If you're talking about older demoscene stuff (i.e. 80's/90's), most of that music was released in tracker formats (i.e. MOD, S3M, IT), not MIDI.

For game MIDI music, I like this site: http://www.mirsoft.info/gamemids.php Some of those old 90's era game tracks had a lot in common with demoscene stuff at the time.

Shponglefan wrote:

If you're talking about older demoscene stuff (i.e. 80's/90's), most of that music was released in tracker formats (i.e. MOD, S3M, IT), not MIDI.

Yeah, that's the thing. Does anyone know of a DOS / Windows player that supports these formats? Particularly MOD files?

Shponglefan wrote:

For game MIDI music, I like this site: http://www.mirsoft.info/gamemids.php Some of those old 90's era game tracks had a lot in common with demoscene stuff at the time.

I did come across several sites with game midi music - didn't know about that one tough - thanks 😀

Winamp (with the correct plugins) supports all of these formats.

A nice MOD type player for Windows is Mod4win 2.40b (I've used it since the 90's on my retro PC's), but it is a bit more resource intensive than an equivalent DOS based player. It even has direct support for GF1 and OPL4 based (like the Audiotrix Pro) sound cards that has onboard RAM.

A nice DOS based MOD player (that supports most of the different formats) is Inertia Player.

I'm sure the other users on Vogons can suggest more players.

jesolo wrote:

Winamp (with the correct plugins) supports all of these formats. […]
Show full quote

Winamp (with the correct plugins) supports all of these formats.

A nice MOD type player for Windows is Mod4win 2.40b (I've used it since the 90's on my retro PC's), but it is a bit more resource intensive than an equivalent DOS based player. It even has direct support for GF1 and OPL4 based (like the Audiotrix Pro) sound cards that has onboard RAM.

A nice DOS based MOD player (that supports most of the different formats) is IPlay.

I'm sure the other users on Vogons can suggest more players.

Thanks! The GF1 support is a nice bonus, but unfortunately I only use the GUS in DOS.

Does anyone have a source of cool .MOD files?

http://modarchive.org/ is a good place for MOD, S3M, IT, XM and even some AHX stuff.

Sedrosken wrote:

http://modarchive.org/ is a good place for MOD, S3M, IT, XM and even some AHX stuff.

Can someone explain how those formats relate to midi? I'm interested in this subject too, but I know nothing about these formats.

I have an MT32, an MT200 and an SC7, along with a Roland UM One USB Interface and it'd be nice to play music through them outside of games.

The plan was to listen to midi on my SC-55 - from what I gather mod files don't play trough MIDI devices witch is unfortunate... I was hoping for a source of midi music...

@Sedrosken - thanks for the link

jesolo wrote:

Winamp (with the correct plugins) supports all of these formats. […]
Show full quote

Winamp (with the correct plugins) supports all of these formats.

A nice MOD type player for Windows is Mod4win 2.40b (I've used it since the 90's on my retro PC's), but it is a bit more resource intensive than an equivalent DOS based player. It even has direct support for GF1 and OPL4 based (like the Audiotrix Pro) sound cards that has onboard RAM.

A nice DOS based MOD player (that supports most of the different formats) is Inertia Player.

I'm sure the other users on Vogons can suggest more players.

Don't play tracker files with Winamp. For the love of all that's good, just don't do it. I can't *believe* people still do this or recommend it to others in 2016.

Same with Mod4Win - it was never a "good" player back in the day and the replay routines for the formats it handles (does M4W even support ITs? I don't think so...) are completely out of date and much better options exist. (The only valid reason to use it IMO is the direct hardware support, but again there are better options.)

For DOS I use (Open) Cubic Player, whatever the last DOS version was (2.6.0 beta it seems.) It's not 100% accurate and has a few bugs, but it plays a ton of formats mostly very well and has so many playback & visualization options it's not funny. It will even play mp3s, but has trouble with more modern encodings. It supports hardware mixing on GUS, AWE, OPL4, etc.

Fun fact: since OCP went open source it got ported & shows up in the repos for most Linux distributions and even MacOSX so you can run it on those too. It's a great program.

Of course you can always go back to the native tracker (IT, FT2, etc) for perfect replay.

For Windows far and away the best player for any tracker format (& mp3, wav, flac, etc.) is XMplay, and yes, it will even run on w98. HEAPS more accurate replay than Winamp (or VLC, or anything based on the old libmodplug for that matter), and actively developed with better format support being added all the time. You can add the libopenmpt plugin to handle the odd format it doesn't cover.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Sedrosken wrote:

http://modarchive.org/ is a good place for MOD, S3M, IT, XM and even some AHX stuff.

Can someone explain how those formats relate to midi? I'm interested in this subject too, but I know nothing about these formats.

Tracker formats (mod, s3m, etc.) include both multi-track sequences of musical notes, but also include audio samples of the instruments/sounds in the song. MIDI on the other hand doesn't include any audio data.

Some examples of tracker based music used in games include Star Control 2, Unreal, and Crusader: No Remorse.

I see. So a tracker based... erm... track... would sound the same on any system, without relying on external sound samples at all? Sort of like if you could attach a sound font to a midi file and it always used that sound font when it was played (though even that would be dependent on the hardware playing it).

That's pretty interesting. Definitely explains how games had decent quality music that wasn't MIDI back in the day. I think the Command and Conquer series used MOD files. I remember editing and modding those games back in the 90s and I was puzzled by the fact they needed the CD to play music and yet the music was in files that were large but not large enough to be full 3 or 4 minute high-quality .wav files. Now I understand why!

So basically, tracker based files are interesting in that they are still being "played" in real time, but they have nothing at all to do with midi sound modules and don't really utilize any special sound hardware?

The rough concept was the same as GM in that you used sampled instruments to play audio according to a big list of volume and pitch changes. The fundamental differences were that GM, GS, and XG provided a standard set of instruments, often on ROM, and dedicated hardware was generally used to play audio from RAM or soundfont whereas MOD files were intended to be rendered via host CPU and played back via PCM out.

The GUS was a special case in it's ability to easily load samples and manipulate them in hardware. That made the GUS platform very popular in the MOD scene.