Yes. But after MOD->MIDI conversion and with completely lost MOD instruments which are usually mapped to some MIDI instrument that sound close enough. Worse yet, most of the mappers support General MIDI, and you further should either load General MIDI emulation to MT-32 or remap to MT-32 instrument set. To get best possible results, you should create custom MT-32 instruments that mimic sounding of those in MOD if possible.

In short, no. Not in any meaningful way. MODs are meant to be MODs.

Yeah, it would be nice if there were support for instrument uploads, as was seen with the SB AWE in Cubic Player (and a few others I think). Unfortunately it doesn't seem to exist.

MusicallyInspired wrote:

In short, no. Not in any meaningful way. MODs are meant to be MODs.

Not the absolute trues. There are examples when a MOD actually sounds better after conversion. Especially, back in the DOS era, a good MOD player was very rare which proposed more than ZOH or linear interpolation. But I cannot object the fact the converted MIDI never sounds as the original MOD 🤣

I thought about something different, not converting to midi, uploading the samples of a mod to the mt-32 and playing them.

Unfortunately, MT-32 is not a GUS/AWE32 in any way. All the PCM samples are stored in a ROM and cannot be changed on the fly. When you upload an instrument to a LA synth, you may just select 1 to 4 of those samples and the way they are mixed (not mentioning synth partials).

sergm wrote:

Not the absolute trues. There are examples when a MOD actually sounds better after conversion. Especially, back in the DOS era, a good MOD player was very rare which proposed more than ZOH or linear interpolation.

MODs are meant to be played on an Amiga, not on a PC, and certainly not with any kind of software mixing or interpolation 😀 (The Amiga didn't mix or interpolate either... it had 4 DACs, which were fed through 4 variable-speed DMA channels, so samples could be played at any speed without having to interpolate in any way).
Yes, MOD players on PC were and often still are, bad.
There's one exception and that's ProTracker Win32: http://16-bits.org/pt.php
Because it's built by studying the original ProTracker Amiga sources, and it also tries to actually model the Paula soundchip in quite good detail.
This, or running the real ProTracker in WinUAE, is the closest thing you'll get to a proper MOD player on PC.

Please, do not start pointless discussions like whether samples are "played at any speed without having to interpolate in any way". This do not get us anywhere. There is NO DAC exist that would perform this way.

sergm wrote:

Please, do not start pointless discussions like whether samples are "played at any speed without having to interpolate in any way". This do not get us anywhere. There is NO DAC exist that would perform this way.

Sure there is.
The simplest DAC just converts its digital input signals to an analog signal of a given voltage.
The rate at which you change the input is your sampling rate. The 'changing of input' is done by the DMA controller. The DMA controller has an internal counter to control its speed. It counts down at every clock cycle (and in the case of the Amiga, the clock runs at 3.5 MHz), and emits a new byte/word whenever the counter reaches 0.
So there is no interpolation/stretching/resampling applied to the samples whatsoever. You just play the samples at a given rate.
See here for more info: https://bel.fi/alankila/modguide/interpolate.txt

Next time, try not to be so sure of yourself.

You misunderstand. Any DAC implies an interpolation filter. This is a bit of DSP knowledge, not electronics. Having realized that, you'll get that Amiga used hardware interpolation and mixing. And this is why it played MODs way better than any attempt to do so on a PC without proper hardware. But now, it is a piece of cake to emulate 4-channel PCM player with high-quality resampling. I am sorry for not clarifying my point at the beginning, a bit busy... 😀

No, you misunderstand.
An Amiga does not have 'a DAC', it has 4 DACs.
The only 'mixing' that is done is in the analog realm, because the 4 DACs are grouped together, two for the left channel, and two for the right channel. Which has nothing to do with how mixing is done in PC players.

Also, 'interpolation', at least in the sense of MOD players, is talking about the resampling of a sample to a different output rate, because you are performing the replaying on a fixed output rate, because you only have one DAC, and need to perform mixing.
I also specifically said that in the part you responded to, so the context should have been clear: "played at any speed without having to interpolate in any way". So I was clearly talking about applying interpolation to play samples at different speeds.
The Amiga does none of that. Because each DAC runs at an individual rate, as I already said.
Your mention of 'any DAC implies an interpolation filter' sounds like convoluted nonsense to save face to me (the DACs in the Amiga are extremely primitive (probably little more than an R-2R-ladder and an analog low-pass filter), and just output simple pulse waves, so forget about your 'interpolation filter' stuff like modern DACs do). I really don't think you should have responded.

Bottom line is that PC hardware works in a completely different way from an Amiga (even a GUS), and therefore it's very difficult to make them sound the same. Add to that the lack of experience and knowledge, and the limits of the target hardware, and most MOD players on PC were and are pretty horrible.

