pouët.net

i have a couple of old amiga modules, which i want to enhance
(stereo spread, add a bit reverb, fix correlation, compress and limit).

anyone has experience and a clever way to do it? i am usually mastering my
own synth&vst music by using various plugins built in DAWs , but polishing the old amiga modules is a different thing for me.

load it on renoise, add shitloads of vst plugins till it sounds tight, render to wave ?!

or were you hoping for a more empirical approach to remastering old tracks?

no, the only way is lots of vst's, and flangers. and very loud multiband mastering!

how about recording the output of an a500 through expensive analog equipment.

(No honestly, my real method would be simple:
1. expand polyphony by taking the modules apart into as many tracks as necessary.
2. whenever applicable, substitute samples w/ higher quality counterparts
3. standard mixing methods
4. mastering)

Yes.

Take modules apart straight into individual instrument per track (there was a tool from voxengo(?) to do this, or so if I remember right).

Drop tracks to your favourite mixing host, use plugins.

Master.

Its a lot of work, I've done such things to some of my/our old tunes. You could also keep grouptracks together, eg. drums and such if you are satisfied and they are together for the whole tune (eg. you dont have some echo's of other instruments in between hits)

Seems that Voxengo tool is no longer available, alas. It made automatically individual wav tracks out of instruments from xm and mods.

You could also mute everything else and record from amiga to pc one instrument at time, but its very time consuming..

Ok the software in case was Voxengo RenderXM, no longer available.

## If you just want to touch up the sound, but keep it as true to the original as possible:
Download XMPlay (it's accurate with everything I've tried it with, might have minor issues with weird shit): http://www.un4seen.com/
Under settings, go to output:
- select "Wav writer" as Device
(- check the box next to "Auto-filename" for convenience)
- check the box next to "Separate MOD instruments"
- click apply
Load the modules and click play

Now you will have separate wav-renders of the track, one per instrument in the module. The next steps should then be obvious :)


## If you want to redo the track completely
1. Find some mod2midi converters, render to MIDI, load up the MIDI file in your favorite sequencer and get to work

or...

2. As suggested by qmotvs, load up the mod in a tracker (FT2 is pretty good with .mod files, and has settings to correctly play back Amiga stuff. Milkytracker is the best tracker I've worked with that doesn't require DOS, and has binaries for a shitload of platforms). Expand the channels used to increase polyphony, replace samples with better samples and so on. Save as XM when you are happy with the result, and then convert to individual .wav-files as explained above. Import the waves into your favorite sequencer and do the mixdown.

Wow, that RenderXM tool is actually pretty cool. You could even set it to use external WAV's to replace the samples with.

Who still has the installer somewhere? :)

I didnt remember XMPlay also has this ability. Well, thats great then!
I sent Alexey (voxengo main man) email about possible availability of RenderXM.

Say, are there any tunes you would consider un-enhanceable? The Turrican 2 music comes to mind. (Ok, its not a demo tune, but still...)

Ahehe. "FT2" and "good at x" in one sentence is fun to read. FT2 wouldn't even get the MOD arpeggios right. Milkytracker is good at playing MODs in an authentic way, just like XMPlay and OpenMPT (latest revisions). OpenMPT also has a "solo instrument" feature, but that cannot be automatically used when using the wav writer yet, so XMPlay is a bit more convenient there.

Asides, XMplay's got the imho the best mod replay engine around (soundwise). There's one interpolation mode alone which already adds a lot of punch to samples.

Anyway, i use to fire up my tunes in Renoise and mix them in Ableton via Rewire. Or just render them as stereo wav from XMplay and tune it a bit in Wavelab. Mostly with UAD plugs. Depends on how far you want to go.

lug00ber win. Render each instrument as a separate track is the absolute best way.

dejavu... Have I seen this thread before?

Use Renoise. It can load MODs and has a lot of great features. Experiment with it.

Loading MODs with Renoise is the worst idea ever; That feature might be sufficient if you want to continue working on old material and compatibility is not important - However, if you want to preserve the old sound and just apply some touch-ups, that's definitely the wrong way to go since Renoise interprets some effects differently (or not at all). Get a real MOD tracker or player in that case.

@Saga Musix:



I think that jazz doesn't care about 100% compatibility but it's on the way to improve his old material (maybe he has a few unfinished old mods and want to change them into something bigger).

Anyway, experiment!

Render each track to .wav and load in a desired application. You can cut up samples of the tracks or as desired.

edit: too not or.

I assume it is your own modules.

well, i'm using digibooster to write modules, i do not know what functions the other applications have.

Buzz machines, anyone? There is a working Mod2Buzz converter, which seperates the instruments in individual mathilde-tracker tracks. I.e. you keep full control on every note and parameter of the original mod-file.

Aside from that, I recommend the amigaremix.com forum for further research.

thank you very much to all of ya. greatly appreciated!
i will release some remix tracks and hope they will sound allright :) cheers!

ok, i could enhance and master them,
but the next releases will be not based on amiga roots. its too much work to master, really :)

http://www.junodownload.com/artists/Konsumer/releases/