I couple months ago I started listening to music I hadn’t heard in over two decades.
The reason I’d drifted away from listening to it is that the music files are MOD files. I’d updated my OS to MacOS X and didn’t have an OSX-native player for MOD files.
What (you might ask) is a MOD file?
They are files of generally less than 1/3 of a MB. They natively contain a batch of very small snippets of sound recording. Plus a program that designates when to play each snippet.
I have the vague notion that they were originally intended to be a mechanism for providing sound for computer video games, specifically on the Amiga platform, but I don’t know if I read that somewhere or came up with it on my own. At any rate, they assumed a life of their own, as creative compositions.
I had one stuck in my head, earworm from another era: Doxmopolitan II. Finally went online and found a native program that will open and play the things, Player PRO for OS X. Of course I still had the sound files, I’m a digital pack rat extraordinaire. (I still have most of my emails from 1991 onwards, both to and from, not to mention all my college term papers written in MacWrite 4.6).
I remember those. They were an upgrade from MIDI files. MIDI files only had the “instructions” for the music but no actual audio. MOD files could sound pretty good by comparison.
This was before MP3s became popular/practical or probably even existed. Most MP3 songs are 3 megabytes+, and at 56k would take about 10 minutes to download.
Yes, I know. I had one (Sound Trekker, I think it was called) under MacOS 9. Then in the early days of OS X there wasn’t one. And I forgot about them. There certainly is now. I’m using Player Pro, as I said in the OP.
Whoa, now I’m feeling relieved that I can still play my old audio files, from the Napster/Limewire days. Luckily, mp3s from the late 80s/early 90s still work fine. I guess they’re like the JPEGs of sound… “good enough”, lossy, but ubiquitous.
