16 ms·

The Mod Archive

129 points by turrini 4y ago

elFarto 4y ago
Funny coincidence, I was just watching a video on the history of trackers yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
robertheadley 4y ago
The website is down. I hope it isn't due to traffic from this site. Might be better to use a caching link to link to small projects like this.
DrPhish 4y ago
Since we appear to have taken poor modarchive offline, here's my vote for the greatest MOD of all time via an archive.org link : https://web.archive.org/web/20220912213826/https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=35344 https://web.archive.org/web/20220912213826/https://modarchiv...
- pan69 4y ago
  That is indeed a very good MOD. Allthough, its not a classic 4 channel MOD. This extended MOD has a crazy amount of channels. It belongs to this PC demo by Complex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcVN7-AxLQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcVN7-AxLQA
- 0x0 4y ago
  Why not link the better final version? https://web.archive.org/web/20210615125241/https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=50820 https://web.archive.org/web/20210615125241/https://modarchiv...
- Minor49er 4y ago
  That's a good track, but I'm afraid it doesn't hold a candle to the classic Online Pizza: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=128899 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu... This MOD has been stuck in my head for nearly 20 years
  - anthk 4y ago
    Interesting. Musically, we Europeans preferred speed-up Trance music at high BPM. Americans already live as in a hurry, so they prefer slower tunes such as Drum&Bass.
  - slimebot80 4y ago
    You know that linking to this is effectively handing someone a VHS with the Ring curse, right?
    - Minor49er 4y ago
      Yeah, and by The Ring's rules, I'm finally free! Mwahahahaha!
- cwillu 4y ago
  ‹lights his hair on fire and puts on his running shoes›
- axus 4y ago
  There's an online player at https://www.wothke.ch/webxmp/ https://www.wothke.ch/webxmp/ if the Wayback machine won't play the XM you download there. Way back when I was learning HTML, it was really exciting to play S3M/XM files from embedded ModPlugin: https://openmpt.org/legacy_software https://openmpt.org/legacy_software
  - butz 4y ago
    Got startled by loud music. I think your notification should mention that after clicking music will start immediately and headphone users should be aware. Good tunes, nonetheless.
    - soneil 4y ago
      To be fair - if someone says "here's an online player" - What are you really expecting?
- holoduke 4y ago
  I didn't know modarchive is down. I used to have many of my songs there. Is there any alternative with the same database?
  - superdisk 4y ago
    I think it's just temporarily down due to the load from this post.
- registeredcorn 4y ago
  In addition, if people are looking to listen to/download large amounts of tracks, consider checking out the torrents instead. (...And don't forget to seed! :)) http://tracker.modarchive.org/ http://tracker.modarchive.org/
- royjacobs 4y ago
  You might also enjoy the country version, done by the original artist: https://m.soundcloud.com/jugi/onward-giddy-up-by-yzi https://m.soundcloud.com/jugi/onward-giddy-up-by-yzi
  - DrPhish 4y ago
    Thanks, that one is a blast!
Daunk 4y ago
I've listened to tracker music since the 80's and I still do it basically every day. Whenever I have a bad day or feel the lack of motivation; tracker music always helps. And to be honest, it's probably what's getting me through my 20 year long depression. There are so many good tracker songs I could recommend, but I'll instead list a couple of my favourite artists: Elwood, Radix/Rymdlego/Mosaik, Fearofdark, Necros, Purple Motion, Lizardking, Malmen, Beek, Dubmood, Skaven, Virt and so many many more!
- usea 4y ago
  My formative years all have tracked music as their soundtrack, and I still listen to them regularly. Many of the people whose music I enjoyed back then are still making new music as recently as this week, including several you mentioned. Many artists were accessible on IRC, and the community was at least as good as the music. There were lots of opportunities to form lifelong friendships with great people.
- Minor49er 4y ago
  Have you listened to the netlabel 8bitpeoples? You would probably enjoy it if you haven't. Virt has a few releases on there http://www.8bitpeoples.com/ http://www.8bitpeoples.com/
- knoke 4y ago
  Also for me tracker music has an incredible and unique emotional power. My guess is that it was mostly written by teenagers and you can just feel that energy and naivety. Elwood tracks make me happy and happy-sad in a way nothing else can. It’s incredibly comforting and at the same time energising music for me.
- sneilan1 4y ago
