made for the Commodore 64 computer of the 1980s. *"MODs" contains "Modules" in various formats, made using sampled (recorded) sounds compiled together using software called "Trackers" to create music in various styles. *"Software" is where to look for the programs to play these music files. Choose the folder for your operating system (probably Windows), then choose the program you wish to use. These are described in the "Software" section below, but to start, just use XMplay as it works with both Modules and SIDs. For those especially ignorant, continue into the "XMplay" folder inside "Windows", then double click on "xmplay.exe", that is, the icon with "XM" written inside it. Select multiple files in the "open" window to add to temporary playlist. "MODplug" is my personal favourite for Modules. *All the musicians/collection are ones I generally like (well, don't mind anyway), hence why you probably hate them. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Now back to last year's ramble (now a seven year old ramble, but it's kind of fun so I'll leave it in): Firstly, the reason for this document: Well chances are that the one person on the planet who will get the most use from this compilation is myself (ohh, now that does make me feel special) so one may question what reason I have for including a text (which already seems to be assuming a usual length) wherein I occupy myself only with explanation of the who, what and why answers related to it? Well for one thing my memory will probably allow me to forget all this before too long and leave me a stranger to my own creation (far from the first time with that one), but closer to the truth would be that this is written for those poor, innocent civilians who find themselves burdened by the weight of my over-enthusiastic self throwing at them a piece of circular plastic covered with some miniscule impressions in which are contained my favourite electronic tunes. Such people will likely have initially shown wonder at this crazy bloke handing them a free CD filled with more music than they have ever seen on such a device and even with an assurance that such action is completely legal. Yet before long they shall observe the impossibility of listening to these tunes with their meagre Microsoft/Apple attempts at music players whose real aim is but to continue the attraction of masses to overpriced softwares seen by many as essential to the operation of their computer machines but actually just a mere option towards computer use clouded by misinformation towards those uninterested in true research into the topic of their computing. Similar in this way is the operation of politics, but I really should avoid making this an all night key pushing exercise and get to my point. Not that it matters, anyone other than myself will have stopped reading some lines ago and have gone on thinking that however hard it is to make the intended use of their new plastic disc, it must be easier than reading this confused and detached attempt at a quick introduction (yep, that really was my aim). "Ohh, a paragraph!" I hear you say to your monitor (and you thought your great confessions to that square of phosphorous (actually you probably have a flat screen, but don't bring it up or I'll likely feel compelled to talk about the other options you may have with regards to monitors in this modern world) were closed to the world, think again!), yes and with this new control over the enter key on my two decade old keyboard, I shall stop this rambling and finally start talking about what exactly this miracle in micrometers (cheap reference to the recordings on CDs which probably isn't even measured in micrometers, you didn't really care did you?) is and what you are intended to do with it, and yes I know I promised you this about twenty lines ago. This CD is filled with music created from the world of the Demoscene. The Demoscene is an area of interest where people compete to produce what are known as "Demos" in which they showcase their skill in programming as well as digital artwork and - the bit we care about here - music. I could start talking about the history of the demoscene and how it has influenced the computing world but I'd probably have to delete something from the CD to make room for the text. All that is needed for you to know is that the music used in these presentations came to be recognised alone and even shared competition on its own. This all started on the computers of the 1980s, in the most part with the cheap but musically powerful home computer which was the Commodore 64. This CD contains an entire 37MB of music for the Commodore 64 in the form of SID tunes. Yes, yes I know 37MB of anything nowadays is small change but remember that the Commodore 64 could store at best less than a tenth of a megabyte and the Average SID file is a hell of a lot smaller than that. Facts be known there are over 3,200 tunes on this disc but they were designed as instructions to a chip in the C64 rather than the sampled sounds of todays digital music, hence one needs to run on ones computer a program which emulates the behaviour of a C64 and its sound chip in order to listen without the real hardware. Well, as no one will read this far, I'll add info on the software under a later heading so I'll just end this paragraph by explaining quickly where this music has come from. The music is both from the old, well remembered makers of video game music in the eighties (Rob Hubbard for example) and the modern musicians who still make SIDs on the old machine to this day. Of course this means that the old files are ripped from video games and are probably technically illegal to distribute, though it is hardly treated as an underground movement to trade SID tunes and really most companies (if they even still exist) have little reason to complain about people listening to the music from games they produced thirty years ago. At least in the case of modern tunes one has not the need even to worry about this as they are always released for free on the internet by their authors. When some of these Commodore 64 users got their hands on some of Commodore's much more powerful "Amiga" computers, they were able to use not just commands to the SID chip to make music but actual digitally recorded sounds. Using a program called a tracker, these samples