pouët.net

tracker mods (My albums)

category: music [glöplog]
tomaes: yes, there was, but it's pretty outdated and only suppports a few formats. Luckily, in_openmpt is a thing. ;)
My question is: what is the definitive way to play a .MOD or .XM or .S3M or even .IT?

For example: the first time I heard Nebulos by Audiomonster was on MED, the Music Player by Teijo Kinnunen, and I consider that to be THE definitive version, NOT Ice by The Silents.

Make of that what you will.
added on the 2015-01-16 23:53:16 by Foebane72 Foebane72
The definitive way is to use the editor the module was made in.

All players (and the editors/trackers themselves too) are known to be buggy and full of quirks. Some players are known to be generally more faithful to the original formats (XMPlay, ModPlug), others, like vanilla Winamp, are very limited in their capability to reproduce the audio correctly. I still use the very old modplug player for some reason. 99% of the mod, xm, it, s3m I throw at it, sound about right to me.

Saga: I knew the maintainer. Last time I checked, he's busy doing vegan cooking websites. ;)
added on the 2015-01-17 00:08:29 by tomaes tomaes
XMPlay sucks, I tried it with the Fake Elektronik Lightshow mod and it muffled it ridiculously, I couldn't see what I'd done wrong so I blamed it on that software and refused to use it any longer.

Quote:
All players (and the editors/trackers themselves too) are known to be buggy and full of quirks. Some players are known to be generally more faithful to the original formats (XMPlay, ModPlug), others, like vanilla Winamp, are very limited in their capability to reproduce the audio correctly. I still use the very old modplug player for some reason. 99% of the mod, xm, it, s3m I throw at it, sound about right to me.


I actually think that music module playbacks are as diverse as classical music performances by various orchestras and conductors - no two are ever, ever alike as long as the general notes are left intact. I'm a big fan of classical music and I've heard the same pieces performed so differently to each other by different orchestras that if it were module music, it would be put down to an inferior player - but then, it's down to performance and interpretation, and frankly, it all boils down to musical notes, which is what the modules contain - right?
added on the 2015-01-17 00:20:22 by Foebane72 Foebane72
Not really, no. When you have a player that messes up volume ramps or frequency slides, you get something truly awful, which has nothing to do with a different performance, it just hurts your ears. It's like a tuba player with a heart attack. ;) Not to mention NNAs and tricks with note jumps. It's not just the notes.

And no idea what your trouble with that one mod and XMP is. My trouble with XMP was usually micro clicks and the interface which I never really liked.
added on the 2015-01-17 00:31:39 by tomaes tomaes
ITT - Saga & Kylearan refuse to use/dl a bt client because "why should we!" but multiple suggestions are made (not just by them) to use (dl) various mod players and sound libraries in order to listen to files.

Kylearan also shows typical l337 scene myopia by suggesting that peeps who have a keen interest in programming and music production have no place on pouet because they haven't "gone and made a demo about it" or been fanbois by earning fake internet glops by commenting.

Oh & - Foebane72 performs excellent outreach and introduction to the scene by producing a couple of nice choons albums whilst trying to be thoughtful of OC's IP rights. l337 sceners poo-poo it due to choice of distribution.
added on the 2015-01-17 01:01:22 by ringofyre ringofyre
Foebane72: XMPlay has absolutely no issue with Fake Elektronik Lightshow, but for Amiga MODs you may want to disable interpolation of course - at least most people probably prefer to listen to them that way. Playing a module correctly depends on dozens of parameters, and XMPlay actually gives you a good way to access these parameters (through the means of its module playback settings but also the plugins).

Quote:
I still use the very old modplug player for some reason. 99% of the mod, xm, it, s3m I throw at it, sound about right to me.
Oh my, can you please stop using that? :)
MPP has so many quirks, and I know for sure that it will play all my recent tracks incorrectly (due to deliberate usage of an unsupported IT feature). These lists should give a rough idea at how many things it simply fails. All of these test cases are abstracted from real-world examples.

By the way, the xmp-openmpt input plugin for XMPlay supports indepenent tempo and pitch adjustments, just like MPP. ;)
I don't see the point all these "collections".
The raw material is available via FTP (modland) or websites (modarchive, AMP, etc.). So I don't understand this "need to share" as it is as available as it can be.

If you prefer MOD.nebulos replayed by MED, that's fine. Just, don't spread, thanks. In case of tracked material, I don't see where there's room for "interpretation". You want to play Doh's MOD ? use Protracker 2.3d, where most were created. That's how the AUTHOR intended them to sound. Playing these anywhere else is fine, just not as the AUTHOR wanted, no matter how accurate a given replay can be.

To me, this is not a sheet with notes handed over by Mozart 240+ years ago, which can indeed be "interpreted". It's physical data like a movie or a painting. Changing anything in these is also fine. It's just not the original creation anymore, that's all.

=> interpolate at will, play with WinAMP, change things, add echo, etc. , that's an individual call. It should stay on said individual computer as "personal collection"

Oh, and some author probably don't care. However, some do ..
added on the 2015-01-17 13:10:59 by asle asle
Quote:
If you prefer MOD.nebulos replayed by MED, that's fine. Just, don't spread, thanks. In case of tracked material, I don't see where there's room for "interpretation". You want to play Doh's MOD ? use Protracker 2.3d, where most were created. That's how the AUTHOR intended them to sound. Playing these anywhere else is fine, just not as the AUTHOR wanted, no matter how accurate a given replay can be.


