|
MO3
MO3 is a tracker module file format developed by Ian Luck for the BASSMOD engine. MO3 files contain samples encoded in the MP3 or Ogg Vorbis formats, rather than straight PCM samples. This results in reduced file size for the module, while maintaining almost identical audio quality. Lossless audio encoding is also supported, for samples that do not compress well with lossy encoding. The format's name is a portmanteau of MOD (file format), MOD and MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin .... Despite the name, five other tracker formats are supported besides MOD: Scream Tracker, Scream Tracker 3 (S3M (file format), S3M), FastTracker 2 (XM (file format), XM), Impulse Tracker (IT (file format), IT), OpenMPT (OpenMPT#MPTM file format, MPTM) and MultiTracker (MTM). See al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Module File
Module file (MOD music, tracker music) is a family of music file formats originating from the MOD file format on Amiga systems used in the late 1980s. Those who produce these files (using the software called music trackers) and listen to them form the worldwide MOD scene, a part of the demoscene subculture. The mass interchange of "MOD music" or "tracker music" (music stored in module files created with trackers) evolved from early FIDO networks. Many websites host large numbers of these files, the most comprehensive of them being the Mod Archive. Nowadays, most module files, including ones in compressed form, are supported by most popular media players such as VLC, Foobar2000, Exaile and many others (mainly due to inclusion of common playback libraries such as libmodplug for gstreamer). Structure Module files store digitally recorded samples and several "patterns" or "pages" of music data in a form similar to that of a spreadsheet. These patterns contain note numbers, in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
XMPlay
XMPlay is a freeware audio player for Windows. Initially released in 1998, it is often used as a reference player for tracker audio files. Overview Developed by ''Un4seen Developments'' in 1998, it originally only supported the XM file format of Fast Tracker II, from where the name "XMPlay" originates. XMPlay is able to handle many tracker file formats, as well as widely used music formats such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, Opus, WAV, WMA, as well as many less common formats, through plug-ins found on the website. Plugins from the Winamp audio player can also be used to extend XMPlay's capabilities. XMPlay is very powerful yet lightweight software: the whole package only takes up less than 360 KB. The software also offers typical audio player features, such as being able to play internet radio streams, organizing music files into playlists and the visualization of sounds generated by real-time animations. Changing the look of the software is also available through skins. A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vorbis
Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjunction with the Ogg container format and it is therefore often referred to as Ogg Vorbis. Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery. Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format. The Vorbis project started as part of the Xiphophorus company's Ogg project (also known as OggSquish multimedia project). Chris Montgomery began work on the project and was assisted by a growing number of other developers. They continued refining the source code until the Vorbis file format was frozen for 1.0 in May 2000. Originally licensed as LGPL, in 2001 the Vorbis license was changed to the BSD lic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pulse-code Modulation
Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form of digital audio in computers, compact discs, digital telephony and other digital audio applications. In a PCM stream, the amplitude of the analog signal is sampled regularly at uniform intervals, and each sample is quantized to the nearest value within a range of digital steps. Linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) is a specific type of PCM in which the quantization levels are linearly uniform. This is in contrast to PCM encodings in which quantization levels vary as a function of amplitude (as with the A-law algorithm or the μ-law algorithm). Though ''PCM'' is a more general term, it is often used to describe data encoded as LPCM. A PCM stream has two basic properties that determine the stream's fidelity to the original analog signal: the sampling rate, which is the number of times per second that samples are taken; and the bit depth, which determines the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lossless Compression
Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistical redundancy. By contrast, lossy compression permits reconstruction only of an approximation of the original data, though usually with greatly improved compression rates (and therefore reduced media sizes). By operation of the pigeonhole principle, no lossless compression algorithm can efficiently compress all possible data. For this reason, many different algorithms exist that are designed either with a specific type of input data in mind or with specific assumptions about what kinds of redundancy the uncompressed data are likely to contain. Therefore, compression ratios tend to be stronger on human- and machine-readable documents and code in comparison to entropic binary data (random bytes). Lossless data compression is used in many ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Audio Codec
An audio codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream (a codec) that encodes or decodes audio. In software, an audio codec is a computer program implementing an algorithm that compresses and decompresses digital audio data according to a given audio file or streaming media audio coding format. The objective of the algorithm is to represent the high-fidelity audio signal with minimum number of bits while retaining quality. This can effectively reduce the storage space and the bandwidth required for transmission of the stored audio file. Most software codecs are implemented as libraries which interface to one or more multimedia players. Most modern audio compression algorithms are based on modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) coding and linear predictive coding (LPC). In hardware, audio codec refers to a single device that encodes analog audio as digital signals and decodes digital back into analog. In other words, it contains bo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Portmanteau
