About MOD Music

Mod music is similar to a MIDI file in that the musical sequence, or what it is to play, is stored in the file. It is different than a MIDI though because it also stores the instruments themselves in the file. This is cool because they do not conform to a specific instrument set, and can have any sound imagineable as instruments (Voices, sound effects, exotic or better sounding instruments). If done right, MIDI music can be quite good, but if done equally good, MOD music can simply kick ass.

MOD music originates to back in the day on Amigas, where those computers could mix sounds like PCs didn't dare dream of for years to come. On PCs when multiple sounds play they have to be mixed together by the CPU and put out through one WAVE output (although newer soundcards are changing that these days - Most old cards only allow one Wave output to play at once). So hence the instruments in MOD music are mixed together as they play. MODs can range from having 4 channels (levels that instruments can play on, max amount of instruments that can play at one time) to 16+ channels. The more channels and more instruments playing at the same time, the more CPU usage. That used to be a downside to MOD music, however with todays CPUs (PII class and up), this is hardly a concern. Most songs take up a miniscule amount of CPU time in Unreal and hardly effect gameplay.

Why is MOD music better than CD music? Well, CD music is basically the best quality you will find, as are mp3s and waves, but the space they use up, even super compressed mp3s or waves that sacrifice quality for filesize, is far greater than most MOD songs. You can have a good MOD song that is as small as 50k or so using few and small instrument samples. I would approximate they average around 300-400KB, but they vary greatly in size based on how many instrument samples and of what quality is used. Some people make MODs in excess of 1MB, but they usually don't get much bigger than that. Length has almost nothing to do with the filesize, and MODs can range from a few seconds to a half hour plus in length. But all-in-all you will get a great sounding tune and almost always it will be done with a far superior filesize-to-length ratio (like a 500KB song that lasts for 10 minutes as opposed to a 10 minute song being 1/6th of a CD, 50-100MB+ in high quality WAVE format, or 10MB in mp3 format). I like MODs, can you tell? :)

What file formats are MOD music? MOD music formats stem back to the programs they were tracked in, however nowadays you can use a tracker like Modplug Tracker and save as any of these formats. .MOD (Amiga Modules, usually low amount of channels), .S3M (ScreamTracker 3), .STM (ScreamTracker 2), .XM (FastTracker 2), .IT (Impulse Tracker), and the more rare .FAR (Farandole) and .669 (ComposD) formats. Unreal supports all of these formats. There are a few other formats I have seen that aren't supported by Unreal... Those include .MED and .OKT, I have found very few of these myself though. Other formats include compressed files (compressed with programs like Modplug Player) which are usually able to be decompressed and saved just fine in a normal format.

What are some good MOD players? By far the coolest and my favorite player is Modplug Player. It has lots of features, supports most formats, and sounds great. It has many cool features that let you tweak the sound to your liking, and it all-around just kicks ass. Another MOD player is one you probably already have, Winamp. When it first started to support MODs it just absolutely sucked. Then they worked on the support some, and it still sucked, but fixed a few problems. Finally they seem to have fixed about all the problems in it and it seems to play most MODs fairly well. I refuse to make it my default MOD player though as it doesn't compare to Modplug Player (although Winamp's installer probably tricked you into registering MODs under it, among various other things). Then there are the oldschool MOD players. MOD4WIN (You can find it at parts unknown, try a search engine) was the only Windows MOD player for a long time, and I still like its sound better in some cases (probably just because its so old school :D). Then there are the trackers themselves, Scream Tracker not only makes, but of course plays them quite well.

Where can I find MODs? By far the best collection of MODs on the internet can be found at www.modarchive.com. They have thousands of them. Check out Modplug Central for information about MOD music and links to other MOD resources. Of course if you want only the best music, you ought to find a smaller site than Modarchive or talk to some people who know a lot about MODs and have a lot of them and they can direct you to the best stuff :)

I hope this sheds some light on the file format that many don't seem to know exists when I ask them about it.

Thats all folks.  Check other Music tutorials out.

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