Thursday, 14 May 2009There have been major changes to the various exotica music collection interfaces. The biggest feature addition is that for most of the tunes you can now download Ogg Vorbis encoded audio recordings directly from the search interface. The Ogg format is supported by most media players, and allows you to listen to the music without having to download a variety of different players. The Oggs are created on the fly in real-time, and as such are provided for convenience rather than accuracy, however you may well be surprised at how good they sound. To access the Ogg downloads browse or search for a tune, and a button will be displayed above the results that allows you to show the Ogg download links.

For the High Voltage SID Collection search, the Oggs are recorded using Alankila's sidplay2 fork, but we also link to SOASC's high quality mp3 recordings made from real c64 hardware, that you might prefer to download instead. Big thanks to SOASC for allowing us to link to their files. The official High Voltage SID Collection website now links to our search from their homepage, and have been very positive towards the current functionality. Thanks guys!

On the Modland search, there are Ogg links for most formats, except for the playsid format (use the High Voltage SID Collection interface for downloading C64 recordings). Not every tune with an off link will be supported, but the more popular ones are, along with most exotic Amiga formats. For Fasttracker 2 and other multi-channel formats, a simple player based on BASSMOD is used, that gives good results. For other formats such as Protracker, TFMX and other Amiga formats, Shd's excellent UADE player is used. All this happens transparently of course. All you need to do is click the Ogg link.

The Modland search now also supports multiple collection groupings per module. Collections are created from both the Modland folder structure, as well as custom playlists that are contributed. If for example a playlist was created with all the music related to the game "Turrican", this would then show up as a collection. More details on creation of a playlist can be found on the Modland page.

The Atari SAP Music archive search also supports Ogg downloads, and it is handled via the ASAP player http://asap.sourceforge.net.

The Ogg Vorbis downloads are around 96kbit (Ogg quality 2) and are named and tagged automatically. We chose Ogg Vorbis due to the higher quality compared to mp3 at the same bitrate, and because it is Open Source and patent free. Note that visitors are limited to a single Ogg download at a time. Due to the real-time encoding nature of this system, it is a cpu intensive task, and so limits are necessary.

For questions regarding this new functionality or other questions regarding the search, please use the ExoticA Forum



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