everbody knows about mods right..???

[ford442]

i was just thinking.. i almost never hear about mods here - and people i meet randomly online almost invariably have never heard of 'em..
so - in case you don't know - and every electronic musician should! - mods are music files that contain WAV quality samples, data that shapes those WAVs into instruments, and sequences of patterns forming a song..
the best player program for them is the ModPlug Player - www.castlex.com - also you can get from there the ModPlug Tracker which doesnt have a playlist, but can be set to play at 32-bit/96khz - the tracker can also let you see the patterns and everything inside the mod and you can try to make your own mods with it.. but it's slow going..
both are free
here is a page i recently found with some really good mod tunes! - http://www.goatrance.de/goacidia/goacidia/SOUNDS.html

please let me know if anyone wants more mod links!

[C00kie]

Mods, hmmm.... It used to be 4-channels of 8-bits samples, usually 11kHz. I've seen other formats with 22kHz sampled and 8 channels, and then it was blown away by MP3. What are the MOD specs nowadays?

[lunarhalo]

[M'Snah]

AFAIK mods were the predecessor to loops (c.q. to samples/samplers), and a bit out of style now?

[quincy]

Basically the original file format of trackers, thats all. Obviously these days they're a bit more complex, but some of the old videogame music guys did some amazing stuff with 4 tracks on the commodore 64 and the amiga etc.

Its been said before, but the music to "magic pockets", that betty boo track, was fantastic

[ford442]

lol.. great pic...
now days the XM format can use up to 64 channels.. lots of mods use 16-bit samples - some at 44khz probly, though i can see that info in modplug.. and the players use high-qualirt resampling - so old mods sound even better played at 32-bit/96khz..
i have 3,425 mods sittin here on my HD and i hope to collect tons more..!
there are some really great songs at that link i posted.. some are excellent mp3's..
mods have gone out of style a lot it's true.. traxinspace.com was the best place to get them until they shut down in like '01.. traxinspace will be back though!!! i will post here when it is..!

[Bunnyboy]

I think that me mate ripped some amiga ones for castlevania.

does that make sense in the context? i have no clue about mods

[Jbravo]

modarchive.com is still going, or it was last time I checked. There are still people on usenet that stick to the format (though I can't for the life of me think why)

[loomchild]

modplug player is certainly one of the worst players when it comes to getting the modules to sound the way they were intended to sound. Modplug player really often doesn't handle the pitch slides correctly and has sometimes difficulties with several other effects.
www.xmplay.com is commonly accepted as the most faithful engine. And yes, you can have a look at the pattern data/sample list/Impulse tracker comments whilst it's playing too.

[loomchild]

lol.. great pic...
now days the XM format can use up to 64 channels..

Xm mods using 64 channels are non-compliant and can only be played on Modplug tracker/player.

[Lawnmower Of The Damned]

That's how I got started in electronic music. I was still writing with that stuff up until about 5 years ago. I'd record guitar riffs and vocals and play those along side the other instruments.

Somewhere I've even got a cd with roughly an albums worth of material I did way back when. The stuff I used to do was much more experimental lo-fi. I think I'm going to have to go dig that up and give it a listen.

It's been years since I even thought about mods/xms/s3ms and whatnot. Thanks for bringing them up again

[ouroboros]

traxinspace.com was the best place to get them until they shut down in like '01.. traxinspace will be back though!!! i will post here when it is..!

that's good to hear traxsinspace was how I ultimately ended up here. My first tracker was modplug, etc., etc. I had no idea they were coming back.

[deggy]

Not that it matters and I'm not sure if this is even really related to the main post but I just read a cool article about Mods (I don't know if this is the same exact thing you're refering to) and trackers (pre-Buzz stuff like fast tracker and impulse tracker) and the online tracking community. It was really well written. It's in "Music and Technoculture" edited by Lysloff and Gay. The article is in chapter 2. Its called "Musical Life in Softcity" by Rene Lysloff. Check it out. It is a good read for anyone who wants to know about the way things were before people really got so into VST/AU stuff. + one of the phd students from the program i'm in has an article in the book as well which is always cool.

[deggy]

is that Sting from Quadraphenia (excuse my spelling)? That's hilarious

[Lawnmower Of The Damned]

Well the really great thing about mods was that you could usually hear everyone's tracks in editable form. If you heard something really cool in a song and you wanted to know how it was done, you just scrolled to that part a looked at it. If there was an instrument you really liked you just saved a copy of it.

Now most people on KVR keep their tracks to themselves, and you can't see how something was done in the songs. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it would even be possible to go back to mods, but I do feel that a certain element is missing from VST culture.

There was also something about mods that gave them a sort of charm. Without getting into some technical trickery, most songs were very harshly quantized. Everything sounded like Samael's "Passage", which is probably why I love that album so much.

The harsh quantization may have taken away from the ability to play complex parts, but it was just dripping with lo-fi charm. Ah, the good old days...