Keygen Library Player (4504 tracks) | Hacker News Reader

Keygen Library Player (4504 tracks)

cable.ayra.ch

150 pointsBenFeldman193056 comments

I remember going through this journey of pirating software.

Eventually, as software started to receive updates, keygens were more interesting as those things didn't break when an update was applied (or the update failed because a checksum mismatch of some exe / dll.

For games, keygens and cracks were needed to bypass the original disc requirement. One could try to image the disc with Alcohol 120% which as able to retain the information needed to pass the disc checks. The output images were of the MDX [1] format. But those images were the size of your disc. So you had your installed game (e.g. 8.5GB) and now the image.

Eventually some people were able to create a 'fixed' image of the disc. I don't know if it was just an MDX with pointers to nothing, or whether this had to be done on a game-by-game basis. I can't link to anything here but searching for 'no-cd fixed image' explains this better.

You'd then mount those images with Alcohol 120% to play the game.

Later on more detections popped up and I remember having to use Daemon Tools as it employed more sophisticated measures to hide it from the games.

Also, I foolishly registered on Daemon Tools' website and to this day I get spam at daemontools@<mydomain>.<tld>...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Descriptor_File

Nice site!

From add_on.css,

    /* 
 player specific positioning of the displayed 'frequency spectrum', etc 
 
 NOTE: the reflection and position handling is a fucking nightmare: The Chome idiots
 like to change their dumbshit implementation with almost every minor release.. each
 time breaking what had to be used before.. bunch of clueless morons! 
 (Their latest achievement: reflection suddenly disapears (border and all) AS SOON as 
 JavaScript draws to the contained canvas. Of course they are also too dumb to use 
 regular font definitions anymore.)

Had a hard time getting it to work in Firefox, now it seems to be down as I'm trying to load it in Chrome. I'm confused, the little sliders in canvas look fine, why would Chrome change anything about what shows up inside a <canvas> tag other than potentially messing with the scaling?

[edit] ah, I see, there are several canvases that are supposed to horizontally align. Yeh. Just take over the whole damn page and draw it on a single canvas, I'd say. Flash Player 2023.

It's working perfectly fine for me in FF, tried both desktop and mobile.

Ha, I remember how easily I achieved a similar effect in Flash more than 10 years ago. It was easy because it was built as a web application platform from the beginning, not a word processor with some crazy macros bolted on top. But I am sometimes amazed at what people do with a platform so constrained.

Yep, it's been this many years and the modern CSS/JS still hasn't caught up with Flash.

Other resources:

http://keygenmusic.org -- A hugh library of keygen music

http://modarchive.org -- Site for Tracker Musicians

Good stuff although it sounds different from any other player I've heard.

https://cable.ayra.ch/webxmp/#835 goes hard.

Here is another player that imho sounds bit better: http://keygenmusic.tk/#track=AiR/AiR%20-%20Synapse%20Audio%2...

It plays in stereo! Others I've heard were mono. Maybe there are more differences.

Growing up in Belgium there was a lot of techno / house / hardcore, specially because of the large hardcore scene in the Netherlands. So this definitely was my music of choice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp2xYLdtNls

That whole channel brings back memories. Good and bad.

Nitpicky factoid: the correct name for this type of music, as used in the scene where it originates from, is CHIP MUSIC or CHIPTUNES.

Also these tunes are XM modules. XM is a popular tracker. Trackers are type of music making software pioneered by Soundtracker on Amiga.

I wouldn't be surprised if many of these tunes have just been ripped from somewhere else and not actually made by keygen crackers themselves.

To be even nitpickier the tracker that makes XM files is called FastTracker2 ;)

Oh, you're absolutely right. :-)

Most of them are, but the reason why (in the words of YouTuber Ahoy) piracy has such an awesome soundtrack, is that the cracking groups grew out of the Commodore scene.

Yup. I learned about it way after the fact, but you have the cracker scene, which crosses over with tracker enthusiasts and produces demoscene in the 80s/90s. Demoscene crosses over with a lot of early PC game dev, which loops us back around to crackers. The next gen picks up the echoes of this stuff through keygens and romhacks, and we eventually get stuff like Barkley Gaiden (whose theme song remixed the Space Jam theme with a mod from a tracker composer who went on to cofound Swedish House Mafia) and Undertale (which is the culmination of a stupidly-interesting chain of chiptune/indie game dev influences).

> a tracker composer who went on to cofound Swedish House Mafia

Axwell aka Quazar:

* http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/Protracker/Quazar/

* http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/Fasttracker%202/Quazar/

Yup, that's him. And the remix in question spawned an avalanche of copycat "Slam Jams" and, in turn, a surge of geeky game/anime-hip hop mash-ups. For the past decade, the actual musical underground has been online. Axwell is just the start; one of these days, something in the lineage, and closer aesthetically to the pure deal, is going to break out, and people are going to wonder where the hell it came from. 30+ years of grassroots culture development happening right under everyone's noses, that's where.

