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Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
Screwtapello@teh.entar.net wrote:
The Amiga "module" music format was hugely popular in the 1990s, with tens of thousands of songs written in "tracker" tools, often used in games and demoscene productions. Mostly on the Amiga, of course, but PC games like Jazz Jackrabbit and the original Deus Ex used music based on the same technology.
The very first "tracker" composing tool was The Ultimate Soundtracker by Karsten Obarski in 1987, a commercial release with one disk containing the program and some example songs, and a second disk containing a selection of instrument samples composers could use.
In the very early days of tracker modules, those were the only samples available, and they were heavily used by just about everyone. Even once people started making their own samples, they were still heavily used, and to a certain extent became the unofficial Amiga soundfont.
Today I learned that despite its significance, this first sample disk is lost media. All the samples survive in thousands of modules, but every sample has a bunch of variants from accidental disk corruption or intentional modification, and it's not always clear exactly which one is the original. Even among things *claiming* to be images of the original sample disk, different images have different sets of samples, or different versions of the same samples. We don't even know if Obarski kept the same sample disk for each release of his software, or if he updated it over time - and if he did, which versions shipped with which samples.