could be arranged to play in sequence and could be tuned as they are played to match a particular note, an Amiga could play four samples simultaneously. Excluding white noise, this was one more sound than could be played at the same time on a C64, but now true instruments could be recorded and used to make music as if it were played in a real performance. These music files were called "modules" with the extension of "MOD" and as standard still only contain four channels to be played simultaneously (though it should be remembered that there is no sensible limit on the number of sound samples which can be played at _different_ times throughout the tune). After the death of Commodore and with the advance of PC sound technology, music development moved to the PC and new module formats allowed use of their new capabilities to play greater numbers of channels, this lead to the IT, S3M and XM formats where channel limits are extremely high. Today, XM format - introduced with the famous tracker "FastTracker 2" - is by far the most common and all formats are supported by most modern module players or trackers. Finally, in case you missed this, the structure of modules retains the instructions for playback as they are at the time of creation so they can be played back on a tracker or with a player such as Open Cubic Player to view the techniques used in their creation. Furthermore, because the music is made up of a small number of recorded sounds rather than one continuous one as in MP3s, the file size is much smaller (the instructions for music playback are so small space-wise as to be irrelevant). Therefore although they are much bigger than SID tunes there are still able to be a similar number of them on this disc, though to make space I did have to leave out a number of the XM files over one megabyte in size. SPECIAL MENTION: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ These are my favourite musicians, with consideration also given to their reputation in the scene. Most of the time, if they are well regarded, I'll probably like them (in other words the opposite of mainstream music). Modules: ^^^^^^^^ *Purple Motion -Probably the most famous. Member of the "Future Crew" a legendary group in the PC scene, known best for the 1993 PC demo "Second Reality" (2ND_PM.S3M is the soundtrack made by Purple Motion). Later made music for video games and these modules are included as well. *Skaven -Worked with Purple Motion in the Future Crew. I somewhat prefer a lot of his tunes to Purple Motion's although there are less of them. If I ever take over the world, it will be to this soundtrack. *Dr Awesome -12th Warrior is one of the all time greats that spread all over the early 'net in the 90s. Hell I don't know about the rest, that's pretty much all the ones well known which I listen to (hard really to judge "well known"). If they have a directory, I like them, let's leave it at that. SID: ^^^^ *Rob Hubbard -Made some great tunes for C64 video games in the eighties, Hubbard is pretty much a 64 scene hero. He is pretty much the base of the "old" style SID tune and did wonders considering the difficulty of producing SID music in those days. Still, old SID tunes are not to everyones taste I expect so a lot of listeners may prefer to look at newer musicians. *Stellan Andersson (Dane) -Made the music for many "Booze Design" demos. This bloke makes the SID chip do wonders. "Tapestry", from the demo "Soiled Legacy" may well be my favourite SID. *M. Nilsson-Vonderburgh (Mitch) -Once again a wonderful musician from "Booze Design". Sadly not so many SIDs as Dane. *Mitch & Dane -The two forces above combined. *DRAX -Found in "New Artists". Once again a man making wonderful music. Once again it's hard to judge (why did I do this again?). I'll leave you to find your own preferences. Both: ^^^^^ *Vincenzo -Of my favourite PC demogroup "Conspiracy", although only for a while. Many of the modules are based on his own SIDs and a small few aren't to my taste but over all most of his modules and SIDs are perfect for some upbeat listening (or at least as upbeat as things can be with me around). There are two Vincenzo module directories, the main one is hidden inside "Conspiracy Modules" while the other contains modules I wasn't sure belonged to the same person (I think I've since downloaded some into the main directory under different names now anyway). Either way, it's my collection so it can be as confused as I want. The "Conspiracy Modules" folder was from my aim to find modules from all the musicians in "Conspiracy", but I never got past Vincenzo. COLLECTIONS: ^^^^^^^^^^^^ Lately (which is to say in the last six years) I've become keen on collecting other people's collections, as well as entries in specific demo parties. Of course one isn't likely to agree that all of the mods are great, but it's an easy way to get a mixed selection of tunes that are likely to be better than average. The collections have their own distinctive biases, although often metting with classic tracks from the likes of Purple Motion. It's fun to roam through the different eras and tastes, perhaps seeking out an unknown gem that you might never have have discovered alone. The competition mods were downloaded from ftp://scene.org where many more also wait from earlier years. Others were stumbled upon here and there, and where they were from a specific web page, I have recorded the URL for the site in a file named "source.txt" within each directory. "Top Ranking (modarchive)" contains the top ranked modules at The Mod Archive in 2011, but probably omitting the modules that I already had in other author folders from the likes of Purple Motion. The rest should be more comprehensive archives of the full collections. SOFTWARE: ^^^^^^^^^ Windows: *ModPlug Player An old Module player which has many features I like and low system resource usage. *SIDplay2/W Windows GUI for version 2 of the SIDplay program. Also in this directory is a range of other SIDplay versions, 2.5 and 2.6 are newer versions of the GUI program which have higher system resource usage but give more accurate emulation of the C64. SIDplay2 is an old command line version and SIDplayfp is a new command line player which also gives better emulation at the cost of greater resource use. Playlists have the "SPL" extension and I used them to indicate