  +1 for tracker music. I don’t have much to say but tracker music is insanely good for coding.
- RunSet 4y ago
  > I've listened to tracker music since the 80's and I still do it basically every day. Whenever I have a bad day or feel the lack of motivation; tracker music always helps. It really hits the spot like no other music I know. Since you didn't mention my favorite I will: https://www.dualtrax.com/ https://www.dualtrax.com/ Disregard the streaming links; the .xm files are all the way at the bottom. :)
voletrunk 4y ago
One of the finest chiptunes I've ever heard is L.F.F. by 4mat: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=66426 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu... It was the music for this Lemmings cracktro on the Amiga, I swear I spent more time replaying the tune than playing the game! https://youtu.be/mi9M8h6JrQU https://youtu.be/mi9M8h6JrQU
empressplay 4y ago
For more MOD files you can also check out Amiga Music Preservation @ http://amp.dascene.net http://amp.dascene.net
Fellshard 4y ago
This site is formative to me. One of the underrated aspects of MOD files is that they're totally transparent - you can learn from others' work by examining the same files you use to play the music. It's more transparent than basically any other medium out there for learning to create music by example.
blaerk 4y ago
Since it's down you can get your mod fix from https://modland.ziphoid.com/pub/modules/ https://modland.ziphoid.com/pub/modules/ (features some good ol' directory browsing though) I've had best listening results with https://github.com/libxmp/xmp-cli/ https://github.com/libxmp/xmp-cli/ A friend of mine wrote an excellent player which uses libxmp and a bunch of other libs to play a bunch of old formats, it's rather good: https://github.com/intealls/modp https://github.com/intealls/modp fair warning though, there's no pre built releases but comes with a handy makefile :)
pasquinelli 4y ago
for people on android, there's an app for playing chiptunes (that i have nothing to do with) called zxtune that integrates with mod archive and others. it's interface is a little weird, and it acts up sometimes, but for the most part it works, and it seems pretty easy on the battery.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
knoke 4y ago
For iOS users I cannot recommend enough the 4champ mod player with radio and total archive access. (But of course you’ll just download everything by Elwood and listen to that for the rest of your lives.) https://apps.apple.com/app/id578311010 https://apps.apple.com/app/id578311010
allenu 4y ago
I remember one of the first MODs I heard in the early '90s was "Smart E's - Sesame's Treet" (i.e. the Sesame Street song remixed as a dance tune). I blew me away back then that that such a high fidelity sound could come from such a small file. Eventually, like a lot of other people at the time, I learned how to use a tracker to write my own tunes. It was a great way to learn about writing music since I didn't play any instruments.
bane 4y ago
Tracker music is one of the great generally unknown "third way" [1] artifacts that arose from the Amiga and the demoscene. There are dozens and dozens of different formats, and even within 4-channel .mod files there are quite a few variants. What they share in common is not only a kind of technological approach to music formats, but an ethos to certain styles and kinds of music that seems to pervade across different generations of technology and artists. As a fully crystalized concept, it's around 35 years old! But it draws heavily on previous work in electronic music going all the way back to avant-garde experiments with reel-to-reel music crafting. As such it exists firmly as part of a grand, but often forgotten, part of electronic music making. Largely speaking the tools to create the music are the tools used to listen to it and an implicit ethos of "openness" exists. You can literally see the notes being played, listen to the samples one by one, and even edit the song files as you wish. There are fewer better forms of immediate performance from composition, and musical pedagogy, in one compact technological concept. Because it ties composition and performance into the same conceptual space (what you write is literally what it performed), and trackers are generally loaded with different ways of manipulating the samples and instruments, there can be a rich expressiveness encoded into the music that far outstrips what a composer might encode using a traditional note-and-bar midi composition program. And the "how" the composer encoded that expressiveness, how they used or abused the sample data, how they selected strategies around limitations of the format or software, is all present to see and learn from. It also ties the specific sounds in with the note data, leaving very little