Some time after making some music in renoise, through the mists of my early memories i recall something. In the first half of the nineties, when almost everybody had atari, and not everybody had a tape or cd player, there were “the modules” around. The diskettes passed on from one to another, and they contained a song file to fasttracker2(bet it was .xm or something). Those songs were often recorded by some teenagers or kids even, so the performance quality and composition weren’t the best, so most of them are just silly, but some are quite cool. Anyway when i talk to people from various cities in age 25-40 about that topic they do remember the same titles, so i guess single “bedroom made” song could have been heard by most teenagers back then.
I wonder if such a thing was only present in Poland? I’ve tried to find such modules from other european countries but have found only some from Ukraine.
Don’t treat it seriously but to show you what I mean:
This definitely happened in Australia. It was a cool time. A lot of us couldn’t afford an internet connection, so we’d be on the hunt for CD-ROMs that had collections of modules collated from BBSs. Several of my high school friends played module music more than commercial music. Nostalgic memories of pressing my ear up the computer tower just to hear 4-channel *.MOD files: Dr. Awesome. Major Tom. 4mat. Then we found FT2 on a CD-ROM and went totally crazy with making our own techno. Around that time (96) I was introduced to fabulous music by Mick Rippon, Hunz, and Xerxes plus many other ‘one hit wonders’. Later on I got plugged into the web and had an awesome time discovering very unique music by people like It-Alien and Distance (Lackluster). Other projects like IT and Buzz hinted new possibilities… yet…
A few years there we the darkages of tracking. Everything faded and lost direction for a while. But sure enough Renoise plus a few other legacy projects have helped to restore and preserve the tracking flame.
Hey, I used to do that too! Inertia player worked with the PC speaker, so that’s what I used before I got my 1st soundcard on our 486. Since the tower was on the floor, and the PC speaker was on the bottom of the case, my dad even built a little wood platform for me so it raised the speaker so it would be louder. Many hours were spent laying on the floor listening to mods and s3m’s by Jester, Leviathan, Purple Motion, etc…
Ok, so now i know a little more and It-Alien posted a link to some old tracker files… Didn’t knew that tracker music was so developed back then! Just started listening, i started form Keith303’s works(absolutely interstellar got me into renoise few months ago). Old, brilliant sounding techno out there!
don’t rely on Renoise for MOD and XM playing, they are not reproduced correctly because backward compatibility with older formats has not never been taken in serious account in Renoise, favouring future development.
XMPlay was betatested by me during 1998-2001 period and I can say from my experience that for XM replaying it reaches perfection; similarly, MilkyTracker does a surprisingly good (I may say: perfect) job in XM replaying.
yeah right, it’s funny to see phrases like “I sucked like an anemic leech”… Now I’m generally more serious than that, but I still write some strange novels sometimes. My music instead, is maybe less serious and dark than before.
musicdisks directory @ scene.org contains many musicdisks (so were called the applications you described), maybe some of the filenames triggers your memory?
During mid 90s Amigas were fun to use, even so much I continued “Amigatradition” after a few years break by getting myself two MorphOS capable machines. I can safely say the MorphOS years have been without doubt most fun in my over 25 years in computing… it was a shame I had to sell my computer a couple years ago to get through a difficult financial period… who know… I might return some day
