TW #11 — How to enhance your music collection (Popcorn)

A short guide by TraxWeekly's then editor to building a module collection; its value today is as a map of the 1995 distribution channels.

Key claims#

• Popcorn's own path: .MOD files found on a Night Owl 4 shareware CD-ROM and played through a PC speaker on a 286 "about 3 years ago"; a modem and a Gravis Ultrasound on his 15th birthday; the musicdisks Chaotic Mind and Nothing On on a local BBS got him "really interested in the PC Music Scene"; on the Internet from 15 December 1994, "over 200 MB of tracker music" by 22 May 1995.
• Where to get music: ftp.mpoli.fi (/starport/music/audiomon, /heatbeat, /noise — Audio Monster, Heatbeat, Jogeir Liljedahl); kosmic.wit.com /kosmic/songs/ ("all the music ever released" by kosmic — "download everything if you can"); netnet2.netnet.net /pub/aminet/mods (the Aminet archive, LHA-packed, sorted into /jazz, /rock, /pop, /chip …; recommends Chorus & Sid in /rock); ftp.cdrom.com /pub/demos/music/disks/classic (all "must-get") and /pub/demos/music/songs/ (indexed by format, "most of the files have been rated by hornet in the late issues of demonews and 01Files").

Relevance#

Dates and paths for tracker-scene-history: CD-ROM shareware collections, BBSs and then FTP as the successive channels; Aminet already had a /chip directory in 1995; Hornet's ratings appeared in Demonews and the archive's index files.

Pages touched#

tracker-scene-history, hornet, kosmic, traxweekly.