room for interpretation. A tracker file should sound basically the same no matter what it's played on. Tracker modules are generally very small, a megabyte is usually considered large. There are also some absolutely world class composers and songs in the pantheon -- across a wide variety of musical genres. And nearly all that music was composed and released into the world for free. And because there's never been a real commercial market for the music, the composers were very free to pursue their own musical interests. Genres range from dance music to highly experimental stuff -- sometimes by the same artist! I think I once tried to get a rough assessment of the number of songs produced in the small community of tracker composers and it was well north of half-a-million songs...a literal life-time of music listening at absolutely no cost. Here's a quick couple youtube playlists since it looks like HN crashed the archive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVWFWvQBnZs&list=UUQ3Y8vCyrohM_xhIFFGkmWw&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVWFWvQBnZs&list=UUQ3Y8vCyro... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuprJ3W2ahOXgaIkH_Pf4De4JSFz6wo9l https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuprJ3W2ahOXgaIkH_Pf4... And the famous Nectarine demoscene streaming radio https://www.scenestream.net/demovibes/streams/ https://www.scenestream.net/demovibes/streams/ 1 - By third way I mean not really commercial, not open-source, just a sort of unstated public domain.
gatane 4y ago
The main problem that I see with making tracker based music is no samples = no music.
- pierrec 4y ago
  A lot of trackers work with synthesized sound, even some early trackers were synth-only. Modern ones have improved on this, eg. Sunvox, Buzz and others are mostly defined by their synths and effects, and how well those things integrate with the tracker interface.
- mzerod 4y ago
  In milkytracker FT2 clone it is possible to draw your own samples to create basic instruments, most of the stuff for instruments is indeed samples often ripped from other modules as is a common practice to get a library of sounds going. Additionally old competitions used to provide packs of samples and 1 hour to make a composition on which it was then voted, another nice way to spend an evening and get some free instruments :)
senorqa 4y ago
My favourite mod is called Napalm Noise by Triton https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=139481 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...
colordrops 4y ago
Unreal ][ by Purple Motion for the Future Crew Second Reality demo is my favorite of all time. https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=60395 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...
jl6 4y ago
Chip and demo music is my only experience on the receiving end of cultural appropriation. When mainstream artists started using SidStations and arpeggios and blip blop in their music, there was definitely a part of me that felt Hey! That’s _our_ sound! But I’m glad the innovations and aesthetic of the scene are circulating, and not just to be found in archives. It makes me feel just a little less old to hear even just a little hint of this style on the radio.
flykespice 4y ago
Necros(Andrew Sega) is a legend of domoscene music and my favorite composer https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_artist_modules&query=69271 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_artist_modules... My personal favorite module of his is Mysticism: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=48433 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...
- icicle93 4y ago
  Necros rocked. Certainly you are then familiar with his solo & band projects "Alpha Conspiracy" and IRIS.
doublerabbit 4y ago
While the site is down. Titan - Sunset Strobe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ovFIEU-heM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ovFIEU-heM
mirthturtle 4y ago
I love Mod Archive! Managed to find 99% of my favourites from the 90's on there... though they don't provide a way to play a list in sequence, so I made one for myself: https://www.mirthturtle.com/crunchy-reliable-beats https://www.mirthturtle.com/crunchy-reliable-beats Ironically it's been unreliable since HN traffic started crushing Mod Archive.
loser777 4y ago
A truly invaluable resource. Many years ago I was searching for the music used in this ancient Tom's Hardware video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1hg1zf7rrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1hg1zf7rrY after finding out that many previous Tom's Hardware video soundtracks were featured modules from the archive. However, this one remained elusive until I realized that the entire archive to ~2007 was available as a torrent and that even a single laptop could run the "shazaam" algorithm fast enough to search it given a few days of time ;) https://github.com/eqy/molasses https://github.com/eqy/molasses And the song is silent running by dragonfly : http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=40309 http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&que...
