MOD Trackers or other useful music software that'll run on 286/10?

[Scali]

The deficiencies are because of the floating-point speed, which had increased dramatically in the Pentium.

That is not entirely true.
You can decode mp3 with a pure integer-solution as well (see libMAD for example), and early mpeg/mp3 players were all fixedpoint (I believe the faster Pentium ones were as well, but there were 'quality' ones that used floating point for better accuracy. There were also MMX-optimized players, which obviously were integer as well).

 

[codeman]

I did this mod player long time ago should run on a 286 its all asm code uses advanced gravis .

ken

 

[vwestlife]

Well, there's your answer... You need to downsample to even get it playing, at 100% CPU.
A 486 can easily play a mod with 8 or more channels at 44 KHz, with 10-20% CPU, which will sound better than a downsampled mp3 file.

Only if the module file uses high-quality 16-bit samples, which are a rarity, as most use 8-bit 16.5 kHz samples. Sometimes the drums were sampled at 28 kHz, but usually not the instruments.

Module files still can certainly sound very good, but due to the low sampling rates involved with most of them, there's always a tradeoff between the "sizzle" of using little or no anti-aliasing (a.k.a. interpolation) during playback and the dullness of using full anti-aliasing. Some players attempt to adjust this differently for each sample, using less aggressive anti-aliasing on periodic samples (since they usually contain synthesizer tones, on which the "sizzle" is less objectionable and can actually help to brighten up the sound) and more aggressive anti-aliasing on non-periodic samples.

 

[Plasma]

High-quality digitized samples, skillful tracking, and a player with good anti-aliasing and a touch of reverb on playback can go a long way towards turning a 4-channel MOD file into something that could pass for a Muzak version of Genesis.

Ewww, sounds like an old MIDI file...

 

[vwestlife]

Ewww, sounds like an old MIDI file...

Unless you have good wavetable synthesis, MIDI sounds even worse.

 

[Plasma]

I dunno, I think that's about what Microsoft's crappy soft synth sounds like

I actually prefer OPL2/3 MIDI vs crappy wavetable. But maybe that's just nostalgia.

 

[KC9UDX]

MIDI only ever sounds as good as the instruments you control with it. It's not a sound format at all. Lots of people including myself use MIDI and if you think MIDI sounds like Adlib, you'd never know it.

You can play MP3s on machines with very limited processing. MP3 player cards were pretty popular at one point.

Someone wrote a utility to use the MC56000 on the Delfina to play MP3s. I can play them on a stock A2000 with that. But there were much simpler and probably better solutions, especially for other platforms.

 

[vwestlife]

Someone wrote a utility to use the MC56000 on the Delfina to play MP3s. I can play them on a stock A2000 with that. But there were much simpler and probably better solutions, especially for other platforms.

There's also an external parallel port MP3 decoder for Amigas:

 

[Scali]

Only if the module file uses high-quality 16-bit samples, which are a rarity, as most use 8-bit 16.5 kHz samples. Sometimes the drums were sampled at 28 kHz, but usually not the instruments.

That's not necessarily true.
If you use 16-bit mixing with 8-bit samples, you still get better than 8-bit overall precision, because you apply volume afterwards.
Likewise, if you play notes at a higher pitch than what they were sampled at, you effectively have higher sample-rate.
Aside from that, most replay routines use interpolation during resampling. So the waveforms are smoothed out, removing any aliasing from low sample rates.
The only limit is that you won't get high-frequency components in the source sample, but especially for instruments that don't have these (take bass for example), there is no issue with relatively low sample rates for the resulting quality.

In short: Decently crafted MODs definitely sound better than mp3s at 22 KHz, and you certainly don't need 16-bit samples and high sample rates for all instruments.
And then we're not even getting into the downsides of mp3s yet, at lower bitrates. They have all other sorts of quality issues because of the lossy compression.

As an aside, there is also a hybrid format known as .mo3. It's basically an XM file where the samples are mp3-compressed.
Also, there's a reason for 8-bit samples and 28 KHz in MODs: these are the limits of the Amiga's Paula chip.
So yes, proper ProTracker MODs will have 8-bit samples by definition, and never higher than 28 KHz, because the hardware can't handle it.
Many later songs made with PC trackers still re-used various instruments from Amiga, so even though the PC trackers were capable of better samples, they weren't always used. There was this huge library of great instruments around already.

