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Topic: Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux? (Read 8620 times) previous topic - next topic
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Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

I currently use ModPlug Player to listen to and decode module files (mod, xm, it, and s3m are some popular file name extensions, although _many_ others do indeed exist) and I want to know whether this is the absolute best application I can use to decode modules. If so, what is the Linux equivalent? Thanks very much.

PS: * Adam looks forward to soon listening to crystal-clear modules on portable MP3/CD player. :-)


Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #2
Modplug will sometimes play a mod incorrectly or add a few glitches / oddities that would not appear if they were played in the original software they were created in (fasttracker, screamtracker, impulse tracker, etc.)

XMplay is generally recommeded for "accurate" playback of mods -- http://www.un4seen.com/ -- or the BASS library in general.  I remember hearing there's a version of BASS in the form of a winamp plugin, so you can use winamp as your mod player (winamp's default mod player totally sucks btw)
seanny.net

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #3
Definitely go with XMPlay. It is THE choice for accurate playback of tracked music. It's also a pretty good program in general.

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #4
The best MOD "decoder" is ProTracker on Amiga, the best XM "decoder" is FastTracker 2 for DOS, for S3M it's ScreamTracker 3 for DOS and for IT it's Impulse Tracker for DOS. Actually the word "decoder" should be replaced with "player" as these files are ment for arrangements of samples and not one big waveform which was "encoded" specifically. So using the original applications which were used to create them would play them 100% like the composer intended the songs to sound like. Apart from that there are some newer trackers which offer Winamp plugins with the original player routine, so using these it would actually sound 100% original.

Basically Winamp's default MOD-Player sounds very bad. But it all depends on which effects (like portamento slides, vibrato, volume slides and retrigger etc.) are used in the songs and if the player interprets them correctly. From my experience I can say that I was always well satisfied with the Oldsk00l plugin for WinAMP.

But perhaps somebody should make some MODs, XMs, ITs and S3Ms in order to create some test environment which makes excessive usage of portamento and volume slides. Obviously someone would need an older computer with a SB16 ISA soundcard or Gravis Ultrasound to create them.

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #5
Quote
Obviously someone would need an older computer with a SB16 ISA soundcard or Gravis Ultrasound to create them.

My mom's PC is a Pentium 166 with a SB16 ISA card. I guess it would be well suited for the job.

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #6
That sounds good. If you are into tracking at first I'd suggest to do a Volume slide test:

Several lines of slight volume slide down (effect A01 in MOD/XM) until the sound is not hearable anymore. After that copy it to the next pattern and but delete the row with the last A01 command so that the sound remains hearable at a low level.

This is to test the volume slide playback accuracy. If the used player plays either the first pattern in a way that the sound is still hearable or playes the second one in a way that the sound is not hearable it has got no accurate volume slide interpretation. Obviously the same thing should be done with on different BPMs (not equal to 125) and different speeds (not equal to 6) as most players play it right on the standard values but do it wrong on different BPM and speed values.

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #7
Hi all,

Ahh mod files, so many memories .. anyway, here's two players you all might be interested in, besides ModPlug..

I recommend DeliPlayer under Windows, which supports the myriad of formats which exist on the Amiga platform, aswell as the common PC tracker formats such as S3M, XM, IT, MTM, etc..

DeliPlayer Homepage

The equivalent of DeliPlayer under Linux is UADE (for Amiga module replay), which comes both as a standalone program and as an XMMS plugin. UADE uses m68k emulation (from UAE - the Amiga emulator) to run the original Amiga DeliTracker replay code.

UADE Homepage

Those of you running Debian, apt-get install soundtracker .. nice tracking program which supports MOD and XM files, uses GTK1.x and resembles FastTracker II.

Happy replaying

Lem.


Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #9
Thanks everyone. I do agree that Winamp's player sucks and it has a length problem with some files that have loops in them (displaying _very_ wrong times, looping a piece that's not supposed to loop only the number of times _you_ set the plug-in to loop, not what it was meant ot loop). I'm going to go with one of your suggestions. I would love to play the MOds in Winamp using one of what is mentioned here but, if it involves non-100 % conversion to WAV, I'll just pass on that option. I want a 100 % reproduction player and conversion to WAV (if it's all-in-one, better!). Whatever does that gets my pick. Thanks... :-)

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #10
This makes me want to get all nostalgic dig out the old asm s3m player a friend and I wrote 10+ years ago, though I don't know if it would actually be useful...

Pros:
- 100% assembly
- Most accurate effects of any s3m I was aware of at the time aside from screamtracker itself
- Excellent Gravis Ultrasound support

Cons:
- 100% assembly (and not particularly good either)
- 16-bit dos code
- Could divide by zero or GUS burp on some modules that put goofy data in unused samples as comments
- Doesn't do click reduction of any kind (most players do this by crossfading sample changes slightly)
- Missing a couple rare effects (which is true of most players believe it or not, ours was more complete than many)
- Only supported GUS

I have an old pentium 100 with a GUS lying around for exactly this sort of thing.  Ya know, it's really one of the great tragedies of the world that the GUS wasn't a bigger success.  At the time, it really blew Soundblasters out of the water in terms of features, quality (it had 16-bit support first, hardware mixing way before SBs, was a cinch to code for and free SDK vs. $$$ SDK and a pain to code for the SB, GUS burps rule, etc.)  Soundblaster already had support in games though and was the "standard part"...
I am *expanding!*  It is so much *squishy* to *smell* you!  *Campers* are the best!  I have *anticipation* and then what?  Better parties in *the middle* for sure.
http://www.phong.org/

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #11
Deliplayer supports loads of formats I wish foobar could play... If only someone would write some kindof wrapper to let us use the deliplayers plugins with fooby

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #12
Just to clarify for the topic of this thread:

DeliPlayer supports rendering to WAV files, with effects.