- metadat 4y ago
  Molasses is amazing, I went ahead and submitted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295601
mzerod 4y ago
Thanks for the hug of death HN :-) Unfortunately the folks taking care of the hosting aren’t yet aware of the problem as it is sleepy time here in EU. In the mid 2000s I built the majority of what you see now but it has generally been out of my hands for a number of years after Scenesat demoscene radio took on the hosting keeping it alive with their love and the generous public’s donations, so that I could pursue other interests. After keeping the fires going for the better part of 20 years it is tradition to pass the baton. It was nice to see it posted here- The former modarchive.com that I helped support until it’s admin moved on was slashdotted back in the day with similar effects. I’m personally pleased to see my incarnation also get the hugs. There’s an awful Easter egg site re-theme on an ancient test page located https://modarchive.org/?mp3 https://modarchive.org/?mp3
- nine_k 4y ago
  Thank you! Tracker music was a,large part of my youth; it's great to he able to find old known tracks, and also discover new gems among the old ones. (And it's great to see chiptune scene alive and kicking at various places.)
  - mzerod 4y ago
    The chip scene has indeed grown in scale since the 2000s began, I shared a few beers with the guy who did the Commodordion and he’s one of many reaching youth with what I think many have come to consider modern folk. Battle of the Bits is a unique and wonderful community plugged to the core by chiptune. I do recall their logo nicely visible on the reddit r/place thing recently which says a lot about the number of participants chipping away!
    - TeaDude 4y ago
      It's strange how they keep popping up in the most unlikely of places. First it was a bunch of Russian bootleg MegaDrive games stealing BotB tunes that were included as demos with Shiru's TFM Music Maker. Then there was a game jam where they all made really excellent TIC-80 games.
Kim_Bruning 4y ago
Also see: https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/ https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/ which can search the mod archive. You can find modarchive under <from> in the file menu.
jeramey 4y ago
If you fell down this rabbit hole, beware the High Voltage SID Collection[1], or you might never come up for air! [1] https://www.hvsc.c64.org/ https://www.hvsc.c64.org/
phendrenad2 4y ago
Since this is now a post your favorite MOD music thread, here's one of my old faves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKMZfPqWpak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKMZfPqWpak
block_dagger 4y ago
I've been searching for Heaven and Hell since 1994 or so. I finally got to hear it again tonight. Thank you! Sadly I'm not finding any of my own S3Ms I created as a youth under the names Quasar83 and Liquid Thought, but I didn't post them anywhere other than AOL 1.0 chat rooms :)
- mzerod 4y ago
  Give a few days until the tsunami of hackerhearts abates and give signing up/in a shot and upload them. The folks are always open looking for new crew too to help in the upkeep such as screening the upload queue etc. Drop a line to Saga_Musix, open to pretty much anyone. There’s a huge backlog still. Who doesn’t love listening to up and coming modscene stars. Especially their very first ones! ლ(ಠ_ಠლ)
6c696e7578 4y ago
Such fond memories, I remember modplay, which thankfully someone else on HN wrote about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19007804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19007804 - I think I first found it on a 1.44" on the front of a magazine in the 90s. Since then I spent so much time listening to mod files, then mp3 happened.
- mzerod 4y ago
  Mod4Win followed shortly, dazzling us with native audio output on our 3.1 windows boxes
crtasm 4y ago
Love the mod archive, this is a good reminder to dontate again.
m-p-3 4y ago
I was first initiated to the existence of tracker music because of Unreal Tournament. I became fascinated by how it worked, and the great improvement in audio quality compared to the midi files and the default instruments used by the operating system.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  The first "Unreal" had modules as well already and the soundtrack is legendary. Another famous game, which had modules was the first Deus Ex game. I later found out, that some of the same people created the music.

