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The Mod Archive

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129 pointsturrini65 comments

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

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.)

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!

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.

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!

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.

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/

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.

+1 for tracker music. I don’t have much to say but tracker music is insanely good for coding.

> 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/

Disregard the streaming links; the .xm files are all the way at the bottom. :)

> Dubmood

Neat, Dubmood was in the Tracker era? Gotta look up his stuff.

I have this remix by them stuck in my favorites: https://youtu.be/9gEkguws0Ww

Elwood - so good! Still listen to a lot of Sweet Dreams (sweetdre.xm) & Dream Complex II (an-dream.xm)

Still not tired of the Flux soundtrack.

I love Spark by Elwood, I'm not sure if it's the same artist. http://www.elwoodproductions.com/

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://modarchiv...

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

Why not link the better final version? https://web.archive.org/web/20210615125241/https://modarchiv...

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&qu...

This MOD has been stuck in my head for nearly 20 years

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.

You know that linking to this is effectively handing someone a VHS with the Ring curse, right?

Yeah, and by The Ring's rules, I'm finally free! Mwahahahaha!

‹lights his hair on fire and puts on his running shoes›

There's an online player at 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

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.

To be fair - if someone says "here's an online player" - What are you really expecting?

I didn't know modarchive is down. I used to have many of my songs there. Is there any alternative with the same database?

I think it's just temporarily down due to the load from this post.

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/

You might also enjoy the country version, done by the original artist: https://m.soundcloud.com/jugi/onward-giddy-up-by-yzi

Thanks, that one is a blast!

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 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

And the song is silent running by dragonfly : http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&que...

Molasses is amazing, I went ahead and submitted it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295601

One of the finest chiptunes I've ever heard is L.F.F. by 4mat: 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

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.

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&qu...

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

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.

Necros(Andrew Sega) is a legend of domoscene music and my favorite composer 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&qu...

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

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

Such fond memories, I remember modplay, which thankfully someone else on HN wrote about: 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.

Mod4Win followed shortly, dazzling us with native audio output on our 3.1 windows boxes

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

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 :)

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)

Since it's down you can get your mod fix from 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/

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 fair warning though, there's no pre built releases but comes with a handy makefile :)

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/

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.

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

Ironically it's been unreliable since HN traffic started crushing Mod Archive.

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.

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=UUQ3Y8vCyro...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuprJ3W2ahOXgaIkH_Pf4...

And the famous Nectarine demoscene streaming radio 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.

I think you hit on something really powerful here. Most web-based players don't seem to have it, but yes, at the time I remember even players that weren't explicitly editors, would let you turn individual channels or instruments on and off.

That made it incredibly easy to strip the music down to an individual track or sample, and understand how the parts came together to make the whole. The notion of a "remix" didn't even apply; this was default functionality of the interface and the form.

I've sometimes wondered, what if commercial music came like that? Like if instead of a 2-track mp3, I (or anyone) could get a 40-track studio master for any random song, and mix it myself. Vocals over here, drums over there, turn off the guitar for a minute and let's see what it's like.... That'd be huge. People would do such crazy things with it. And we did, back in this little forgotten eddy of music that the main stream completely forgot.

This is essentially how I put together this gem: https://eindhoven.space/demoscene-stuff/joke-music/stardust-...

Achieved by deleting the lead instrument from the module and playing it with my own orchestra of otamatones.

You're psychotic.

I love it.

I should not laugh this hard immediately after eating.

One of my favorite things about modules is the little embedded messages in the files from the author. Sometimes they were about the music, sometimes a shout out to friends in the scene, sometimes very random. Reading them even ~25 years ago felt a bit like archeology.. Now? Most definitely so.

Mod Archive was great but long before it, I found the best music randomly on random BBSes. Quite a different age.

Still listening devotedly to AFTERSUN.S3M

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

While the site is down.

Titan - Sunset Strobe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ovFIEU-heM

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.

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

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.

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 :)

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