OpenMPT

Last updated

OpenMPT
Original author(s) Olivier Lapicque
Initial release1997;26 years ago (1997)
Stable release
1.31.04.00 [1]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 27 August 2023
Repository
Written inC++
Operating system Windows Only
Platform x86, x86-64
Available inEnglish
Type Tracker
License BSD-3-Clause (since OpenMPT 1.17.02.53) / GPL-2.0-or-later, partly public domain software [2]
Website openmpt.org   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

OpenMPT is an open-source audio module tracker for Windows (with an intended Wine-functionality for UNIX and Linux x86-systems). It was previously called ModPlug Tracker, and was first released by Olivier Lapicque in September 1997. [3]

Contents

Computer Music magazine listed OpenMPT among the top five free music trackers in 2007, [4] and it is one of the most widely used trackers. [5]

History

MOD Plugin and ModPlug Tracker

OpenMPT was initially developed as a browser plug-in called MOD Plugin, [6] which enabled users to play music and other sounds encoded in module files. ModPlug Tracker, along with a player application named ModPlug Player, evolved from this plug-in. [7]

In December 1999, Olivier Lapicque sent the module-playing parts of ModPlug Tracker's source code to Kenton Varda, under the GPL-2.0-or-later, to write a plugin for XMMS based on the code. In 2001, the source code was released in the public domain, [2] and the mod-playing code was split off into a separate library, libmodplug, maintained as part of the ModPlug XMMS Plugin project. This project lay dormant from late 2003 until early 2006, when it was picked up again. Today, libmodplug is included in many Linux distributions as a default audio plugin for playing module files and is a part of the popular open source multimedia framework gstreamer. [8]

Due to lack of time, Olivier Lapicque discontinued development of ModPlug Tracker itself, and in January 2004, he released the entire source code under an open-source license. The ModPlug Player source code is still closed as of May 2020.

OpenMPT

Lapicque's MPT code was taken up by a group of tracker musicians/programmers and is now known as OpenMPT. Also based on the ModPlug code is OpenMPT's "sister project" Schism Tracker which contributed several backports of bugfixes to OpenMPT. [9]

OpenMPT is distributed as free software and is, as of August 2022, under active development. Until May 2009 (v1.17.02.53) [10] OpenMPT was licensed under the Copyleft GPL-2.0-or-later and then relicensed under the terms of the permissive BSD-3-Clause. Since OpenMPT 1.23 (March 2014), OpenMPT is also available as a 64-bit application. [11] This allows musicians to use 64-bit VST plugins and make use of the entire physical memory on 64-bit systems. For this purpose, OpenMPT provides its own plugin bridge, which can be used to run plugins with a different bitness than the host in a separate process, or to run plugin in a sandbox and prevent them from crashing the host application.

Features

OpenMPT's main distinguishing feature is its native Windows user interface. Most trackers, even newer ones such as Renoise, have interfaces modelled after the older DOS trackers such as FastTracker II. It supports samples, VST plugins and OPL3 instruments [12] as sound sources. OpenMPT makes use of features common to Microsoft Windows programs, such as context menus for effect selection, "tree" views (for files, samples, and patterns), drag and drop functionality throughout, and the native look and feel of the Windows platform.

It supports both loading and saving of IT (Impulse Tracker), XM (FastTracker Extended Module), MOD (Protracker and similar), S3M (Scream Tracker 3) and MPTM (its own file format) files, imports many more module and sample file formats, and has some support for DLS banks and SoundFonts. [13]

OpenMPT was also one of the first trackers to support opening and editing of multiple tracker modules in parallel. OpenMPT supports up to 127 tracks/channels, VST Plugins, VST instruments and has ASIO support. [13]

MPTM file format

Due to limitations of the various mod file formats it is able to save, a new module format called MPTM was created in 2007. [14]

OpenMPT introduced some non-standard additions to the older file formats. For example, one can use stereo samples or add VST plugins to XM and IT modules, which were not supported in the original trackers. Many of these features have gradually been removed from IT and XM files and made available only in MPTM files.

