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1

Help me find that... / Re: Looking for a very old Mod.

« on: July 31, 2020, 12:12:31 »

I have never heard that song before. However, I do recognize a number of the samples as originating from the original ST-01 sample disk for Soundtracker. These include Dreambells, Shamus, Monobass, Popsnare2 and Touch, samples which you will find in a lot of songs from that era.

Other instruments have me puzzled. There is a somewhat long cymbal crash in there, although possibly at a very low sampling rate, but it's hard to tell from the sound degradation. There are also some phasing synth sounds that I do not immediately recognize, but they appear to be rather simple. This could indicate that this song uses some instruments which are synthetic sounds rather than samples, which means we could be looking at something like a MED, Startrekker or Soundmon module, or some other format that uses synthetic sounds.

Musically, this song reminds me a lot of Crockets Theme by Jan Hammer. You will find a whole lot of attempts at covering this song in various Soundtracker modules. The song you posted could sound as if it started out as one of these attempts, and if not it is certainly heavily influenced by it.

I have done a quick scan of my Soundtracker, Protracker, Stratrekker, Oktalyzer and MED modules around 5 minutes using Foobar2000, as well as quickly perused some Soundmon modules, but I found nothing that sounds like this song.

2

Help me find that... / Re: Can anyone help me find this MOD? (YouTube Link)

« on: July 25, 2020, 09:54:46 »

That video only has like 2 seconds of sound before it gets quiet?

3

The Lobby / Re: Rename files based on meta data

« on: July 24, 2020, 23:49:18 »

The answer was right in front of me the whole time. I use foobar2000 with openMPT plugin a lot of the time for playing mods, and that program has a nice rename feature that allows you to rename media files based on metadata. This also works for mods. There's not much metadata there for advanced naming of course, but I only wanted the title, and that works fine.

You can easily see both filenames and titles, so in the case of weird titles it is easy to only select files with valid titles, and then rename those.

I prefer fileanmes to be clean, and use folders to group files by author, style etc.

4

Feedback & Suggestions / Re: duplicate modules

« on: July 24, 2020, 14:05:18 »

Dupes
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=33360
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=164197

Alphaville - Big in Japan, cover by Pat.

5

The Lobby / Rename files based on meta data

« on: July 24, 2020, 09:58:08 »

I have downloaded some module collections where the collectors have renamed the files, adding style, descriptions, years etc. I would like to remove these, and rename the files to their original names or something similar. Preferably by using the metadata of the file (title, format) and rename them en masse. Does such a tool exist?

6

Help me find that... / Re: Good 8-channel Amiga modules?

« on: July 20, 2020, 11:36:29 »

The irony is that in that module, the 2nd set of channels is an exact duplicate of the first. I thought I must be doing something wrong when I implemented support for it in OpenMPT. But no, it's really just an 8 channel module for the sake of being 8 channels.

Shit, you're right. That's.... weird. It even does the tempo setting (F command) on channels 1 and 5 simultaneously. I could somewhat understand it if they reversed the second set of channels as a workaround to make the output mono instead of stereo, or use the second set of channels to add a delay effect to the first set, or alternate channels to add more polyphony to what is a pure piano piece. But this, I don't even know what to say.

I only listened to it briefly in EaglePlayer without seeing the patterns the first time, but loaded it up in Startrekker to see it for myself when you pointed this out.

7

Help me find that... / Re: Good 8-channel Amiga modules?

« on: July 19, 2020, 20:46:34 »

Found another 8 channel tracker I am not familiar with. Face The Music, aka FTM, from 1991. There's a demo version on Aminet, and a few modules on Modland. It is mostly in german, so I don't understand much of it, but it seems to have some fairly advance effect programming features.

8

Help me find that... / Re: Good 8-channel Amiga modules?

« on: July 19, 2020, 20:35:19 »

There are actually quite a few MED files with synthesized instruments, but they are not particularly outstanding. Advanced features need advanced users.

Probably true. I attended a talk with Matt Gray and Rob Hubbard at a local retro game show a couple of years ago, and they talked about how things worked on the C64. Back then you basically needed to know 6502 assembly to make good music.

9

Help me find that... / Re: Good 8-channel Amiga modules?

« on: July 19, 2020, 12:05:50 »

OK, so I found some stuff at Modland. Seems they have a bit of Oktalyzer stuff at least. Including a couple of hundred modules attributed to FBY (https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_profile&query=69605). I see he also has a website (fby.develer.com/fby2/mp3/index.html) with a load of music in various formats including Fasttracker II, Protracker, Oktalyzer and Sonix (old non-tracker Amiga music program).

Modland also had a folder for Startrekker FLT8 modules, which contained only 1 single module. Guess that format never really took off. There are some modules there with synthetic instruments, though. This is another thing that never really took off. Same thing with MED/OctaMED, apart from a couple of example songs by Teijo Kinnunnen and some nice songs by Dr Awesome, and the awesome Alien Breed title tune by Allister Brimble, I don't think I've heard many modules using these. But all in all, looks like synthetic instruments became a niche thing when we got samples.

There's also a lot of OctaMED stuff, some of it is probably multichannel, but it's not sorted from the 4-channel stuff, so going through it will probably take some time and effort.

Re your comment about being overwhelmed by more than 4 channels, I don't think this is the case, since there are plenty of examples of people going to great pains to use two Amiga simultaneously to get 8 hardware mixed channels. The mentioned FBY site has modules designed to be played together. I believe there is a special version of Protracker that supports syncing two instances running on separate Amigas using a serial cable. And I also believe Urban Shakedown (and probably others) back in the day used two Amigas with OctaMED in 4-channel mode that they manually synced up with a click-track to get 8 hardware channels.

I'm guessing the absence of 8-channel stuff on Amiga is more due to technical limitations and quality implications of doing software mixing of 8-bit samples on a 7 MHz CPU. Going through the Oktalyzer stuff I do notice that a lot of them only uses 4 or 6 channels. And I also remember when I experimented with OctaMED that 6-chan was a good compromise, giving 2 hardware channels and 4 software mixed channels. Also, the added CPU requirements of software mixing made such productions unsuitable for games and demos, at least until 68020 CPUs became mainstream with the Amiga 1200.

10

Help me find that... / Re: Good 8-channel Amiga modules?

« on: July 17, 2020, 19:17:00 »

Tnx, will check it out. Never tried DigiBooster, guess I had moved on from the Amiga by then. Found DB 1.7. Seems to crash on my A500 setup, but A1200 works fine.

Would still welcome tips for earlier 90s stuff though.