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Comment by vardump | Hacker News Reader

Also these tunes are XM modules. XM is a popular tracker. Trackers are type of music making software pioneered by Soundtracker on Amiga.

I wouldn't be surprised if many of these tunes have just been ripped from somewhere else and not actually made by keygen crackers themselves.

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Most of them are, but the reason why (in the words of YouTuber Ahoy) piracy has such an awesome soundtrack, is that the cracking groups grew out of the Commodore scene.

Yup. I learned about it way after the fact, but you have the cracker scene, which crosses over with tracker enthusiasts and produces demoscene in the 80s/90s. Demoscene crosses over with a lot of early PC game dev, which loops us back around to crackers. The next gen picks up the echoes of this stuff through keygens and romhacks, and we eventually get stuff like Barkley Gaiden (whose theme song remixed the Space Jam theme with a mod from a tracker composer who went on to cofound Swedish House Mafia) and Undertale (which is the culmination of a stupidly-interesting chain of chiptune/indie game dev influences).

> a tracker composer who went on to cofound Swedish House Mafia

Axwell aka Quazar:

* http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/Protracker/Quazar/

* http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/Fasttracker%202/Quazar/

Yup, that's him. And the remix in question spawned an avalanche of copycat "Slam Jams" and, in turn, a surge of geeky game/anime-hip hop mash-ups. For the past decade, the actual musical underground has been online. Axwell is just the start; one of these days, something in the lineage, and closer aesthetically to the pure deal, is going to break out, and people are going to wonder where the hell it came from. 30+ years of grassroots culture development happening right under everyone's noses, that's where.

Dubmood managed to get a song onto the Hotline Miami soundtrack ("Richard").

Music trackers are so cool. Instead of recorded audio, they produce modules which are essentially programs that the tracker software executes to reproduce the sound. You can even see the unmixed waveforms of each instrument being generated in real time. It's just so cool to watch.

https://youtu.be/eclMFa0mD1c

Meh, they are unlike programs. Rather, they are grids of notes and special commands that alter the pitch, velocity or timing, together with a bunch of samples and envelopes used to play those notes. Some formats also have simple filters for subtractive synthesis. Modern tracker-based programs, though, have capabilities for complex signal synthesis/processing (Renoise, Sunvox).

To be even nitpickier the tracker that makes XM files is called FastTracker2 ;)

Oh, you're absolutely right. :-)

Most of them are. The first two things this site played at me was the fruit machine music from Superfrog (Amiga, 1993, Allister Brimble) [0], then the DisIsSid#3 intro (Amiga, 1996, Manfred Linzer) [1]

That's not to say that crackers and musicians don't mingle. While there was not only music made for games, demos, intros, musicdisks and other demoscene productions, there was certainly a lot of chiptunes commissioned for or widely spread by cracktros, with the musicians' support

In one particularly interesting case, Mark Knight [2] got a permanent job as a musician for the game company Mindscape, and he could hear his own music, [3] that he'd given to Melon Dezign and had been used by their cracking friends Crystal for the cracktro [4][5] to their crack of Mindscape's game, Moonstone [6]

> I received a call from Richard Leinfellner at Mindscape offering me some freelance work, converting the Wing Commander music for the Amiga. I snapped it up and when (almost) completed, he offered me a full-time position as in-house composer.

> It could have been the shortest career in history when, during the first week, I heard one of my chiptunes playing in the production office. Mindscape had just released Moonstone, and had downloaded a copy from a bbs. I stuck my head around to see why they were playing my tune, and quickly saw that the crack intro introducing Moonstone was playing. I silently shuffled out, went back to my room, and shut the door very worried about the consequences of this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfrog

[1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3416

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Knight_(musician)

[3] https://marktdkknight.bandcamp.com/track/maintheme-2-origina...

[4] http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=7902

[5] https://flashtro.com/crystal-moonstone/

[6] https://archive.org/details/AmigaDownload/page/n259/mode/2up...

not all are XM, some are s3m (ScreamTracker 3) ;-)

For the fun of it:

  jq '.[]["songs"][].file | match("\\.([^.]+)$") | .captures[0].string' songs.json -r  | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

  3169 xm
  1011 mod
   226 it
    86 s3m
     4 nsf
     3 rad
     2 amd
     2 S3M
     1 mtm

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