Overview
Mod music (or chiptunes or tracker music) describes the genre of computer music started in the '80s and '90s on C64, Amiga, and other home computers, using their hardware capabilities to create music. Often tracker software is used to describe which note or sample is played when and how. Today there is a wide variety of different formats, from many different computer systems (old vintage hardware like Spectrum, C64, Amiga, Atari, but also newer systems).Each computer system comes with its own fascinating music style, often based on limited capabilities of creating sound. For instance, the C64 was only barely capable of playing generic samples. The sound chip SID is able to generate different wave forms and noise with a nice sound characteristic but due to flexible programming interesting music can be generated. The Amiga on the other hand had four independent voices capable of playing generic samples. Those four voices were originally able to play 8 bit samples at up to 28 kHz but with additional software approaches up to 14 bit resolution, higher sampling rates, and more voices were possible. Later, on the PC, more advanced tracker formats have been used but basically the method is always the same.
I like this kind of music art and even if those formats are originating from old computer system, it is possible to play these files on modern hardware. It is of course possible to use emulations of such old hardware, but software players exists too which are able to reproduce the original sound (more or less). In the following, I list the programs which can be used to play specific file formats. Since I prefer free software and free software operating systems, I concentrate on GNU/Linux but often the software runs on other operating systems as well or similar software can be easily found.
List of players
| File format | Player software | Additional information |
|---|---|---|
| Mod (mod.* or *.mod) | xmp, MikMod, or OpenMPT | Original Amiga tracker format |
| Med/OctaMed | xmp, MikMod, or OpenMPT | OctaMed Amiga tracker software |
| *.xm | xmp, MikMod, or OpenMPT | FastTracker 2 |
| *.s3m | xmp, MikMod, or OpenMPT | ScreamTracker 3 |
| *.it | xmp, MikMod, or OpenMPT | Impulse Tracker |
| *.ahx | UADE | AbyssHighestExperience |
| *.aon | UADE | ArtOfNoise |
| *.bp | UADE | Sound Monitor |
| *.cus | UADE | |
| *.dw | UADE | David Whittaker |
| *.fc3 or *.fc4 | UADE | Future Composer |
| *.fred | UADE | FredMonitor |
| *.hip | UADE | |
| TFMX (mdat.* or *.tfmx) | TFMX-Play or UADE | The Final Musicsystem eXtended |
| *.ay | Aylet | Sinclair ZX Spectrum format |
| *.sid or *.psid | SIDPlay2 SidplayFP |
C64 SID format |
| *.sap | ASAP | Atari SAP format (8-bit systems with POKEY soundchip) Standalone CLI player can be build with make asap-sdl |
| *.ym | STYMulator | Atari YM format (16-bit systems with Yamaha soundchip) |
| *.sndh | sc68 | Atari ST format Use SVN version for best support. |
| *.hvl | hvl-replayer | Amiga Hively Tracker format |
Further reading
- Overview of module file formats
- Additional information about computer music on Amiga and other systems: https://www.exotica.org.uk