Hi folks,

I recently found out about a musician called "Front 6". He has a very minimal presence online and his stuff seems to mostly be from the 90s.
The only substantial source of his music I could find that is publically available is from a website called "DemoZoo", and most of his tracks are in .mod format or .xm files.
https://demozoo.org/sceners/2282/

Upon downloading (one by one), VLC plays these tracks normally, so I'm confused as to why every audio conversion software I use gives me an error when I try to convert these to mp3.
My guess is that these file formats are intended to be played back on a specific kind of software/hardware, that VLC just so happens to be able to play back, but not other software.

Is anyone familiar with these formats or have heard of them, and are able to shed some light into this ghost composer's work and how to convert it to a more standard format?

 

Yep those are made with protracker and fasttracker. Modules, mod files. Its like almost like an archive that has instructions on which notes to play and sample files stored in it. That's why the files are so small. Perfect for sharing at the time.

The chiptune scene sort of existed separately from regular commercial music and was more closely tied to the demo and warez scenes. Certainly no publicists or money paid for advertising.

To convert to them I would use foobar2000 with the openmpt plugin. As long as you can play it you can convert it. But Im sure there are many methods.

 

Last edited: May 10, 2023

On windows, download ffmpeg (from eg. https://www.gyan.dev/ffmpeg/builds/)

Run command prompt (as admin, if needed), maybe put ffmpeg and your file in a directory for convenience.
use

Code:

ffmpeg -version

and check for --enable-libopenmpt. If it's there you re good to go.

for .mod and .xm respectively the command is:

Code:

ffmpeg -i input.mod -codec:a libmp3lame output.mp3
ffmpeg -i input.xm -codec:a libmp3lame output.mp3

input ofc being the name of your file and output what you want.

 

I use XMplay to play the module and route the audio to a wav or flac file. you can then encode the wav to mp3 with lame mp3 encoder.

 

Last edited: May 10, 2023

if you are on windows you could use freeware https://openmpt.org/ too

 

I use ZXTune. Works on Windows/Linux/MacOS/Android.

Start zxtune-qt.exe. Click the [X] next to Samples in the GUI to clear the default playlist, drag & drop the files/folders in, right-click and 'Save as' - not 'Convert'.

 

wow, thanks for the responses guys! will try those out, thanks,