 

[Scali]

You can play MP3s on machines with very limited processing. MP3 player cards were pretty popular at one point.

Someone wrote a utility to use the MC56000 on the Delfina to play MP3s. I can play them on a stock A2000 with that. But there were much simpler and probably better solutions, especially for other platforms.

Well, mp3 is certainly not cheap if you don't have dedicated hardware for it.
On accelerated Amigas (A1200 with 060 at 60 MHz usually), it is common to use an ADPCM format with 14-bit resolution in stereo as the soundtrack to a demo.
This relies on a simple trick: The Amiga has 4 channels, configured as two left and two right channels, each with 8-bit resolution and 65 volume levels.
By setting the volume of the two channels of a side the right way, you can basically play the low byte of a sample with one and the high byte with the other, and they will be 'added' by the analog circuit that mixes the output of the two DACs to the single channel. This gives you an effective resolution of 14-bit per channel.

They choose ADPCM because it has a very low CPU load, just like the native MOD format. MP3 would work in 14-bit and it would sound good, but it would tie up most of your CPU for the audio.
The 14-bit trick is also used for software mixing sometimes, giving more of a 'PC Tracker' effect on the Amiga, allowing higher resolution, more channels, and techniques such as interpolation.
To increase quality even further, you can also bang the sound chips directly with the CPU rather than letting them use DMA transfers. The DMA transfers are limited to 28 KHz, but if you push each sample manually, you can easily exceed 44 KHz. Even a stock Amiga 500 could play 56 KHz samples with the CPU.

 

[vwestlife]

In short: Decently crafted MODs definitely sound better than mp3s at 22 KHz, and you certainly don't need 16-bit samples and high sample rates for all instruments.

It really depends on the style of music, and whether or not it was specifically composed and arranged to be played in a module format. The biggest problem is that changing the pitch of a sample also changes its speed. With techno/EDM music that is largely synthesizer based, this is not really that noticeable, and taking advantage of the characteristics of modules and trackers in these compositions can become a musical art form unto itself.

But acoustic instruments will come out sounding very artificial because the speed change with each note totally screws up the A/S/D/R envelope. Plus, on instruments that contain tremolo or vibrato, such as strings or an electric organ with the Leslie effect, the speed of the tremolo/vibrato will also speed up or slow down along with the pitch. And unless you use multiple channels per instrument, you cannot overlap notes, to allow the sustain of one note to carry over into the next. The Tandy Deskmate Christmas Medley is a perfect example of all of this, with its highly artificial-sounding piano and strings.

Some module files have attempted to work around these limitations by recording short passages of music into each sample instead of individual notes, such as "Guitar Slinger" and "Electric Church", but that is only practical when the song contains highly repetitive riffs -- and the more you do that, the more your MOD file ends up just being a series of PCM files played in sequence (such as "tjdemo1").

 

[Scali]

It really depends on the style of music, and whether or not it was specifically composed and arranged to be played in a module format.

It's useless to try and compare MODs to MP3s because they come from a different era.
Having fully sampled music soundtracks simply wasn't an option when the Amiga came out. The only common media was the floppy disk, which neither had the capacity nor the throughput to play a whole soundtrack in digital form.
And the CPU did not have the power to use any advanced compression techniques on the audio either.
As said before, MOD is to the Amiga as SID music is to the C64. It's a compact and efficient way to make music on a given platform.

It's rather unusual that MODs and trackers became so popular on other systems as well, which essentially had to emulate the Amiga audio hardware in order to play these files. But that is a testament to how revolutionary the Amiga's audio chip was at the time. Entirely sample-based, where everything else was just a basic synthesizer chip. It gave composers a lot more flexibility than before.

MP3 is more like CD-audio. Sure, once PCs had CD players that could just store the audio, and play it as background music to a game, it was a great option. But prior to that it was rather useless, since PCs couldn't play CDs. So arguing that the CD audio of a game sounds better than the Adlib audio or whatnot is somewhat missing the point.
They aren't competing technologies.

