Demoscene – who remembers?

Hi all!

I must confess when I was a kid growing up I didn’t buy many CDs, I spent most of my time listening to Demoscene music (hey, it was free!). Funnily enough one of the larger sites still exists:

http://modarchive.org/

Anyone remember the days of ScreamTracker and ExtremeTracker and whatnot?

I managed to track down a player for OS X that works reasonably well:

http://ximplemod.sourceforge.net/

It’s a bit buggy but plays most of my stuff, I can’t recall what I used to use under windows but it was super solid and would play everything.

Anyway, who else is/was into it?

Oh happy days! I used to create audio for a couple of groups on the Atari ST demo scene. That’s how I first got into audio production! Thank goodness technology moved along quickly enough that we weren’t restricted to 4-channel audio forever! I used to use Noizetracker which I think was a port from the Amiga. Anyone remember the Monster Sound Cartridge on the Atari ST?! I used ScreamTracker when I moved from the ST to the PC, Ryan. I think we’re showing our age now.

This is also how I started back in 1995. MOD files, S3M files, and IT files!

I actually loaded up ImpulseTracker the other day just to experiment with my new knowledge in an older application.

It was loads of fun.

Certainly a lot of audio apps become a whole lot more complicated… I remember loading up Logic Express 5 a few years ago and going ‘whaaat?’.

I bought it to sequence a hardware synth I bought (Novation KS4 ) but ended up hardly writing anything on it, I was way more productive on my crappy and limited Korg EM1 .

I reckon the simplicity of ScreamTracker very awesome, I had a whole lot of fun making junk in that when I was 15