I've posted this here before, but a 25-year old Amiga 2000 still provides background music at home (when the wife is away). A couple hundred megs of Mod files provide hours of nostalgia. Some people meditate with incense, Amigans ruminate to the sounds of 80s tracker beats.
I've tried replacing the machine with emulation, but there is something comforting in seeing the old girl in the corner singing as well as she ever did. Perhaps devices living beyond their natural lifespans comforts man's worries over his own perishable nature.
The Amiga MOD sound is quite distinctive because it uses very low-res instrument samples (typically 8-bit, 8 kHz) played back at different sample rates.
Only four channels were available, so each of those crunchy samples gets to be heard in the mix too.
It was amazing at the time and still sounds unique in its way.
A few PC games used Amiga MOD soundtracks too. Star Control II (1992) comes to mind because it was a very early example of Internet crowdsourcing: the music was created by MOD composers around the world.
"This is a compilation of some of my demoscene music made between 1989 and 1993 when I was still called Moby, before some other guy took my moniker :P. These tunes were released by some of the best demogroups ever : Sanity, Alcatraz, Quartex, Dreamdealers... All tracks were composed using Protracker on the Amiga." https://elmobo.bandcamp.com/album/amiga-days-remasters
The worldwide distribution was though BBS networks and the Internet. Just for reference, when these Amiga modules started circulating, the IBM PC was only capable of making "beeping" noises.
There was a definite style to a lot of e.g. game music on the amiga that made it feel quite unique both at the time and since, and listening to this reminds me of that style.
'the number of voices is limited to four. To have something similarly to chords, the three notes of it are repeated very fast. This makes MODs sound so freaky.'
This is possibly why this stuff sounds so unique. Interesting how a technical limitation can result in unintended stylistic consequences.
I’m actually kind of amazed that you’ve traced that lineage, as some of the earliest influences on my musical taste were the tracker-based soundtracks of Amiga games, coming out of the same milieu as the scene.
I never could get into trackers, but there must be elements of classic modfile music that still come through in my music all these years later.
Not only has the author collected a great library of classic mod files to play back, they compiled a fantastic starter library of mod samples for composing new work. These have such a delightfully retro sound to them, I'd love to use them in other software as well, such as the sampler in my primary DAW – anyone know how to extract a WAV file from these vintage Amiga DMS archives?
I first discovered music MOD files on the CD-ROM of the magazine "What PC?" in 1995. I was only 10 years old at the time so hadn't even heard of the Amiga but I was instantly hooked on the music style.
I would record the MODs from the family computer on to my cassette player so I could listen to them without hogging the computer. Listening to these again is such a nostagia trip.
People still make music using C64, NES, GameBoy, etc. Some pretty decent stuff out there if look around. For anyone else interested see https://chipmusic.org which is a forum for posting and talking about chiptune-related things, or http://www.8bitpeoples.com a label run by chiptune artists most of which I believe can be downloaded for free at 192.
I remember Lizardking (Gustaf Grefberg, composer for what is now Starbreeze Studios) used to distribute his early music on "musicdisks", bootable Amiga floppies with the tracks in MOD format and a player program. The module music scene fascinated me with its ability to distribute sampled music in a form that took up tens or hundreds of KiB. Plus the often synthesized, somewhat bitcrushed sound of the era was an aesthetic in its own right.
Love trackers! A lot of my friends got their start in music in the mod scene - was a magical time of free original music making and sharing on BBSs/early internet. It’s amazing what people created with 4 channels and 8 bit samples on amigas (and a couple of years later with more channels and 16bits on PCs and cheap sound cards)
emphasis on that an old computer or console could produce (this is the original meaning of the term)
chiptunes on Amiga (mod, xm) where reproducing samples of the sounds created with HW synthesizers (CHIPs), like, for example, the C64 SID, one of the most popular ever.
For example the intro of "Cannon Fodder"[1] on the Amiga is not considered a chiptune, because it used samples from real instruments and a human singer
For some original true chiptune, see the amazing work of the amazing Rob Hubbard[2]
The 8bit electric guitar of Skate or die still gives me goosebumps almost 40 years later[3]
Fun fact: the tracker songs recorded from real amigas (or faithful emulations) have a certain nuance to the samples which you learn to recognize, due to that everybody disabled the D/A low-pass filter back in the day, which is normally really required after a D/A to reproduce the actual analog samples.
So you got a higher pass-through of some of the higher frequencies contained in the played samples (as the original filters were too wide and cut into the real data), but also you got higher aliasing harmonics, that shouldn't be there but kind of make it sound better in total. Actually, in music production you often add filters in the chain that artificially create harmonics to "excite" the audio and make it more interesting for the ear. This was kind of an unintentional exciter :)
On the Amiga 500, the D/A filter was switchable by software, by toggling the power LED. I'm pretty sure some engineer thought it was crippling to have the filter there permanently online, and sneaked in a toggle feature but couldn't find any free GPIO :)
More in depth description of the D/A reconstruction filter and mod-player emulation issues arising from it:
> People swapped MIDI arrangements of popular songs
I recall downloading MOD files back in the day from various BBSs. This is probably pre-95 by a few years. MIDI files were good but you needed a good sound card to play them. I recall drooling over ads of the Gravis Ultrasound (I had a SB Pro).
To inspire others who were kids in the 80s/90s: My current favourite programming music is old Commodore Amiga game and demoscene music. (Lots and lots of tunes can be found on Youtube of course.)
Yeah the "8-bit" part came from a (really cool) newsletter called The Happening from the Kickstarter employees. I don't think I made a claim like that. My only standard was non CD, I don't know why I guess it feels like I'm surfacing great music that is harder to hear again. The best example of this I can think of is http://sndtst.com/Continuum I had to trick down and build (on OSX) some obscure utilities and libraries to get this specific Amiga MOD rip into a wav format so I could upload it. I've also be encoding these from the the original VGM, NSF, HUE and SPC files with the great library [Game Music Emu](https://code.google.com/p/game-music-emu/) some simple C I adapted https://gist.github.com/jasonsperske/5ce7f90bf591454a08bc#fi.... This project is really my chance to play with HTML5 audio, Python and (very limited) C (and to have something fun playing in my car and while I program :)
Actually, chiptunes (C64) and MODs (Amiga) used quite different playback technologies.
The C64 synthesized its sound via the MOS Technology 6581/8580 SID (Sound Interface Device). It was limited to 3 voices, so the only way to emulate chords on a single voice was to arpeggiate rapidly through a sequence of notes.
The Amiga used four PCM sample based sound channels (in stereo - two left, two right). So chords could easily be sampled and played back on one or more channels.
Chiptunes were limited to the distinctive '8 bit electronic' style - although it didn't stop groups like Maniacs of Noise pushing the technology to use primitive samples alongside the traditional sounds; one notable example was the 'Stormlord' soundtrack.
MODs, being sample-based, could be made to sound like quite respectable audio recordings. Even so, there were some musicians who tried to emulate the old C64 sound on the Amiga, hence the profusion of chiptune-sounding MODs.
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