Straylight Productions, Purple Motion, Skaven, Etc? Mod Tune Fans Out There?

[[DE]Momaw]

Just wondering if anybody else out there is of an age to remember the mod scene and all the great music that came out of it. :)

 

Found myself listening to the Unreal soundtrack, which is mod (the .umx music it uses are an upgraded flavor of impulse tracker file).  Unreal was made in part by Digital Extremes...

[DivisionByZero]

Nice to see that mod tunes haven't gone extinct. I listen to a lot of them, even these days.

Purple Motion and Straylight Productions are classics. You forgot to list Elwood, though.

I also listen to music from Unreal and Unreal Tournament.

They're a reminder of the good old days of PC games where:

-A premium game cost half of what premium games cost these days

-Internet connection wasn't mandatory for 99% of games.

-Video game music was memorable and actually good to listen to. These days, most premium games have lousy "orchestral" music (also known as background noise)

-Games could run with decent frames per second even if you didn't have a proper video card.

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Another thing is that mod tunes take up a much lower amount of space than equivalent MP3/Ogg Vorbis music because of their structure. A mod tune/"module" is a set of samples and a set of directives and patterns, with a header for title/artist/album. A 400 KB high-quality mod tune could easily take up 5-6 MB if translated to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis formats.

Directives and patterns reference the sample set, so if a sound is used 100's of times in a mod tune, it only takes as much space as if it was used once. Directives and patterns could also apply various effects to samples.

I would guess that there are 2 main reasons why mod tunes have mostly disappeared. The first is that after the year 2000/2001, disk space started increasing a lot. There was no reason to impose heavy-duty compression for music and sound, except for cell phone ringtones and cell phone apps. The other reason is that different mod tune interpreters supported different effects - a mod tune that sounded good in one interpreter might sound garbled in another interpreter if an effect was missing or worse, if the effects were misinterpreted.

[[DE]Momaw]

Purple Motion and Straylight Productions are classics. You forgot to list Elwood, though.

 

If I listed every musician that has made mod tunes I liked...   :P