The same can be achieved with XMMS and UADE/ModPlug, using the DiskWriter output plugin.


Lem.

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #13
Quote
This makes me want to get all nostalgic dig out the old asm s3m player a friend and I wrote 10+ years ago, though I don't know if it would actually be useful...

Miss the good old days of BBS ...

Too bad most of the musician gone(?!) and some of them go MP3, I almost forget how to use Fast Tracker II and Impulse tracker.

Still think that MOD or latest MO3 can preserve best size and bandwidth, but tracker is a bit difficult for nowadays youngsters.

Recently only the Future Crew make great MOD music.
Hong Kong - International Joke Center (after 1997-06-30)

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #14
Quote
Recently only the Future Crew make great MOD music.

"recently"?  Is this the same Future Crew from the early 90's? :P

Try Disk (part 2) and Appelsap both from MD (of the legendary FiveMusicians & TPOLM).  Great, modern musicdisks that really take advantage of and push the limits of the mod (or XM) format.

And many "professional" artists came out of the tracking scene such as LackLuster (aka Distance), Kschzt, and the Warp Records -signed Brothomstates (aka Dune of Orange).

As for releasing in pure MOD format nowadays... almost seems like a lost cause, aside from "cool to be oldskool" factor or playability on slow/limited devices such as handhelds
seanny.net

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #15
Quote
Recently only the Future Crew make great MOD music.

What? Is Future Crew STILL ALIVE???!

Loved the soundtrack of the Second Reality demo.

Quote
At the time, it really blew Soundblasters out of the water in terms of features, quality (it had 16-bit support first, hardware mixing way before SBs


Not to mention 48 kHz. I eventually had to sell my GUS MAX because the Windows 95 driver sucked. What a good sound card 'twas. 'Doubt it was better than my Terratec EWX 24/96 though

BTW, making music with trackers was considerably easier than with Cubase + softsynth + drum machine. You could whip up a song in matter of minutes. I guess you can get much better quality with recent tools, but it still doesn't seem worth the tradeoff. Old habits die hard, I guess.

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #16
IN_BASSvsMoSG version 0.0.3

BASSvsMoSG plug-in allows Winamp to play mod/umx/mod/s3m/it/mo3/mtm/mdz/s3z/itz/xmz/all above packed
modules like XMPlayer does and grab samples from mod/s3m/xm/it modules like MoSG does

http://trackers.pp.ru/soft/plug-in/in_bassvsmosg.zip

ModulesSampleGrabber(MoSG) version: 0.1.0_gui
http://trackers.pp.ru/soft/util/mosg2.zip


In_Bass module player plugin for WinAMP 2.x

In_Bass is a module player plugin for WinAMP 2.x which uses the BASS library for far better sound quality and exact replay of IT and especially XM modules. What you might miss is a smooth time bar and the possibility to read song texts for songs other than the one that's actually played, but if you don't need that, you should use this plugin instead of the default in_mod. The current release of the binaries is 1.8.0, kindly provided by Hans "Kvasi" Molin. Note that the sources (VC++ 6.0) are slightly outdated by now.

http://www.copro.org/copro/e6/e161/index_en.html

You need the BASS audio library 2.0 (BASS.DLL) for this plugins:

http://www.un4seen.com/files/bass20.zip

Don't forget to rename the in_mod.dll plugin to in_mod.dll.bak or something, or the BASS plugins won't work.
\"The R.I.A.A. is out there\"

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #17
Speaking of mod files, check this site out - has over 105,000 mods across 188 different file formats:

ModLand FTP

There's a downloadable index file of the site which can be used for searching for specific mods. This site is great for rebuilding lost mod collections

Lem.

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #18
FC (Abyss in particular) does a lot of the organization for Assembly.  Also, some of them were interviewed for the Mindcandy demoscene DVD.  What's that you say?  You don't OWN Mindcandy?  Good thing there was a recent repress; otherwise you'd be screwed.
I am *expanding!*  It is so much *squishy* to *smell* you!  *Campers* are the best!  I have *anticipation* and then what?  Better parties in *the middle* for sure.
http://www.phong.org/

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #19
umm, wait..... the assembly still exists? 

*someway feels remembered to his reaction when a demoscene member joined his channel a few weeks ago*

Yes, composing with trackers was indeed much easier - even for beginners. It also felt more intuitive to me than the now "modern" tools. I mean, heck, the main disadvantage of trackers imho was that they were sample-based instead of instrument based. The way they worked was imho just fine. So, if the sample-based approach of trackers would have been replaced with an instrument-based (soundbanks) approach, one would have had a quite powerful tool usable even by non-techies.

Anyways, to add something on-topic: i would go with a player/plugin which uses the BASS library. Never heard it making a single mistake with my modules.

- Lyx
I am arrogant and I can afford it because I deliver.

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #20
Hi
Can anyone tell me what options I should use in XMPlay to have a most accurate as possible FT2 or IT reproduction ?
Did FT have interpolation, or volume ramping, etc ?

Best module (*.MOD) decoder for Windows & Linux?

Reply #21
Quote
Hi
Can anyone tell me what options I should use in XMPlay to have a most accurate as possible FT2 or IT reproduction ?
Did FT have interpolation, or volume ramping, etc ?
You can set mod playback to FT2 mode.  I don't know if it bothers to accurately represent the old trackers' volume ramping or interpolation... if you want that level of accuracy, you may as well install the real FT2 and IT.  I have ramping on sensitive and interpolation on 8-point sync, and it all sounds good to me.  You can read all about that here -- http://support.xmplay.com/Guide_Options_Mod.html

Also, RenderXM was released as freeware (formerly it was commercial) last week.
seanny.net