129 points by turrini 4y ago

Funny coincidence, I was just watching a video on the history of trackers yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw

robertheadley 4y ago

The website is down. I hope it isn't due to traffic from this site. Might be better to use a caching link to link to small projects like this.

DrPhish 4y ago

Since we appear to have taken poor modarchive offline, here's my vote for the greatest MOD of all time via an archive.org link : https://web.archive.org/web/20220912213826/https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=35344 https://web.archive.org/web/20220912213826/https://modarchiv...

pan69 4y ago
That is indeed a very good MOD. Allthough, its not a classic 4 channel MOD. This extended MOD has a crazy amount of channels. It belongs to this PC demo by Complex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcVN7-AxLQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcVN7-AxLQA
0x0 4y ago
Why not link the better final version? https://web.archive.org/web/20210615125241/https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=50820 https://web.archive.org/web/20210615125241/https://modarchiv...
Minor49er 4y ago
That's a good track, but I'm afraid it doesn't hold a candle to the classic Online Pizza: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=128899 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu... This MOD has been stuck in my head for nearly 20 years
- anthk 4y ago
  Interesting. Musically, we Europeans preferred speed-up Trance music at high BPM. Americans already live as in a hurry, so they prefer slower tunes such as Drum&Bass.
- slimebot80 4y ago
  You know that linking to this is effectively handing someone a VHS with the Ring curse, right?
  - Minor49er 4y ago
    Yeah, and by The Ring's rules, I'm finally free! Mwahahahaha!
cwillu 4y ago
‹lights his hair on fire and puts on his running shoes›
axus 4y ago
There's an online player at https://www.wothke.ch/webxmp/ https://www.wothke.ch/webxmp/ if the Wayback machine won't play the XM you download there. Way back when I was learning HTML, it was really exciting to play S3M/XM files from embedded ModPlugin: https://openmpt.org/legacy_software https://openmpt.org/legacy_software
- butz 4y ago
  Got startled by loud music. I think your notification should mention that after clicking music will start immediately and headphone users should be aware. Good tunes, nonetheless.
  - soneil 4y ago
    To be fair - if someone says "here's an online player" - What are you really expecting?
holoduke 4y ago
I didn't know modarchive is down. I used to have many of my songs there. Is there any alternative with the same database?
- superdisk 4y ago
  I think it's just temporarily down due to the load from this post.
registeredcorn 4y ago
In addition, if people are looking to listen to/download large amounts of tracks, consider checking out the torrents instead. (...And don't forget to seed! :)) http://tracker.modarchive.org/ http://tracker.modarchive.org/
royjacobs 4y ago
You might also enjoy the country version, done by the original artist: https://m.soundcloud.com/jugi/onward-giddy-up-by-yzi https://m.soundcloud.com/jugi/onward-giddy-up-by-yzi
- DrPhish 4y ago
  Thanks, that one is a blast!

Daunk 4y ago

I've listened to tracker music since the 80's and I still do it basically every day. Whenever I have a bad day or feel the lack of motivation; tracker music always helps. And to be honest, it's probably what's getting me through my 20 year long depression. There are so many good tracker songs I could recommend, but I'll instead list a couple of my favourite artists: Elwood, Radix/Rymdlego/Mosaik, Fearofdark, Necros, Purple Motion, Lizardking, Malmen, Beek, Dubmood, Skaven, Virt and so many many more!