Dubmood managed to get a song onto the Hotline Miami soundtrack ("Richard").

Music trackers are so cool. Instead of recorded audio, they produce modules which are essentially programs that the tracker software executes to reproduce the sound. You can even see the unmixed waveforms of each instrument being generated in real time. It's just so cool to watch.

https://youtu.be/eclMFa0mD1c

Meh, they are unlike programs. Rather, they are grids of notes and special commands that alter the pitch, velocity or timing, together with a bunch of samples and envelopes used to play those notes. Some formats also have simple filters for subtractive synthesis. Modern tracker-based programs, though, have capabilities for complex signal synthesis/processing (Renoise, Sunvox).

Most of them are. The first two things this site played at me was the fruit machine music from Superfrog (Amiga, 1993, Allister Brimble) [0], then the DisIsSid#3 intro (Amiga, 1996, Manfred Linzer) [1]

That's not to say that crackers and musicians don't mingle. While there was not only music made for games, demos, intros, musicdisks and other demoscene productions, there was certainly a lot of chiptunes commissioned for or widely spread by cracktros, with the musicians' support

In one particularly interesting case, Mark Knight [2] got a permanent job as a musician for the game company Mindscape, and he could hear his own music, [3] that he'd given to Melon Dezign and had been used by their cracking friends Crystal for the cracktro [4][5] to their crack of Mindscape's game, Moonstone [6]

> I received a call from Richard Leinfellner at Mindscape offering me some freelance work, converting the Wing Commander music for the Amiga. I snapped it up and when (almost) completed, he offered me a full-time position as in-house composer.

> It could have been the shortest career in history when, during the first week, I heard one of my chiptunes playing in the production office. Mindscape had just released Moonstone, and had downloaded a copy from a bbs. I stuck my head around to see why they were playing my tune, and quickly saw that the crack intro introducing Moonstone was playing. I silently shuffled out, went back to my room, and shut the door very worried about the consequences of this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfrog

[1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3416

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Knight_(musician)

[3] https://marktdkknight.bandcamp.com/track/maintheme-2-origina...

[4] http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=7902

[5] https://flashtro.com/crystal-moonstone/

[6] https://archive.org/details/AmigaDownload/page/n259/mode/2up...

not all are XM, some are s3m (ScreamTracker 3) ;-)

For the fun of it:

  jq '.[]["songs"][].file | match("\\.([^.]+)$") | .captures[0].string' songs.json -r  | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

  3169 xm
  1011 mod
   226 it
    86 s3m
     4 nsf
     3 rad
     2 amd
     2 S3M
     1 mtm

Its not mutually exclusive. These chiptunes cone from key generators which is why its called keygen music.

> Illegitimate key generators are typically distributed by software crackers in the warez scene and demoscene. These keygens often play "Keygen music", which may include the genres dubstep or chiptunes[1] in the background and have artistic user interfaces.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keygen

More details: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/66nvia/w...

Some of them come from there, a few of them even exclusively composed for this or that cracking group to use in their key generators, but the vast majority of them were just taken from prior intros (demos) and crack intros from a time before software began commonly using calculable serial keys. The history is not the least unknown to me, as I grew up in both the demo scene and the "elite/piracy" scene of the Commodore 64 and the Commodore Amiga - where all of this began.

Nitpickier:

Fairly certain the music itself strongly predates these terms. I'm reminded of when the phrase "mash-up" got popular; though hip-hop DJ's doing "blends" had been happening for years before.

Chiptune does have its subgenres. Keygen chiptune usually have a very distinct style with a lot of fast arpeggios and mainly pulse waves instruments with no attack or delay.

Chip music / chiptune specifically to music produced on/for sound chips, or produced using tracker software which was commonly used to produce this kind of music.

"8-bit" is also often used to refer to the genre of chiptune, even though much of the music is produced for higher bit depth systems.

Many keygen tunes are chiptunes, produced on trackers, but many are not. Some are straight-up DnB, techno, or trance, not remotely chiptune. E.g. Here's a track from downthread which would be considered rave/ old skool / breakebeat hardcore or just "hardcore" (not to be confused with like a dozen other genres called "old skool" or "hardcore" (it's a very ineffable genre from a fairly narrow time period, from a fairly underground at the time subculture, who released via physically unstable "dubplates" that haven't survived well through digital archiving)).

https://cable.ayra.ch/webxmp/#835

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakbeat_hardcore

It's almost like language is fluid and descriptive, not proscriptive.

It was never really about the genre per se, though there is a certain artistic similarity that can be gleaned, similar to how e.g. Japanese game music of the early 90s has a certain red thread to it. It was always about the nature of the instruments used in the tracker music: a notable use of simple looped waveforms and minimal samples, instead of extended samples of a real or synthesized instrument, and often a desire to squeeze the file size of these tracker modules down to a minimum to the point where it became a bit of a craft to some. People (like me) who spent a lot of time in the scene when this era of computer music came into existence have a specific and widely shared opinion about what is a chiptune and what isn't.