I used the TSL Ice demo to play Nebulos, which is what it was officially used in.

So you're saying use a specific version of a tracker to hear how a particular artist's mods should sound? I don't recall Mod Archive posting those requirements. And what about specific Kickstart ROMs or versions of Workbench? For that matter, what about when you're emulating, eh? Which version of UAE? What settings? This is all highly unwieldy, I would just go for what sounds best. I bet some mod authors are flexible about their mods' performance.
added on the 2015-01-17 19:20:18 by Foebane72 Foebane72
Quote:
I don't recall Mod Archive posting those requirements

Why would we? It's up to the author to specify this. You will see a lot of module texts that say "don't play this with X, it will sound wrong", which is of course often just a snapshot in time, because a later version of X might play the track perfectly. However, in general many authors (at least on PC trackers) state the software + version they used to create a file, or at least it's easy to extract this information from the file (e.g. it's easy to tell if an IT file was made with OpenMPT or Impulse Tracker, and you can even get the exact version number of the software from the file). For ProTracker MODs it's sadly more complicated because there's no real way to find out the software that was used to save them, but PT2.3d is always a safe choice for those. This is less about whether you applied a certain filter in UAE or not, it's more about the playback quirks in the tracker itself. It's easy to craft e.g. a MOD file that will sound okay in PT2.3d but wrong in e.g. Winamp.
Quote:
This is all highly unwieldy, I would just go for what sounds best

Sir, no matter how "unwieldy" it may seem, that's how it is. And you should mention "what sounds best" for you.
That author are flexible is your own saying, and rather convenient here.

Again, don't misunderstand, I certainly won't try to right any wrong, here. I'm just saying you're defacing original creations made by others. It fits your liking ? fine. However, since you want the world to know what you like, I believe you should advertise what process and tools you actually used to generate those files.

Just my own opinion, of course. Not worth much, I know, but ..
added on the 2015-01-17 23:21:09 by asle asle
Sorry Foe, I don't mean to keep hijacking your thread but Imma..
Quote:
So you're saying use a specific version of a tracker to hear how a particular artist's mods should sound?

These are the exact same guys who were whinging about your content delivery system (bt) and saying why should they have to dl some extra software just to access your albums.
They're hypocrites, don't bother arguing. Whatever mod player works for you - stick to it. mplayer works for me - dunno if any windows ports would do the same.
added on the 2015-01-18 03:10:15 by ringofyre ringofyre
ringofyre: Okay, I will respond to you one last time. Getting a BT client for one single download is something I don't consider to be worth doing compared to downloading the right player for playing possibly hundreds of tunes. I simply have no use for Bittorrent under normal circumstances, so why should I bother to get a client? Conversely, if I was about to listen to a single mod file, I would of course also not bother to find the best possible player probably. It's exactly the same logic, nothing hypocrite there.
mplayer will most likely use libmodplug, which is terrible. If you like listening to butchered modules, go ahead, but don't be surprised if they sound off.
I think it's safe to say Saga that we're not going to agree on this.
How about we be gentlemen and agree to disagree, leave this thread for what it was meant for and bid each other a good day?
added on the 2015-01-18 03:39:15 by ringofyre ringofyre
Problem is not the fact that he's listening to the modules not sounding the way they were meant to sound.
Problem is that he's spreading them recorded like that.
added on the 2015-01-18 04:17:38 by Tomoya Tomoya
Quote:
Problem is not the fact that he's listening to the modules not sounding the way they were meant to sound.
Problem is that he's spreading them recorded like that.


Just offering them up in terms of sharing, it's not mandatory to own them ;)

BTW, thanks to whoever mentioned OpenMPT, I had that a long while ago but lost it, and I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was called. What DOES MPT stand for, anyway? I think it's available for Foobar2000, I certainly hope so, I think that's what I used it on before.
added on the 2015-01-18 10:23:25 by Foebane72 Foebane72
trololololo
added on the 2015-01-18 10:37:24 by havoc havoc
So does the ZX Spectrum category need to be subdivided?
added on the 2015-01-18 11:40:03 by trc_wm trc_wm
Foebane72:
I've written a nice article on OpenMPT's legacy, which should also make clear what MPT stands for.
There is indeed a foobar component that uses OpenMPT's playback engine, but I won't claim that it's perfect for everything - but it's way better than e.g. libmodplug or Mikmod or Winamp.
Quote:
but it's way better than e.g. libmodplug or Mikmod or Winamp.


I don't think I've ever heard of libmodplug, unless it was the in-browser mod player on the BTTR website.

Never heard of Mikmod, no less used it, to my knowledge.

And as for Winamp: you have to know that it was a media player like foobar is, but also had components available for it - it had a stock player but I didn't like it, so used another component in its place. Unfortunately, it's been YEARS since I used Winamp, so I can't remember the details.
added on the 2015-01-18 18:23:39 by Foebane72 Foebane72
Winamp uses a ~15 year old version of mikmod. I am well aware that you can replace the default plugin (e.g. with in_openmpt), but many people who use Winamp still use the original plugin as well, which is horrible.
libmodplug is used by the majority of players on Linux, and also e.g. VLC on Windows.
I'm going to stop seeding my files, as I would imagine that those who would've downloaded them have done so by now, and so others can share them, as they've seeded them as well.
added on the 2015-01-22 23:03:29 by Foebane72 Foebane72
keito: http://se2a1.iiiii.info:8080/soamc/ this is quite nice in that sort of area, btw :)
added on the 2015-01-29 16:41:50 by maali maali

login