 

[vwestlife]

It's rather unusual that MODs and trackers became so popular on other systems as well, which essentially had to emulate the Amiga audio hardware in order to play these files. But that is a testament to how revolutionary the Amiga's audio chip was at the time.

MODs became popular on PCs because it was a cheap and easy way to cram a lot of songs onto one CD-ROM. At computer shows in the '90s there were tons of CD-ROMs available that advertised "Over 4000 songs for your PC!" All these companies did was just download every module file they could ever find on BBSes, throw in a MOD player program, and put it on a CD-ROM. Usually they didn't even pay any attention to duplicate files, so you often came across 3 or 4 copies of the same song on the disc, helping to boost the claimed number of songs it contained.

At least this one was nice enough to say "No duplicates!"... "A computer music lover's dream!"

 

[Trixter]

MODs became popular on PCs because it was a cheap and easy way to cram a lot of songs onto one CD-ROM.

I don't think that statement is accurate. MODs and their ilk became popular because they allowed for much higher quality audio than using just MIDI or FM synthesized instruments, while not taking up as much space as a .WAV file. Packing a lot of music onto a CDROM came later, after they were already popular. I was filling disk after disk with MODs in 1990; CDROM compilations were several years later. The earliest CDROM dedicated to MODs (similar to the concept of what you posted) I've ever seen was Ultimate MOD Collection from 1992 (which I bought at Chicago's only all-Amiga store at the time).

I see something very interesting in the cover you posted: A year of 1995 and there is a URL on it. It's a ~user URL, but still, that's about a year earlier than when other companies jumped on the bandwagon. Neat.

 

[Chuck(G)]

But acoustic instruments will come out sounding very artificial because the speed change with each note totally screws up the A/S/D/R envelope. Plus, on instruments that contain tremolo or vibrato, such as strings or an electric organ with the Leslie effect, the speed of the tremolo/vibrato will also speed up or slow down along with the pitch. And unless you use multiple channels per instrument, you cannot overlap notes, to allow the sustain of one note to carry over into the next. The Tandy Deskmate Christmas Medley is a perfect example of all of this, with its highly artificial-sounding piano and strings.

Even very good sampled instruments don't admit to much manipulation. Take, for example, a bassoon. The low register has a very different sound texture than the higher registers. Almost any real instrument has a limited range where a sample can be adjusted pitch- and time-wise. I've used tools like Audacity and the old CoolEdit to make minor changes in pitch and time to pre-recorded tracks--it only works across a very small range before it begins sounding phony.

And, as mentioned, real instruments aren't usually pure tones--tremolo, vibrato and articulation are all time-dependent, not to mention attack and release.

 

[Trixter]

It's rather unusual that MODs and trackers became so popular on other systems as well, which essentially had to emulate the Amiga audio hardware in order to play these files. But that is a testament to how revolutionary the Amiga's audio chip was at the time.

MODs became popular on other systems because the audio files were so diverse and of such a high quality. That isn't a testament to the Amiga's design; it was a testament to the talent of the composers. I'm anticipating your next statement to be "trackers wouldn't exist without the Amiga". Possibly, but that's irrelevant. I wrote a PC modplayer to play mods, not to emulate a Paula ;-)

There were ways to compose with wavetable instruments on personal computers before trackers on the amiga. DeskMate 3.x music was noted before, but I'll throw out something earlier: Deluxe Music Construction Set (1986) for the Apple IIgs and Amiga. On the IIgs, samples were limited to 64K but the native Ensoniq hardware could play 15 of them instead of Amiga's 4. I mention these because I think it brings up an even more interesting discussion: Why did Amiga trackers succeed in making wavetable music on the desktop popular, when previous attempts failed? This is even harder to answer given how arcane and unfriendly tracker interfaces are to traditional music writing methods.

