Wondering how SUPERLEMMINI GOT the AMIGA MOD MUSIC FILES

[ericderkovits]

Hey Tsyu I and perhaps Willem were wondering where you got your Amiga mod music files as Willem is using your mod ones in His neolemmix Amiga Conversion Project. He mentioned that the neolemmix ones have different instrumentation so are not Amiga ones and the only ones I could find were in .ogg. It's really hard to find music files now in mod so I am asking where you found yours. also ogg ones seem to fade. also many music files people use for neolemmix are in ogg (ie Lemmings united) and kaywhn also said those fade. Nowadays is very hard to get music in mod(preferred way since their smaller in size than ogg but just too hard to find music in mod).

NOTE :probably from the lemmings archive. I see lemmings, oh no more lemmings, and holiday lemmings from Mindless
    and lemmings2 and lemmings3 from Tsyu were ripped but how did they rip them.

[Tsyu]

Yes, the MOD files that come with SuperLemmini are from The Lemmings Archive, along with a few small modifications that I did myself.

Regarding the Lemmings 2 and 3 music, I converted them from MED to MOD format by reading documentation on the two formats and writing my own converter to do most of the work (although I still had to change tempos and slides manually). I had posted about this earlier; you can read it here: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=1803

The Ogg files that you're referring to (which are in the optional enhanced music pack) do not come from the Amiga version but rather from certain DOS versions that use CD audio (the very same format that standard music CDs use). Unfortunately, yes, most of them do have fadeouts, because that's how they were on the game CD, and "undoing" the fadeouts is either very difficult or impossible for many of them.

The reason it's so hard to get music in MOD format is that very little music actually exists in a MOD or MOD-like format. Most recorded music is (and, since the invention of the phonograph, always has been) distributed as straight recordings. MOD (and similar formats), on the other hand, is basically sheet music with sound clips. Yes, MIDI (which is also basically sheet music, but without sound clips) is widely used in music production and performance today, but it's rarely done in a way that's suitable for distribution to the public as MIDI files (and even when it is, most artists and record companies simply don't bother distributing them for various reasons).

[Dullstar]

Midi files are pretty much just sequences of notes, and contain minimal instrument data - specifically, they have instructions related to what instrument should be used, but don't actually contain the instruments - those have to be provided elsewhere. As such, they sound incredibly low quality on most consumer setups, particularly as Windows' built-in midi instruments are not very good (I believe they're rather lossy compressions of samples from the Roland SC-55, but I'm not 100% certain; they do sound quite similar, however, but the SC-55 actually sounds somewhat passable). They can be used as inputs for equipment/software that makes actually good sounds, which is how they've managed to remain relevant, although my understanding is that generally you wouldn't want to release the raw MIDI itself; rather, you want to release the output from your fancy setup that, you know, actually sounds good.

.mod and related formats such as .it and .xm have sequence data, but they also have associated samples/instruments. This makes them larger than .midi files and smaller than a recording. At one point, these were great - you had more control than with .midi, but you didn't have to use the sheer amount of storage space a recording would require. The fact that you're just using a few samples and playing them back at different rates, however, imposes a limitation on the quality of the output. It's generally better than what you get out of MIDI on a typical consumer setup, but now that distributing recordings generally isn't an issue, so now you can do all your recording on some fancy high quality set-up and then just distribute the recording. And if you just want to use a sequence of note data to control your fancy piece of hardware/software, MIDI is significantly more widely supported. There ARE some newer formats (e.g. .mptm) that are similar to .mod but have stuff like VST support, but the VST plugins complicate distributing them in their original format, so it's often more practical to just distribute a recording.

As such, the main niche for the .mod format is for making stuff that sounds kind of like an old Amiga game. There's certainly more you can do with it than that, but at a certain point you leave what's practical and instead are clearly pushing the limits of what the formats are capable of, which can be an art in its own right, but if you're just trying to make quality music it's usually more practical to use more up-to-date methods.

It shouldn't be surprising that it's possible to find these files for Amiga games, however, because mod-like formats were extremely common for Amiga games. They were a good compromise between the small size of midi sequences and the quality you can get from a recording, and the Amiga's sound hardware was particularly well-suited to it.