KVR Audio

Manc Chris · Post by **Manc Chris** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 11:25 am

a guy I know is landing me with a load of old Amiga tracker mods he made. He wants them remastering
and put to CD.

Now, I dont want this to be a long winded process as it a none payer, and he already owes me
enough favours, so, what sort of generic issues would you imagine these mods having?

I'm thinking of maybe just strapping endorphin's lound and punchy across them all???

ouroboros · Post by **ouroboros** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 11:33 am

A lot depends on how good the tracks sounded as .mods.
i have found that often, the levels are low for some reason, so I bounce each track down, actually each instrument down, and then import the wav's into a sequencer. that may be obvious, but it lets me adjust volumes and then decide to compress or eq. It's also hard to get a punchy bass for me, so you might even try dominion to sharpen up the attack of the basslines and then either endorphin or eq in some more bass?

I always found stereo issues easier to deal with in trackers, but maybe check to make the bass isn't phasing strangely in the render?

advaya · Post by **advaya** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 11:37 am

As a HUGE fan (and minor participant) of the mod/tracker scene (circa 92-96), the problems that I discovered were mostly the result of poor/noisy samples (due to keeping the file-size as small as possible)... Make sure you run the track through some sort of noise reduction scheme to remove a lot of hiss and other unwanted sounds.

And unless the track was very carefully crafted, you'll probably be running into spectral balancing/leveling issues as well... most trackers I know of didn't include any sort of channel EQ.

Back then, all that stuff really didn't matter much though. It was the quality of the composition that counted...

I loved those days! Some absolutely incredible stuff was made with only a few tracks of hex-sequencing.

Kingston · Post by **Kingston** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 11:38 am

First thing that comes to mind if you wanna make it sound great and modern, is to use a very high quality mod export tools and export everything one track at the time and simply mix then again in a proper daw environment. The mod (input) plugin in winamp has some timing issues every now and then, but the interpolation and quality is as high as it comes.

Just use that to export the mods at 24bits and remix the thing.

Kingston · Post by **Kingston** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 11:40 am

Oh and speaking of which,

I've been wanting to get my hands on some old time legendary mods by the best composers.

Does anyone know of a great ranking list of the mod scene of the old days? I have my mod/s3m etc. collection, but it's only 1/3 of what I'd like it to be.

wakax · Post by **wakax** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 11:56 am

use xmplay
http://www.un4seen.com
or

Oldsk00l MOD player
http://fuel.adsl.dk/index.php?view=area ... t=Oldsk00l
to dump the mod.

also try Open Modplug Tracker
( has some interesting interpolation modes)
http://modplug.sourceforge.net/builds/#dev

24 bit wont make any diffrence if/since mod samples were bad quality anyways ...

and for the MOST COMPLETE mod /xm / etc archive in the world ever just go to:
ftp.modland.com

advaya · Post by **advaya** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 12:09 pm

Kingston wrote:First thing that comes to mind if you wanna make it sound great and modern, is to use a very high quality mod export tools and export everything one track at the time and simply mix then again in a proper daw environment. The mod (input) plugin in winamp has some timing issues every now and then, but the interpolation and quality is as high as it comes.

Just use that to export the mods at 24bits and remix the thing.

It really doesn't make sense to export one track at a time. In many cases, the individual instruments were required to jump around a lot from one channel to the next (as a way to get around the limited number of channels one had to work with). So for instance, pattern 1 channel 3 might be a pad sound, but then in pattern 2 it could be a snare, or a kick...

It got better as new trakkers came out with more channels though. And yeah, 24 bit export wont do anything at all, considering a good majority of the samples were only 8 bit to start!

tERMoBLUe · Post by **tERMoBLUe** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 12:26 pm

i knowing the modplug with wave-export

...cya

tro

mmdejonge · Post by **mmdejonge** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 12:46 pm

and http://www.deliplayer.com/ for even the most exotic mods

spacedad · Post by **spacedad** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 12:49 pm

i like TBT's TLS Maximizer cos it don't colour the sound,depends if you want to stay faithful to the original.

Manc Chris · Post by **Manc Chris** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 12:58 pm

Kingston wrote:Oh and speaking of which,

I've been wanting to get my hands on some old time legendary mods by the best composers.

Does anyone know of a great ranking list of the mod scene of the old days? I have my mod/s3m etc. collection, but it's only 1/3 of what I'd like it to be.

I did a lot of well respected work myself around that time. My stuff was packaged as the demo music for Octamed. My 'handle' was Raven, and my (one man) crew name was 'Friends Of Paula'. Released 4 demo disks under that name.

Let me know if you want any of my stuff.

As for the adivce here, thanks guys, remember though, I dont have the mods as such, just stereo wavs of the mods.

Ronny Pries · Post by **Ronny Pries** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 1:15 pm

easy mod mastering:

render mods using xmplay w/ sensible ramping and sinc interpolation enabled in the options for further processing. you'll be surprised how good the plain rendered mods sound.

and the sophisticated way:

load up skale tracker VSTi in your host (has to support instruments with multiple outs) and assign each instrument to a different output. this way you can really go into the mod and mix it. downside: the setup needs way more time.

if you're looking for mods check out the amiga music preservation project at http://amp.dascene.net/home.php

greetz,
ronny

my 'amp' page

birrbits · Post by **birrbits** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 1:34 pm

along the same lines, I had 'forgotten' about 2 rather huge mod collection cd's I purchased years ago. I pulled them out and was listening to them in Winamp. Does anyone know if winamp playback of mods has any limitations? The playback sounded pretty good to me.

dblue · Post by **dblue** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 3:07 pm

birrbits wrote:Does anyone know if winamp playback of mods has any limitations? The playback sounded pretty good to me.

The WinAmp .mod plugin does have some limitations, though I forget what they are exactly. It's very possible you may never run into them though. I believe most of the bugs/inaccuracies are to do with really weird uses of the tracker commands.

Once in a while you'll dig up a .mod which was written in a specific tracker, which takes advantage of a bug in a certain command that causes it to play back in some weird way. Using extreme settings on a pitch slide or vibrato, for example, which might give that particular .mod a totally unique sound. And it's usually that which is not played back "correctly" by the WinAmp plugin.

Either way, I would really recommend XMPlay as wakax has already mentioned. I believe the playback engine is much more accurate and even incorporates a few of the quirks which some .mods rely on.

Aleksey Vaneev · Post by **Aleksey Vaneev** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 3:13 pm

In the past I was offering RenderXM application which could render any XM tracks in separate WAV files for mixing. XM handling is quite good - some said it was the best after FastTracker2 itself. It also supports sinc interpolation for the best quality playback. I would recommend to convert MOD to XM (this is possible for the most part) and use RenderXM (I may send it by your request to info@voxengo.com). RenderXM is now freeware. S3M and IT rendering is not supported.

Amiga Mods - mastering advice