usea 4y ago
My formative years all have tracked music as their soundtrack, and I still listen to them regularly. Many of the people whose music I enjoyed back then are still making new music as recently as this week, including several you mentioned. Many artists were accessible on IRC, and the community was at least as good as the music. There were lots of opportunities to form lifelong friendships with great people.
Minor49er 4y ago
Have you listened to the netlabel 8bitpeoples? You would probably enjoy it if you haven't. Virt has a few releases on there http://www.8bitpeoples.com/ http://www.8bitpeoples.com/
knoke 4y ago
Also for me tracker music has an incredible and unique emotional power. My guess is that it was mostly written by teenagers and you can just feel that energy and naivety. Elwood tracks make me happy and happy-sad in a way nothing else can. It’s incredibly comforting and at the same time energising music for me.
sneilan1 4y ago
+1 for tracker music. I don’t have much to say but tracker music is insanely good for coding.
RunSet 4y ago
> I've listened to tracker music since the 80's and I still do it basically every day. Whenever I have a bad day or feel the lack of motivation; tracker music always helps. It really hits the spot like no other music I know. Since you didn't mention my favorite I will: https://www.dualtrax.com/ https://www.dualtrax.com/ Disregard the streaming links; the .xm files are all the way at the bottom. :)

voletrunk 4y ago

One of the finest chiptunes I've ever heard is L.F.F. by 4mat: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=66426 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu... It was the music for this Lemmings cracktro on the Amiga, I swear I spent more time replaying the tune than playing the game! https://youtu.be/mi9M8h6JrQU https://youtu.be/mi9M8h6JrQU

empressplay 4y ago

For more MOD files you can also check out Amiga Music Preservation @ http://amp.dascene.net http://amp.dascene.net

Fellshard 4y ago

This site is formative to me. One of the underrated aspects of MOD files is that they're totally transparent - you can learn from others' work by examining the same files you use to play the music. It's more transparent than basically any other medium out there for learning to create music by example.

blaerk 4y ago

Since it's down you can get your mod fix from https://modland.ziphoid.com/pub/modules/ https://modland.ziphoid.com/pub/modules/ (features some good ol' directory browsing though) I've had best listening results with https://github.com/libxmp/xmp-cli/ https://github.com/libxmp/xmp-cli/ A friend of mine wrote an excellent player which uses libxmp and a bunch of other libs to play a bunch of old formats, it's rather good: https://github.com/intealls/modp https://github.com/intealls/modp fair warning though, there's no pre built releases but comes with a handy makefile :)

pasquinelli 4y ago

for people on android, there's an app for playing chiptunes (that i have nothing to do with) called zxtune that integrates with mod archive and others. it's interface is a little weird, and it acts up sometimes, but for the most part it works, and it seems pretty easy on the battery.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

knoke 4y ago

For iOS users I cannot recommend enough the 4champ mod player with radio and total archive access. (But of course you’ll just download everything by Elwood and listen to that for the rest of your lives.) https://apps.apple.com/app/id578311010 https://apps.apple.com/app/id578311010

allenu 4y ago

I remember one of the first MODs I heard in the early '90s was "Smart E's - Sesame's Treet" (i.e. the Sesame Street song remixed as a dance tune). I blew me away back then that that such a high fidelity sound could come from such a small file. Eventually, like a lot of other people at the time, I learned how to use a tracker to write my own tunes. It was a great way to learn about writing music since I didn't play any instruments.