Please, do not start pointless discussions. "an analog low-pass filter" is essentially the interpolation filter. I can't understand why are you so angry. "Everybody's got to learn sometimes". 😀
OK, turning back to the subject. Due to the fact that most PCs in old DOS times lacked DSP-capable hardware and speed, it was really advantageous to convert a MOD to MIDI and send it for playback at a hardware synth. Including MT-32 likes. A synth may compute output samples, not play at a given speed. So, after some effort, a MOD converted to a MIDI may well sound better than even on Amiga. The only downside of this approach is you need to manually map and probably edit the instruments (not mentioning voice instruments which MT-32 is certainly unable to play).

sergm wrote:

Please, do not start pointless discussions. "an analog low-pass filter" is essentially the interpolation filter. I can't understand why are you so angry. "Everybody's got to learn sometimes". 😀

As I said above: "played at any speed without having to interpolate in any way". Which in itself was a response to you bringing up the linear interpolation that MOD players do: "a good MOD player was very rare which proposed more than ZOH or linear interpolation."
Clearly you weren't talking about interpolation filters done at the DAC stage either, but about resampling to match the samples at the correct pitch for a fixed output frequency.
You're being a jerk, pulling the word 'interpolate' out of the context in which it was used, and using it in a completely different context. Everyone can see what you're doing (and it is you who is starting the pointless discussion here).
A context I am not unfamiliar with, as you can tell from my response, so you can drop the smugness and arrogance as well. You are the one who needs to learn. Both about how an Amiga works, and about how to conduct yourself in a pleasant manner.

sergm wrote:

OK, turning back to the subject. Due to the fact that most PCs in old DOS times lacked DSP-capable hardware and speed, it was really advantageous to convert a MOD to MIDI and send it for playback at a hardware synth. Including MT-32 likes. A synth may compute output samples, not play at a given speed. So, after some effort, a MOD converted to a MIDI may well sound better than even on Amiga. The only downside of this approach is you need to manually map and probably edit the instruments (not mentioning voice instruments which MT-32 is certainly unable to play).

In practice that is not going to work very well.
Since the Amiga only had 4 channels, samples would often consist of entire chords. There would also be entire drum loops encoded in single samples.
There's no way to 'convert' such a MOD to MIDI, because not all the note data is stored in the MOD file. You'd have to reconstruct the notes played in these 'combined' samples manually.
Another complication is that the note pitches may not necessarily be correct. That is, the notes in a MOD merely control the relative pitch of the sample. So if you write a C in the note data, it is only played at the pitch of a C if the sample is at the correct rate. That is not necessarily the case.
And then there's the fact that MIDI does drums in a special way: you have a single 'drums' instrument, and each note plays a different type of drum.
In MODs each drum is a different instrument (sample). There is no way to automatically determine which samples are drums, and therefore it is not possible to remap MOD drum instruments to MIDI commands.
Not to mention the fact that you can play the MOD drums at any pitch, and perform all sorts of effects on them, which isn't possible in MIDI.

In short: playing MODs on MT-32, or any kind of MIDI device is not possible.

Scali wrote:

There's no way to 'convert' such a MOD to MIDI, because not all the note data is stored in the MOD file. You'd have to reconstruct the notes played in these 'combined' samples manually.

Sure there is. A LA synth is more capable than Amiga. And an effort is really need to be spent, as I said above.

I will not respond on anything other, keep it for yourself. I just note, that this approach worked in reality. That's the fact you can either ignore or accept. I personally do not care. 🤣

sergm wrote:

Sure there is. A LA synth is more capable than Amiga. And an effort is really need to be spent, as I said above.

We are talking about converting MODs automatically (as in, with some kind of replayer software). This is not possible. You can 'convert' a MOD manually, by simply rewriting the entire tune. But that's not the point here.
Even then, as said above, not everything you can do in a MOD is possible on an MT-32 (such as the aforementioned voice samples).

Yes, for some small subset of MODs it may be possible to get some kind of meaningful MIDI files, after some amount of automated conversion and hand-editing, and some attempts at that have been made in the past. But that was not the question here.
The question here was:
"Hi, is it possible to play MOD-Files on a MT-32 ?"

The answer to that is: no, you can't play MOD-files on an MT-32.

If you want to know the hairy details... The most powerful MOD2MIDI tool is 2MIDI: http://www.un4seen.com/2midi/
Read through the manual and see how much configuration you have to do to set up the converter for each MOD file... which hopefully results in something halfway meaningful in the end.

easy easy...

where does this question come from?
- a have an old bridge-board a2286 in my a2000 with limited power 286/8 and can only put one sound card in it (8bit)
- i have to choose either a mpu-401i with an mt-32 behind it, or an ct1350b

I choose the MPU401i because there are lots of old games that support it. Beside that I tested with this limited 286/8 and the glx-player with the ct1350b.
this works really great, even with 22khz. But then I choose the DAC behind the Zipdrive as alternative, but this does not work very well because using
a DAC means much more CPU-Power but the machine is limited to 286/8. There came the idea of player the mod-files through the mt-32. As you mentioned:
NO way for that.

Having a PC like this, I guess the best way to play MODs is via AWE32. It offers pretty good playback quality using the dedicated player that utilizes EMU8k capabilities. But then, you choose what's in the ISA slot...
Though, you might also consider SoftMPU way, if you had a 386.

dr.zeissler wrote:

Hi, is it possible to play MOD-Files on a MT-32 ?

XMPlay: http://support.xmplay.com/

Fantastic audio player, plays everything. I use it to play .MOD /.XM /.IT /.S3M etc along with standard audio formats since it does those as well. XMPlay can actually (also) fix a lot of the aliasing problems that the original Amiga hardware exhibits. So you won't need an MT-32 to fix the quality problems 😉

As a bonus reverb and whatever else can be applied, although I generally don't.

No, does NOT play everything. Has problems with special formats (SNDH, SOC, etc.)