Talking 'bout the old sk00l music here! (Recommed me a Mod Player, please?)

Support & Help Requests
#1

I'm looking for a recommendation from people who are into the old skool mods who can help steer me in the right direction. I recently heard that the Mod Archive is still around and downloaded the entire thing via their torrents for people to be able to keep passing around the files with. Initially I just went with Rhythmbox but it seems to hate me for some reason so I trawled my collection of old Windows software until I found my copy of WinAMP 2.x and associated addons. Life seemed well and Wine worked swell except for the visualizations.

Then I was reading through the Mod Archive site and I saw this text:

in_openmpt is a plugin for Winamp that takes over the majority of module replaying responsibility for Winamp. This is a very good thing - because Winamp out-of-the-box (standard package) does a terrible job of replaying many modules. If you are going to use Winamp, we will only recommend it if you install the OpenMPT plugin.

So seeing as how basically all these years I've been doing it wrong, could I get some recommendations for Linux to playback all these mods I've downloaded? Thanks!

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#2

No one?

No one else listens to the old skool mod music on Ubuntu and can recommend something better than Winamp for me?

#3

I don't even have an idea what you are talking about with "mods".
Personally I love Clementine, but have no idea if that would work for you, My entire library is .mp3.

#4

I suspect @bornagainpenguin is talking about Amiga SoundTracker audio files, which have a file extension of .mod (if I remember correctly).

@bornagainpenguin, a nice list of MOD-playing apps is available at Wikipedia as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amiga_music_format_players. A quick glance at the list reveals that Audacious, Timidity, VLC and XMMS all have support for MOD files but Rhythmbox has no designation on the list. That's the best advice I can give you right now, since I don't have any old MOD files to test with, and quite frankly I'm not that interested in testing the support. Sorry.

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#5

I don't even have an idea what you are talking about with "mods".

It's as @gordon says. These are the old Amiga 'tracker' mods. They predate mp3s and are an incredible work around and innovative method to get high quality sound in very limited file space. They were basically a collection of samples zipped into an archive with a text file detailing which sample to use when. It was brilliant and not only were there incredible remixes possible by this method, most of them fit on a floppy, leading to the name: Music on Disk. Mods.

Then after Mods were various other types of module trackers, all with their own formats and extensions. It was wild. I miss those days some times.

So after a while people started making plugins to popular music players (such as WinAmp) which allowed for most formats to be playable by one player. I used to use Winamp until as the article I quoted stated I discovered that WinAmp allegedly had the worst implementation. And now I'm looking for a better player for these files...

PS: Thanks @gordon, I check out the list and see what sounds best to me.

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