bane 4y ago

Tracker music is one of the great generally unknown "third way" [1] artifacts that arose from the Amiga and the demoscene. There are dozens and dozens of different formats, and even within 4-channel .mod files there are quite a few variants. What they share in common is not only a kind of technological approach to music formats, but an ethos to certain styles and kinds of music that seems to pervade across different generations of technology and artists. As a fully crystalized concept, it's around 35 years old! But it draws heavily on previous work in electronic music going all the way back to avant-garde experiments with reel-to-reel music crafting. As such it exists firmly as part of a grand, but often forgotten, part of electronic music making. Largely speaking the tools to create the music are the tools used to listen to it and an implicit ethos of "openness" exists. You can literally see the notes being played, listen to the samples one by one, and even edit the song files as you wish. There are fewer better forms of immediate performance from composition, and musical pedagogy, in one compact technological concept. Because it ties composition and performance into the same conceptual space (what you write is literally what it performed), and trackers are generally loaded with different ways of manipulating the samples and instruments, there can be a rich expressiveness encoded into the music that far outstrips what a composer might encode using a traditional note-and-bar midi composition program. And the "how" the composer encoded that expressiveness, how they used or abused the sample data, how they selected strategies around limitations of the format or software, is all present to see and learn from. It also ties the specific sounds in with the note data, leaving very little room for interpretation. A tracker file should sound basically the same no matter what it's played on. Tracker modules are generally very small, a megabyte is usually considered large. There are also some absolutely world class composers and songs in the pantheon -- across a wide variety of musical genres. And nearly all that music was composed and released into the world for free. And because there's never been a real commercial market for the music, the composers were very free to pursue their own musical interests. Genres range from dance music to highly experimental stuff -- sometimes by the same artist! I think I once tried to get a rough assessment of the number of songs produced in the small community of tracker composers and it was well north of half-a-million songs...a literal life-time of music listening at absolutely no cost. Here's a quick couple youtube playlists since it looks like HN crashed the archive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVWFWvQBnZs&list=UUQ3Y8vCyrohM_xhIFFGkmWw&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVWFWvQBnZs&list=UUQ3Y8vCyro... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuprJ3W2ahOXgaIkH_Pf4De4JSFz6wo9l https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuprJ3W2ahOXgaIkH_Pf4... And the famous Nectarine demoscene streaming radio https://www.scenestream.net/demovibes/streams/ https://www.scenestream.net/demovibes/streams/ 1 - By third way I mean not really commercial, not open-source, just a sort of unstated public domain.

gatane 4y ago

The main problem that I see with making tracker based music is no samples = no music.

pierrec 4y ago
A lot of trackers work with synthesized sound, even some early trackers were synth-only. Modern ones have improved on this, eg. Sunvox, Buzz and others are mostly defined by their synths and effects, and how well those things integrate with the tracker interface.
mzerod 4y ago
In milkytracker FT2 clone it is possible to draw your own samples to create basic instruments, most of the stuff for instruments is indeed samples often ripped from other modules as is a common practice to get a library of sounds going. Additionally old competitions used to provide packs of samples and 1 hour to make a composition on which it was then voted, another nice way to spend an evening and get some free instruments :)

senorqa 4y ago

My favourite mod is called Napalm Noise by Triton https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=139481 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

colordrops 4y ago

Unreal ][ by Purple Motion for the Future Crew Second Reality demo is my favorite of all time. https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=60395 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

jl6 4y ago

Chip and demo music is my only experience on the receiving end of cultural appropriation. When mainstream artists started using SidStations and arpeggios and blip blop in their music, there was definitely a part of me that felt Hey! That’s _our_ sound! But I’m glad the innovations and aesthetic of the scene are circulating, and not just to be found in archives. It makes me feel just a little less old to hear even just a little hint of this style on the radio.

flykespice 4y ago

Necros(Andrew Sega) is a legend of domoscene music and my favorite composer https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_artist_modules&query=69271 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_artist_modules... My personal favorite module of his is Mysticism: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=48433 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

icicle93 4y ago
Necros rocked. Certainly you are then familiar with his solo & band projects "Alpha Conspiracy" and IRIS.

doublerabbit 4y ago

While the site is down. Titan - Sunset Strobe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ovFIEU-heM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ovFIEU-heM

mirthturtle 4y ago

I love Mod Archive! Managed to find 99% of my favourites from the 90's on there... though they don't provide a way to play a list in sequence, so I made one for myself: https://www.mirthturtle.com/crunchy-reliable-beats https://www.mirthturtle.com/crunchy-reliable-beats Ironically it's been unreliable since HN traffic started crushing Mod Archive.

loser777 4y ago

A truly invaluable resource. Many years ago I was searching for the music used in this ancient Tom's Hardware video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1hg1zf7rrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1hg1zf7rrY after finding out that many previous Tom's Hardware video soundtracks were featured modules from the archive. However, this one remained elusive until I realized that the entire archive to ~2007 was available as a torrent and that even a single laptop could run the "shazaam" algorithm fast enough to search it given a few days of time ;) https://github.com/eqy/molasses https://github.com/eqy/molasses And the song is silent running by dragonfly : http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=40309 http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&que...