the end times of tunes before I discovered the "songlengths.txt" support of the XMplay plug-in and switched to using that program instead. --I just realised that the CLI players CAN use "songlengths.txt" (or at least sidplay2 can), one just has to add the path to the ini file placed in the WINDOWS directory. I worked this out a while ago, never thought I'd forget. Makes me think I should do more of this sort of thing. Actually, one could probably set up a batch file to work as a playlist using sidplay2, perhaps even a batch file to make the batch file. Not that there is really any need unless XMplay won't work somewhere. *XMplay Designed originally for module playback, but as I prefer the interface of Modplug I just use this with the SID playback plug-in to play my SIDs. I prefer it to SIDplay because it supports the HVSC's "songlenghts.txt" file which is included in the SID directory on the CD. The nature of SID files is that they do not indicate to the player when they end, so they loop endlessly. "songlengths.txt" is a record of SID lengths which a player can use to know when to stop playing, and while the SIDplay GUIs do not use this, if it is specified in the XMplay plug-in configuration panel with the location of the "songlengths.txt" file it can be used automatically while playing. -The version included is quite old, but it works and I've moved over to Linux so I don't bother keeping up with the latest versions anymore. Linux: *Open Cubic Player: A great module player which displays the commands to the player as if in a tracker. Original was for DOS but this is a basic port to Linux though some features are not available where they are under DOS. By far my favourite player for Linux but console based and thus not so good when using other programs. Also supports SID playback, but not "songlengths.txt". The source code is all that is included along with that for many of the dependencies required for compilation (the versions of these are quite outdated now, but should work). Note that adplug and libmad may be the only dependencies for installation, but at least libsidplay is required for SID playback. You can also check your distro's package respository for "ocp", though it's pretty old software now so you might be forced to compile from source. Try out the different display modes for full-screen via SDL, or text-mode in the terminal. https://www.cubic.org/player/ *XMMS: Personally I prefer the original XMMS to the later XMMS2. Included are the source code and plug-ins for Modplug module playback, and SidPlay SID playback support (includes support for songlengths.txt). This is my preferred software for general background listening on Linux. http://www.xmms.org/ http://modplug-xmms.sourceforge.net/ https://www.tnsp.org/xmms-sid.php *XMP Extended Module Player, haven't tried this one but I found it recently and it looks like it might be kinder on really low spec machines than OCP (although OCP should hardly be a resource hog). Plays every module format under the sun and supports many Linux sound systems, with luck it doesn't need dependencies either. *SIDplay2 -Linux port of SIDplay2, or at least the original SIDplay2 as it's hard to keep track now. Once again I don't _think_ this has any dependencies. With luck it might support "songlengths.txt" like its Windows counterpart though I'm yet to try it out. DOS: *OCP This is the original DOS Open Cubic Player as described regarding the Linux port above. I consider it the best Module and SID player for DOS with a wide range of features. For good use, some setup of the INI file is recommended especially if sound is not working. *Inertia Player Another module player (no SIDs), a good player but not in my mind equal to OCP above, the main advantage of this player is that it can use the PC speaker for output and as such can play modules on PCs which don't have sound cards (such as many early 90s laptops). *SIDplay The original SIDplay for DOS, much less system resource usage than windows SIDplay versions but of course worse emulation. Uses a good text mode GUI and runs well on my 486DX-2 100MHz DOS laptop. Of course no "songlengths.txt", it didn't exist back then. Internet Demoscene Music Locations: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Modules: * http://modarchive.org/ - Current Module archive updated regularly, most modules on this disc are from here. * http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Special:Modland - Search utility for the great Modland FTP module archive, great if your after more modules from a certain musician. * ftp://modland.com - FTP site searchable through above site. Great archive but frustrating to use as modules are grouped under the program used to make them rather than with single directories for individual authors. * ftp://modland.ziphoid.com - An FTP modland mirror which uses the standard FTP ports, good if you block unused ports like me. * http://amp.dascene.net/ - Archive of modules made using the Amiga computers. * http://www.cubic.org/player/ - Website for Open Cubic Player. * http://www.modplug.com/ - Website for Modplug Player and tracker (not included). Includes http://www.modplug.com/modfaq/ which is a wonderful module information resource. SIDs: * http://www.hvsc.de/ - The High Voltage SID Collection. Great package of SIDs containing over 41000, updated twice a year and contains additional resources such as STIL database and "songlengths.txt". * ftp://ftp.exotica.org.uk Directory: /pub/exotica/media/audio/High_Voltage_Sid_Collection - FTP archive which provides access to contents of HVSC without downloading all of it. * http://noname.c64.org/csdb/ - Commodore Scene DataBase, this site is the hub of the demoscene on the Commodore 64 and is the release point of almost all new SIDs amongst some brilliant demos. * http://sidplay2.sourceforge.net/ - The SIDplay2 Homepage from the past, quite outdated now. * http://web.archive.org/web/20060822111611/http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/5147/sidplay/download.html - Original SIDplay homepage offers a number of resources regarding SID emulation and a great list of players, although it is quite outdated now. Link to Archive by Archive.org as the original is no longer online to my knowledge. *_-=Good Listening!=-_* Text and graphics of this document (c) 2012-2019 The Free Thinker.