libopenmpt

libopenmpt is a cross-platform module playing library based on the OpenMPT code with interfaces for C, C++ and other programming languages. To ensure that the code bases do not diverge like in the case of ModPlug Tracker and libmodplug, libopenmpt development takes place in the same code repository as OpenMPT. Official input plug-ins for popular audio players (XMPlay, Winamp and foobar2000) based on libopenmpt are also available from the website. FFmpeg also offers an optional module decoder based on libopenmpt. [15] libopenmpt can also serve as a drop-in replacement for libmodplug and thus offer up-to-date module playback capabilities for software that relies on the libmodplug API. [16]

Reception and users

Nicolay of the Grammy-nominated The Foreign Exchange has revealed that ModPlug is his "Secret Weapon". [17] Movie and video game music composer Raphaël Gesqua made known his use of OpenMPT in an interview. [18]

Peter Hajba and Alexander Brandon used OpenMPT to compose the soundtracks for Bejeweled 2 , [19] Bejeweled 3 [20] and other PopCap games.

Electronic rock musician Blue Stahli has mentioned that he used ModPlug Tracker and other trackers in the past. [21]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Plug-in (computing)</span> Software component that adds a specific feature to an existing software application

In computing, a plug-in is a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program. When a program supports plug-ins, it enables customization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XMMS</span> Free and open source audio player

X Multimedia System (XMMS) is an audio player for Unix-like systems released under a free software license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scream Tracker</span>

Scream Tracker is a tracker. It was created by Psi, one of the founders of the Finnish demogroup Future Crew. It was written in C and assembly language.

XM, standing for "extended module", is an audio file type introduced by Triton's FastTracker 2. XM introduced multisampling-capable instruments with volume and panning envelopes, sample looping and basic pattern compression. It also expanded the available effect commands and channels, added 16-bit sample support, and offered an alternative frequency table for portamentos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Renoise</span> Digital audio workstation

Renoise is a digital audio workstation (DAW) based upon the heritage and development of tracker software. Its primary use is the composition of music using sound samples, soft synths, and effects plug-ins. It is also able to interface with MIDI and OSC equipment. The main difference between Renoise and other music software is the characteristic vertical timeline sequencer used by tracking software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GStreamer</span> Multimedia framework

GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes them, and exports them in another. The formats and processes can be changed in a plug and play fashion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FastTracker 2</span> Audio tracker for DOS

FastTracker 2 is a music tracker created by Fredrik "Mr. H" Huss and Magnus "Vogue" Högdahl, two members of the demogroup Triton which set about releasing their own tracker after breaking into the scene in 1992 and winning several demo competitions. The source code of FastTracker 2 is written in Pascal using Borland Pascal 7 and TASM. The program works natively under MS-DOS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Module file</span> Family of file formats

Module file is a family of music file formats originating from the MOD file format on Amiga systems used in the late 1980s. Those who produce these files and listen to them form the worldwide MOD scene, a part of the demoscene subculture.

ModPlug is the name for the series of computer software for creating and playing module files, originally developed by Olivier Lapicque.

MO3 is a tracker module file format developed by Ian Luck for the BASSMOD engine. MO3 files contain samples encoded in the MP3 or Ogg Vorbis formats, rather than straight PCM samples. This results in reduced file size for the module, while maintaining almost identical audio quality. Lossless audio encoding is also supported, for samples that do not compress well with lossy encoding.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LMMS</span> Free software digital audio workstation

LMMS is a digital audio workstation application program. It allows music to be produced by arranging samples, synthesizing sounds, entering notes via mouse or by playing on a MIDI keyboard, and combining the features of trackers and sequencers. It is free and open source software, written in Qt and released under GPL-2.0-or-later.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">REAPER</span> Digital audio workstation by Cockos

REAPER is a digital audio workstation and MIDI sequencer application created by Cockos. The current version is available for Microsoft Windows and macOS, as well as for Linux. REAPER acts as a host to most industry-standard plug-in formats and can import all commonly used media formats, including video. REAPER and its included plug-ins are available in 32-bit and 64-bit format.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LV2</span> Open standard for audio plugins

LV2 is a set of royalty-free open standards for music production plug-ins and matching host applications. It includes support for the synthesis and processing of digital audio and CV, events such as MIDI and OSC, and provides a free alternative to audio plug-in standards such as Virtual Studio Technology (VST) and Audio Units (AU).

