Understanding Amiga Mods
 

Hello all,

I admittedly come from the 8-bit world, and have only been getting into the Amiga for the last 10-15 years, so please interpret my questions in this light.

When I discovered MOD files, and listened to a few, I was astounded at the clarity and quality of the sound, and almost immediately looked into doing the same thing I had done with "SID" files: building up a nice big collection of familiar MOD tunes I could bob my head to while working on another things.

However, after spending several hours scouring the intertubes, I'm noticing a strange pattern. It appears that there are almost NO familiar MOD tunes. There are plenty of mod files to choose from -- just nothing familiar to me. It's easy to find familiar SIDs, but not MODs. WHY? I decided that it might be because of the years of relative popularity of the machines, so I compared SIDs from 1989 with MODs, but the pattern held: lots of popular familiar songs ported to SID format, but everything in MOD format was unfamiliar (I assume either game tunes or original music?).

Can anyone help me understand this?

Thank you,
- Bo

You mean "popular songs made into MODs"?

The simple answer I can find is that Amiga people were a lot more interested in creating their own music, than in doing covers.

Also with crappy 8-bit sounds, trying to replicate a much more complex song is a bit of a challenge, especially with limited channels. When sampling is at your disposal, this wears thin VERY quickly. You can use any sound you can possibly hear, why do covers? Much better to do your own thing.

Also Amiga came later, I would guess by then people interested in computer music making had learned a lot more and are not interested anymore in covering. Many times you do covers when you are learning up things.

The other factor I could put in, is that the Amiga scene is mostly Europe-centric. You are from the US, there are plenty of cover songs on Amiga, but I bet they have to do with whatever was popular in Europe instead of what you grew up with.

This would be my guess, and I for one applaud and welcome that the AMiga music archives are not just full of shitty covers. It's a testament to the historical creativity of Amiga users.

Yeah, the amount of covers is not as high as on the SID side of things, but stuff like Axel F has been done plenty of times. :-)

Ciao bozimmerman, take a look HERE, surely you will find something that interests you.

That link exemplifies very well what I conjectured about an eurocentric scene :D

I love conversions of SID files in Amiga format

I don't like instead the emulated playback (PlaySID)

I prefer to listen to original SID file indeed

Which i totally dislike is the lack of a big and well organized collection like HVSC

But this is probably due to the multi formats modules of Amiga world

I mean, for C64 only SID format exists

This doesn't happen for Amiga, with ProTracker as the main format + a lot of other Exotic formats

So, this extremely high number of formats probably discourages people from creating an ALL IN ONE archive

At least, this is my supposition :agree

I would not say they are famous guppies all over the world ;)

That exists, it's just that most people don't delve into it.
It's called Modland
https://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Special:Modland
It just doesn't come in one lazy zipfile, especially because it's MUCH MUCH LARGER than HVSC.

And there is a reason.
.SID is a full "container": not only the data but also the 6510 code.
This is possible because music player/data is small and host can cheap emulate CPU/SID.

For 680x0/Paula/custom is not so simple, better use an explicit format or WinUAE :)

Thanks for info ross

For Akira

You are right, modland is a great collection, i was missing that

Also another great collection exist and it's called AMP

http://amp.dascene.net/

For me, it was always about making something new instead of covering. As mentioned, it didn't make sense since sampling was so easy. I rather sample something and create something 'new' with it.

Why not just use an all in one player such as Eagle Player or Deli Tracker for example?

Modland isn't a great collection, it's an all-encompassing, multi format archive, really. Like HVSC.

If they can interest some other links of musical modules:

http://amiga.modules.free.fr/index.php?dir=mods_files

http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_searchbox

There's another collection of Amiga modules

Even if it's hidden in some way

Here

http://www.amigamega.com/amigamega.html

MEGA_XTRA01