MOD Player Online

How the MOD Player works

What a module is

A module is a song and its instruments in one small file. Instead of recorded audio it holds short samples — a snare, a bass note, a few cycles of a string pad — and a list of patterns that say which sample plays at which pitch on which channel, row by row. The player builds the music at playback time, which is why a four-minute Amiga song can fit in 100 KB. The format was born with Ultimate Soundtracker on the Amiga in 1987, spread through the demoscene and game music of the 1990s, and is still written today in OpenMPT, MilkyTracker and Schism Tracker.

The formats this MOD player reads

The player is the libopenmpt library, the playback engine of OpenMPT, compiled to WebAssembly. It reads every common tracker format and most of the obscure ones.

Common tracker formats and where they came from

Packed and wrapped files are also read: MO3 (modules with Vorbis-compressed samples), UMX (Unreal Engine music packages) and MMCMP, XPK and PowerPacker compressed modules.

The settings

• Times through plays each module that many times end to end. Most modules loop back to a point in their order list when they finish, so the second pass picks up from the loop point rather than restarting cold, just as the original tracker would.
• Stereo separation sets how far apart the left and right channels sit. 100% is the module's own panning. Amiga MODs hard-pan channels left and right, which sounds odd on headphones; 40 to 60% folds them towards the centre. 0% is mono and 200% exaggerates width.
• Interpolation chooses how samples are resampled to the playing pitch. None gives the gritty, aliased sound of an early PC sound card; Linear is what most 1990s trackers used; Cubic and Windowed sinc are smoother and cleaner. Tracker default lets libopenmpt choose, which is usually the windowed sinc filter.

Playlists

Every drop adds to the list rather than replacing it, so you can bring in files from different folders. The modules render one after another with the same settings and play as one continuous track, and the waveform shows the whole playlist. Rendering is offline and takes a fraction of a second per minute of music on a typical laptop; the progress bar shows each module as it renders.

Exporting

Export writes exactly what Preview plays: the whole playlist, at 48 kHz stereo, as 16-bit or 24-bit WAV or as MP3. If you want one file per module without the playlist, use the MOD to WAV converter, which renders each file separately.

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