I was only ever involved in the PC demoscene back in the day, and on that platform chiptunes generally referred to mods that were tiny, using very small samples or even not many samples e.g. playing the same samples at different pitches for different instruments.

Right, I tried to say this elsewhere; I ended up hearing a LOT of this music when it was actually being made, and neither "Chiptune" nor "Chip Music" was widely in use, if at all. If anything, "Tracker" was the word most used, I thing.

> "I ended up hearing a LOT of this music when it was actually being made, and neither "Chiptune" nor "Chip Music" was widely in use, if at all."

Thousands upon thousands of chiptunes were composed on the Amiga. Hundreds of chiptune collections and so-called "music disks" were made specifically targeting this subcategory. In the Amiga scene it was a musical artistic phenomenon in its own right, and the term was solidly cemented. What you're saying is not one bit in parity with reality.

And, they're all tracker modules, whatever the genre. Chiptunes are a specific subcategory.

I suppose I wasn't clear -- I meant the actual term "Chiptune" or "Chip Music." I feel like it just wasn't called that back then, like those actual terms didn't show up until people actually began to seek out the sound as a retro thing.

I may be wrong here -- I can personally attest to consuming a lot of this material (demoscene stuff, games, tracker songs, etc) -- but I will admit I didn't make it or actually directly interact with many humans who did.

Depends on the tune... some of these sound more like mods or xms, made up of samples rather than synthesized notes (the synthesized nature being one of the distinguishing characteristics of the chip tune).

Wow I just got smacked in the face hard by nostalgia. Man where did the time go? Thanks for the share!

Try out the "classic" player for a cooler UI: https://cable.ayra.ch/modplayer/

This one too.

https://chiptune.app/

Also play MIDI (multiple sound fonts available) and retro consoles musics.

Not bad, but it's not searchable, it doesn't credit the musicians, and there are loads of classic tracks missing.

Oh man, this is a nostalgia bomb. I wish this had a search feature, so I can't find my favorite one, though I'm sure it's on there. Author if you are here, I'd love the ability to search, rather than scroll through thousands in a drop-down on mobile.

Unreel Superhero 3. I think it was off a keygen for Sony ACID, propellerheads Reason, or Daemontools, can't remember which.

https://youtu.be/9STiQ8cCIo0

I definitely remember this one. It's good.

I remember back around 2007 or so I got a huge collection of chiptune music off of Demonoid and it had a bunch of Razor1911 music among others that I'd listen to.

The site greets me with "Your browser vendor has disabled autoplay". Nope, I have disabled autoplay.

This may be a music player, but please don't play anything without my permission...

Agreed. I have disabled autoplay. Pray I don't disable it further, music player website.

I included keygen music into internal license key generator tool. That was fun easter egg

Not directly related to the music. But I noticed that most games that I s/pirated/borrowed when I was young, I then bought them legally (on Steam/GOG, but when on sale) when I started making money (have a job). I don't even play them again, just the sense of "owning" them makes it worth buying. I don't know what to call this phenomenon. Guilt?

Convenience. Steam is immoral DRM but there's no question it provides a good service. It's essentially a package manager for Windows. There's a reason people don't even remember the days when they had to download and apply multiple 500 MB incremental patches on a crappy connection just to play online.

As someone who authored some keygen templates in this list (circa 1999-2000), this music was not commonly properly sourced. Chip music had already turned classic and we would pick what we liked. Providing credits was best effort. At some point we were very happy to collaborate with a chip music artist who made a tune just for our template, this was more the exception than the norm. tl;dr: this archive doesn't carry proper credits to original artists. The demo scene is where it's at.

Great stuff. Started at #1 - am waiting for my Wavestation keyboard keygen to come up. I can't believe I paid with a card to a well-cool site based in Albania (warez.al? something like that): they delivered and I became an irregular customer.

I have since, legally purchased all the Korg Vintage items :-) Those were the real 'try before you [can afford to] buy' days.

https://cable.ayra.ch/webxmp/#2608

This is the X-Out loader music by Chris Hülsbeck, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BqadZEIAU8

I used to have this keygen and I'd leave it on to loop all day in the background while I worked circa ~2005.

Mega Man themes!!!

https://cable.ayra.ch/webxmp/#1884

I can't believe it!

Dang, this is awesome. Now I'm going to have to spend an hour trying to find the tune that's been stuck in my head since 2004.

I also had one in mind, which I found almost instantly. https://cable.ayra.ch/webxmp/#1735

The nostalgia pang when a familiar track from some ancient demo or keygen comes on is unreal... those truly were the days <3

Ah, how I recall in the late 90s browsing through the seedy sites looking for the specific version keygen/crack I needed... back before ad-blockers and those websites were like 10% content, 90% porn ads, on dial-up. These all sound so nostalgic, even if I can't recall which specific tunes I heard back then.

This is great. Thank you.

Best track is Marble (R2R Ableton) hands down https://cable.ayra.ch/webxmp/#2724

I remember FFF keygens and NFO files. Their name meant “Fighting For Fun” :D

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