The Mod Squad

The origin of the MOD isn’t mysterious. They aren’t strange alien creatures from Mars that just landed. MODs have been around since the days of the Amiga. The Amiga used the chip that fathered the Mac, so it was inevitable that they would show up on the Mac. MODs don’t just exist on Macs and Amiga machines, they exist on PCs, Unix, Sun and probably even CGI machines. The best part is that they don’t need any special translation or conversion to be passed from one platform to another. Throw it on a disk or attach it to email and poof! Music!

MODs have many faces. MOD, MADF, MADG, MADH, MED, XM, S3M, 669, and MTM. File names usually follow some sort of a DOS-like format, meaning filename.(MOD, MAD, MED, S3M, 669, XM, MTM). For example, distant.mod is a MOD called “Distant Call.” Be careful though, names can be deceiving. It may be called Blues.S3M, but that don’t mean that it’s blues music!

Aaalllrighty then. What are they made of? Well, simple. They are made of instrument samples, musical data, and patterns for the music data. There isn’t much to it. So when you consider it, you get quite a bit for your money.

Now you need a player.

A good starter program is The Sound-Trekker by Frank Seide. The
unregistered version only plays MODs and MEDs. The full version allows
editing and creating files. Written for the 680×0 with PPC optimized plug-in, it needs about 2 Megs of HD space and less than a Meg of RAM.

Next comes MacMod Pro 4.15 by Ian Mouton. This program is beautiful. It
has the best visual interface of them all. It also has the first editor that uses
Musical Notation. It looks stunning, but unfortunately, it only plays/edits MODs and self playing applications. 68K only. Needs 3000K of RAM and at least a Meg of Disk Space.

Last but certainly not least is Antoine Rossets PlayerPro 4.5.1. It is as
visually stunning as MacMod Pro. It is the most versatile player/editor ever
written for Mac. It supports MADF, MADG, MADH, MOD, S3M, MED, MIDI, MTM, self playing applications and XM. That’s more than any other program available for Mac. This program supports every machine with a 68020 or higher and doesn’t need any special equipment although if you have the Apple Sound Chip or a MIDI keyboard, you can play the music through them. You do need at least System 7 with Sound Manager, 4 Megs of RAM and a hard drive with about 2.5 megs of free space. This one’s the best in my opinion. FAT Binary for use with 68K and PPC machines.

The best place to get MODs and stuff is by purchasing the PlayerPro CD. You get PlayerPro, 500 instruments if you want to create MODs, and over 3000 files of various types. If you need to find files on the Web, use AltaVista and search for MOD+files.