Topic: Weird obscure thread of tracker music nostalgia

[idolminds]

Way back when I was a lad I got into tracker music. More advanced than playing a midi file, but not up there with MP3s. Obviously I liked the idea of downloading high quality music that was usually 1MB or less in size.

I never got a large collection of the stuff. Even though they were small it always sucked picking up a crappy track and it took time to find, download, and listen to all this random stuff. I did eventually happen upon an artist that went by the name "Alk". I liked his stuff...well, the few tracks I could find.

Fast forward to more recent times. I've always wanted to find a portable MP3 player with trakcer playback support. With the filesizes of the songs generally so small you could fit a TON of music on even the smallest players. Sadly that never happened...until now. I got myself an iPod Touch and the Modizer app! Portable tracker music is a go! One of the cool features of the app is it has built in browsing and downloading from a couple of mod archive sites. First thing I search for is Alk.

Boom! On the Modland archive I find a bunch of his stuff! Lots of it I had never heard before. I am happy. It gets me into remembering the old tracks I downloaded ages ago. I tried to remember the names of some of them but came up empty. So tonight I decide to dig through my old CDRs and find those old tracks. Yes, I backed up everything.

Ah, good times. Hey wait a sec, this song was made by Alk...but I didn't get it from that archive site. Thats weird. I wonder if I can submit it to them. So I track down this Modland site. Its really just a big FTP site so I can upload these missing songs, so thats cool. I better make sure and double check they don't already have them. They have a web interface to search the archive...lets see, artist name "alk" should do it.

243 results. It turns out the tracks I downloaded earlier in life and the tracks I grabbed with Modizer was just the tip of the iceberg. It only downloaded the tracks the program supported (makes sense), but Alk apparently used this other format a hell of a lot more! Something called Psycle.

So now Im on a mission to find a way to playback all these songs. This is awesome.

[Cobra951]

Awesome!  I was into MOD music quite a bit, 7+ years ago.  I had an app on my Dell Axim to play them.  I still have a folder full of them.  I'm looking through it now.  I suppose a lot of indie music is still produced this way, and then released as MP3s.  I know I've posted some MODs here before.  Great stuff for the size it takes up, especially back when it mattered.

Edit:  I always come back to this one (404 KB).  Doom SFX nostalgia.

[Quemaqua]

I'm a huge MOD music fan, and have done some composing myself (there's actually a thread around here somewhere, I think, when I got ScreamTracker working again and did the music for that Dwarf Fortress thing where we were trying to get everyone to play).  I'm totally looking into this when I have some time.

[idolminds]

So that Psycle program is a go. It seems to be missing some VSTs to properly playback some of these songs, so I'm going to try track those down. But it totally plays back a bunch of these tracks. Its great. Though to get them on my ipod I'll have to make MP3s out of them.