S3M is a module file format, the successor to the STM format used by the original Scream Tracker. Both formats are based on the original MOD format used on the Amiga computer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Impulse Tracker</span> Free music sequencing software created in 1995 for the DOS platform

Impulse Tracker is a multi-track music tracker. Originally released in 1995 by Jeffrey Lim as freeware with commercial extensions, it was one of the last tracker programs for the DOS platform.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ModPlug Player</span> Module file player

ModPlug Player is a module file player developed by Olivier Lapicque in conjunction with the original ModPlug Tracker project and the ModPlug Browser plugin. Features include a playlist editor, graphical equalizer, automatic gain control, bass expansion, reverb, Dolby Surround Sound support and the ability to mix two modules simultaneously and to change their pitch and tempo. The player supports a variety of module music files in both native and compressed formats.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quod Libet (software)</span> Free and open source audio player

Quod Libet is a cross-platform free and open-source audio player, tag editor and library organizer. The main design philosophy is that the user knows how they want to organize their music best; the software is therefore built to be fully customizable and extensible using regular expressions and boolean logic. Quod Libet is based on GTK and written in Python, and uses the Mutagen tagging library.

XMPlay is a freeware audio player for Windows. Initially released in 1998, it is often used as a reference player for tracker audio files.

References

  1. ↑ Error: Unable to display the reference properly. See the documentation for details.
  2. 1 2 ModPlug XMMS Plugin - News on sourceforge.com "27 October 2001: ModPlug-XMMS v2.0 (including libmodplug v0.7) - Changes: [...] License changed to public domain."
  3. ↑ ModPlugTrackerv1.00alpha5.7z - from ftp.modland.com/pub/trackers
  4. ↑ "Top Trackers". Computer Music . Future Publishing (113). June 2007.
  5. ↑ Schultz, Johannes (2018). Design and Implementation of a Collaborative Music Software (PDF) (MSc). Of all the tracked music works uploaded to The Mod Archive in 2017, one of the largest collections of tracked music online, it was found that about 42% are written in OpenMPT.
  6. ↑ Christe, Ian (30 October 1997). "A Cheat Sheet for Internet Sound". Wired.com. Archived from the original on 6 December 1998. Retrieved 5 February 2011. MOD: The lingua franca of the Internet's large network of Amiga musicians, MODs are ingenious self-contained sound files that include raw audio data and sequencing information.(Link to modplugcentral)
  7. ↑ "MODPlug Central - Technical Support Features". MODPlug Central. 22 February 1998. Archived from the original on 22 February 1998. Retrieved 5 February 2011.
  8. ↑ GStreamer Bad Plugins 0.10 Plugins Reference Manual
  9. ↑ storlek (1 February 2011). "Modplug". schismtracker.org. Archived from the original on 11 July 2011. Retrieved 5 February 2011. Schism Tracker uses a highly customized version of the Modplug library, [...]. Many of Schism's fixes have since been back-ported to OpenMPT [...]
  10. ↑ History
  11. ↑ "OpenMPT 1.23.01.00 released". 29 March 2014. Retrieved 30 March 2014.
  12. ↑ "OpenMPT 1.28.01.00 released". 23 December 2018. Retrieved 29 May 2020.
  13. 1 2 "Features". openmpt.org. 5 February 2011. Retrieved 5 February 2011.
  14. ↑ ModPlug Central Forums
  15. ↑ libopenmpt demuxer in libavformat
  16. ↑ libopenmpt-modplug1 in the Debian package repository
  17. ↑ Inside The Producer's Studio on theforeignexchangemusic.com
  18. ↑ Interview with Raphaël Gesqua at game-ost.com Archived 1 April 2013 at the Wayback Machine
  19. ↑ Bejeweled 2 Soundtrack on BandCamp
  20. ↑ Bejeweled 3 Soundtrack on BandCamp
  21. ↑ Blue Stahli twitter profile
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.