 

[Scali]

MODs became popular on other systems because the audio files were so diverse and of such a high quality. That isn't a testament to the Amiga's design; it was a testament to the talent of the composers. I'm anticipating your next statement to be "trackers wouldn't exist without the Amiga". Possibly, but that's irrelevant. I wrote a PC modplayer to play mods, not to emulate a Paula ;-)

I don't think you understood the point I tried to make, so let me try again:
The Amiga was the first machine to have a simple form of 'wavetable synthesis'. That is the revolutionary part. Before that you had sound chips like SID, POKEY, SN76489 and whatnot. Amiga's sound capabilities opened up completely new possibilities.

I certainly won't claim that trackers wouldn't exist without the Amiga. Just look up my earlier post in this very thread, where I point out Soundmonitor on the C64 as an early example of a tracker. The idea of trackers as music editors (even including sample playback, because the C64 could do that on a single channel) existed before it became popular on the Amiga. It's just that things really took off once the Amiga arrived, because its audio hardware was unlike anything that went before it, and going full sample-based completely changed the way computer music sounded. The tracker interface worked very well for 'optimizing' music for a given audio chip (low number of channels, frame-based music routines etc), and it suited the Amiga very well.

And you wrote a PC modplayer to play Amiga mods, so you were emulating a Paula even though you may not have fully realized it
Because you cannot deny that the MOD format is tied VERY closely to the Amiga hardware, down to using the Amiga's timer division for note pitch, and the Amiga's 65-level volume. You had to convert that to something a PC could play, so you were emulating.
It was only the second generation of trackers on PC (Scream Tracker 3, FastTracker 2) that actually moved away from the Amiga, and evolved into something more native to the PC hardware at the time.

There were ways to compose with wavetable instruments on personal computers before trackers on the amiga.

That's not really the point. The point is that the Amiga was the first home computer where the stock hardware was aimed at wavetable, so you didn't have to burn all your CPU on software mixing at low quality.
MODs didn't really come into their own on the PC until we had fast 386/486 systems, where you actually had enough CPU power to get good quality mixing AND have enough CPU left to do an actual game or demo in the foreground. An Amiga could already do that in 1985 (it's just that it took a few years for the actual tracker software to mature on the platform, but I was talking about the hardware capabilities that made it possible).
DeskMate or DMCS aren't anything like ProTracker. Neither in sound, in user-interface, nor CPU-load. This is a pars-pro-toto fallacy.

I mean, I'm not sure if I have to point this out to anyone... but on an Amiga, playing back a MOD takes virtually no CPU at all. You just need to update a few registers every frame, a fast replay routine can play back even the most complex songs on Amiga in about 10 scanlines time. Which is similar to the cost of SID music on a C64 for example.
On other platforms it's very different, because they have to perform CPU-intensive software mixing. You shouldn't compare the two. MOD was not designed for PCs or software mixing. It was designed for Amiga, for playing high-quality music in the background of a CPU-intensive game or demo.
Which it did very well:

 

[Scali]

Or perhaps this one:

Other computers from around 1985 have nothing on this.

There is a painful bit of irony in the fact that once CPUs became fast enough on PCs, that games and demos started using software mixing and use the soundcard as nothing more than a 'dumb' DAC to play Amiga music (literally, a lot of early games and demos use MODs made in ProTracker on Amiga), rather than using the onboard synthesizer.
Which, as I said, is a testament to the Amiga, which pushed audio chips in home/personal computers into new directions.
Once MODs became popular on PC, new soundcards emerged which had RAM-based wavetable capabilities, such as the Gravis UltraSound or the Sound Blaster AWE32. More or less Paula-on-steroids.

 

[vwestlife]

The Atari ST (which predates the Amiga, if just slightly ) can play MOD files as well. The sound is only mono unless you have an STe, and I don't know what the CPU load is like, but it certainly can be done.

 

[Scali]

The Atari ST (which predates the Amiga, if just slightly ) can play MOD files as well. The sound is only mono unless you have an STe, and I don't know what the CPU load is like, but it certainly can be done.

Yes, it can do it, poorly, while eating all your CPU (because it is using the CPU to try and emulate the Amiga hardware). Heck, we've shown that even a stock IBM 5150 from 1981 can play MODs...
You can't use that as background music for a game or demo. Which was the whole point.