A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsGarner's Modern American Usage , p. 644. in which parts of multiple words are combined into a new word, as in ''smog'', coined by blending ''smoke'' and ''fog'', or ''motel'', from ''motor'' and ''hotel''. In , a portmanteau is a single morph that is analyzed as representing two (or more) underlying s. When portmanteaus shorten es ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MOD (file Format)
MOD is a computer file format used primarily to represent music, and was the first module file format. MOD files use the “.MOD” file extension, except on the Amiga which doesn't rely on filename extensions; instead, it reads a file's header to determine filetype. A MOD file contains a set of ''instruments'' in the form of samples, a number of ''patterns'' indicating how and when the samples are to be played, and a list of what patterns to play in what order. History The first version of the format was created by Karsten Obarski for use in the Ultimate Soundtracker, tracker software released for the Amiga computer in 1987. The format has since been supported by hundreds of playback programs and dozens of other trackers. The original version of the MOD format featured four channels of simultaneous audio playback, corresponding to the capabilities of the original Amiga chipset, and up to 15 instruments. Later variations of the format have extended this to up to 32 chann ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scream Tracker
''Scream Tracker'' is a tracker (an integrated multi-track step sequencer and sampler as a software application). It was created by Psi (Sami Tammilehto), one of the founders of the Finnish demogroup Future Crew. It was written in C and assembly language. The first version (1.0) had monophonic 4-bit output via the PC speaker, as well as 8-bit output via a digital-to-analog converter on the parallel port or a Sound Blaster 1.x card. The first popular version of Scream Tracker, version 2.2, was published in 1990. Versions prior to 3.0 created STM (Scream Tracker Module) files, while versions 3.0 and above used the S3M (ScreamTracker 3 Module) format. The last version of Scream Tracker was 3.21, released in 1994. It was the precursor of the PC tracking scene and its interface inspired newer trackers like Impulse Tracker. As of version 3.0, ''Scream Tracker'' supports up to 99 8-bit samples, 32 channels, 100 patterns, and 256 order positions. It can also handle up to 9 FM-synthesi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
S3M (file Format)
''S3M'' (Scream Tracker 3 Module) is a module file format, the successor to the STM format used by the original Scream Tracker. Both formats are based on the original MOD format used on the Amiga computer. The S3M format has many differences compared to its predecessors. * The format is a hybrid of digital playback and synthesized instruments. The official format specification document covers space for 16 digital channels and 14 synthesized ones with two unused slots out of a total of 32. * Separate volume channel in pattern data. * Supports more instruments than MOD or STM (99 instead of 31). * Default panning of channels can be specified by the composer. * Extra-fine pitch slides are added * Instruments are not limited to a fixed sample rate for a given note. The format stores the instrument's sample rate at middle C. The period table used by S3M is smaller than the one used by the MOD format (only 12 entries, compared to between 36 and 60 for the MOD variations) and uses larger ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
FastTracker 2
FastTracker 2 (also referred to as FastTracker II) is a music tracker created by Fredrik "Mr. H" Huss and Magnus "Vogue" Högdahl, two members of the demogroup Triton (who later founded Starbreeze Studios) which set about releasing their own tracker after breaking into the scene in 1992 and winning several demo competitions. The source code of FastTracker 2 is written in Pascal using Borland Pascal 7 and TASM. The program works natively under MS-DOS. History In 1993, Triton released FastTracker. This tracker was able to load and save standard four channel MOD files, as well as extended MOD files with six or eight channels (identical to standard MOD files, aside from the extra channel data and ID markers "6CHN" or "8CHN"). It was only compatible with Creative Labs' SoundBlaster series of sound cards, which were most popular on the PC at that time. The whole editor was a single 43 KiB DOS executable. Through 1994, the musicians in Triton released some songs in a new multi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
XM (file Format)
XM, standing for "extended module", is an audio file type introduced by Triton's FastTracker 2. XM introduced multisampling-capable instruments with volume and panning envelopes, sample looping and basic pattern compression. It also expanded the available effect commands and channels, added 16-bit sample support, and offered an alternative frequency table for portamentos. XM is a common format for many module files. The file format has been initially documented by its creator in the file XM.TXT, which accompanied the 2.08 release of FastTracker 2, as well as its latest known beta version2.09b The file, written in 1994 and attributed to Mr.H of Triton (Fredrik Huss), bears the header "The XM module format description for XM files version $0104." The contents of the file have been posted on this article's Talk subpage for reference. This documentation is however said to be incomplete and insufficient to properly recreate the behaviour of the original program. The MilkyTracker pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
