[hnlmorg]

That’s not how these mods are created though.

They are composed on trackers and the mod files are more akin to a MIDI file than they are “waveforms and shit”. At least not if you talk about “waveforms” in the PCM sense of the term.

The evolution of these mod files is an interesting one. Epic were the ones who most leaned into this for commercial uses. Games like the original Unreal and Jazz Jackrabbit 2 had some awesome sounding music and was the same mod files.

As a much younger nerd and hobby hacker too, I always wondered how those keygens were so small in size yet sounded so modern. Took years before I learned about trackers. I was pretty late to the game on that one.

[sdenton4]

The tracker space is weird and full of twisty passages... Sampling was a common starting point for the basic sounds. The cool thing about tracker files is that they would include all the pcm samples, so people would build up their library of sounds largely by getting them from other people's files... A few would create their own samples by recording things out in meatspace, or do delightfully weird stuff like drawing waveforms.

From there, a given tracker would have all kinds of shenanigans available for manipulating the audio, in addition to whatever one wanted to do in an external audio program with a full effects stack.

Once you noodle around with synthesizers a bit, everything looks like either an oscillator or a transform... and who cares what the oscillator is.

[hnlmorg]

Interesting reading that because the trackers I used didn’t support sampling. If I recall correctly, they were just tone generators. So you had to define waveforms like you might for a VSTi in a modern (by comparison) sequencer. Albeit without the fancy UI of a VSTi, any piano roles, nor the drag-and-drop placement of bars of music.

It was kind of like writing music in hexadecimal.

I wasn’t particularly good at it though. I much preferred the workflow of a sequencer to a tracker.

[sdenton4]

Oh yeah - the tracker itself wasn't the sampler, but one would often import sampled waveforms (or borrrrrow 'em from other tracks). I seem to remember fasttracker ][ (which i spent a ridiculous amount of time with as a teenager) had some 'draw a waveform' functionality which is possibly the worst sound interface imaginable.

[hnlmorg]

Hahaha I hadn’t used fasttracker ][.

Sounds like you had a lot of fun in it though?

[tscherno]

Sound can be synthesised out of few basic waveforms. It’s the most common approach.

[hnlmorg]

Yes, I know how sound can be synthesised. That’s not the point I was making though. The point is those mod files are generated from trackers rather than programming any SFX chips directly.