metadat 4y ago
Molasses is amazing, I went ahead and submitted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295601

mzerod 4y ago

Thanks for the hug of death HN :-) Unfortunately the folks taking care of the hosting aren’t yet aware of the problem as it is sleepy time here in EU. In the mid 2000s I built the majority of what you see now but it has generally been out of my hands for a number of years after Scenesat demoscene radio took on the hosting keeping it alive with their love and the generous public’s donations, so that I could pursue other interests. After keeping the fires going for the better part of 20 years it is tradition to pass the baton. It was nice to see it posted here- The former modarchive.com that I helped support until it’s admin moved on was slashdotted back in the day with similar effects. I’m personally pleased to see my incarnation also get the hugs. There’s an awful Easter egg site re-theme on an ancient test page located https://modarchive.org/?mp3 https://modarchive.org/?mp3

nine_k 4y ago
Thank you! Tracker music was a,large part of my youth; it's great to he able to find old known tracks, and also discover new gems among the old ones. (And it's great to see chiptune scene alive and kicking at various places.)
- mzerod 4y ago
  The chip scene has indeed grown in scale since the 2000s began, I shared a few beers with the guy who did the Commodordion and he’s one of many reaching youth with what I think many have come to consider modern folk. Battle of the Bits is a unique and wonderful community plugged to the core by chiptune. I do recall their logo nicely visible on the reddit r/place thing recently which says a lot about the number of participants chipping away!
  - TeaDude 4y ago
    It's strange how they keep popping up in the most unlikely of places. First it was a bunch of Russian bootleg MegaDrive games stealing BotB tunes that were included as demos with Shiru's TFM Music Maker. Then there was a game jam where they all made really excellent TIC-80 games.

Kim_Bruning 4y ago

Also see: https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/ https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/ which can search the mod archive. You can find modarchive under <from> in the file menu.

jeramey 4y ago

If you fell down this rabbit hole, beware the High Voltage SID Collection[1], or you might never come up for air! [1] https://www.hvsc.c64.org/ https://www.hvsc.c64.org/

phendrenad2 4y ago

Since this is now a post your favorite MOD music thread, here's one of my old faves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKMZfPqWpak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKMZfPqWpak

block_dagger 4y ago

I've been searching for Heaven and Hell since 1994 or so. I finally got to hear it again tonight. Thank you! Sadly I'm not finding any of my own S3Ms I created as a youth under the names Quasar83 and Liquid Thought, but I didn't post them anywhere other than AOL 1.0 chat rooms :)

mzerod 4y ago
Give a few days until the tsunami of hackerhearts abates and give signing up/in a shot and upload them. The folks are always open looking for new crew too to help in the upkeep such as screening the upload queue etc. Drop a line to Saga_Musix, open to pretty much anyone. There’s a huge backlog still. Who doesn’t love listening to up and coming modscene stars. Especially their very first ones! ლ(ಠ_ಠლ)

6c696e7578 4y ago

Such fond memories, I remember modplay, which thankfully someone else on HN wrote about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19007804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19007804 - I think I first found it on a 1.44" on the front of a magazine in the 90s. Since then I spent so much time listening to mod files, then mp3 happened.

mzerod 4y ago
Mod4Win followed shortly, dazzling us with native audio output on our 3.1 windows boxes

crtasm 4y ago

Love the mod archive, this is a good reminder to dontate again.

m-p-3 4y ago

I was first initiated to the existence of tracker music because of Unreal Tournament. I became fascinated by how it worked, and the great improvement in audio quality compared to the midi files and the default instruments used by the operating system.

zelphirkalt 4y ago
The first "Unreal" had modules as well already and the soundtrack is legendary. Another famous game, which had modules was the first Deus Ex game. I later found out, that some of the same people created the music.