You probably heard one of the many "reproductions" of commercial music in .MOD format. There are plenty of them (and way too much Depeche Mode and 2Unlimited at that)

Also, I think I may know the exact music player you're talking about.

I remember being impressed by the WOWII player by Jan Ole Suhr when playing MOD files on my PC with an SBPro2 and AR 570 desktop speakers. ModeX graphics, fast per-channel oscilloscopes, and stereo sound better than any other player I had heard at the time.

Am I getting warm?

Interia Player?

I *think* this was the one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=N3k-nAkhiCU

More info here:
http://www.awe.com/mark/dev/modplay.html

I remember running Winamp on my 486 under Windows 95. It was juuuust barely capable of playing a MOD file without skipping if I didn't try to do anything else at the same time. (Goold ol' Catch That Goblin!)

There was one MOD player that was less resource-intensive that worked with AWE cards, but I seem to recall it wouldn't work with the tiny amount included by default on an AWE64.

Anyway, someone mentioned a while ago that apparently PopCap's games still use tracker music.

simbin wrote:

edit: I think it may have been MOD or a variation of it, like S3M?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module_file has a list of a bunch of different formats.

simbin wrote:

I think I had "Big in Japan"

Hahaha, I had the same one.
http://cd.textfiles.com/ultimatemodc/MODS/A/ALPHAVIL.MOD

Jorpho wrote:

There was one MOD player that was less resource-intensive that worked with AWE cards, but I seem to recall it wouldn't work with the tiny amount included by default on an AWE64.

Cubic Player is very fast and has AWE support.

WinAMP's in_mod sucks, and was introduced way after the 486's prime 😀 what I used for windows then was Modplug Player 1.2x

leileilol wrote:

WinAMP's in_mod sucks, and was introduced way after the 486's prime 😀 what I used for windows then was Modplug Player 1.2x

Oh man, remember MOD4WIN? Shit was pro.

SquallStrife wrote:

leileilol wrote:

WinAMP's in_mod sucks, and was introduced way after the 486's prime 😀 what I used for windows then was Modplug Player 1.2x

Oh man, remember MOD4WIN? Shit was pro.

The final version was free. Still use it on my machine as it does hardware playback on the Dream 9407 chip.

MOD4WIN is ok as long as you get hardware playback running. This even works within NT4 with some additional configuration. As Rich stated it even supports the Dream9407 native (well Kay Bruns worked also for Terratecs EWS64 software).
There are somequirks still, as f.e. XM playback draws still a lot of CPU with native GUS and no IT support.

I usually use XTC-Play in Multitasking Mode as background player in Win on older computers with hardware accelerated sound cards.

Cubic Player is also ok, but requires a bit more CPU power. Also GUS PnP hardware support was not working reliable. The options for visual presentation and live changing of playback devices, interpolation etc. are very advanced.

For background playing in DOS the capamod_tsr is compatible.

Cubic Player was by far the best... it lives on as OpenCP but requires VDMSound to work last time I played with it... I'm pretty sure it works in DOSBox too

you don't know what "mod files" are unless you experienced demos from people like Future Crew