Shortly after I set up my gopher hole last year, I downloaded all of the MOD files off of textfiles.com thinking I would mirror them on my gopher site. I decided not to once I had finished the 54 gig download of over 140,000 MOD files. The directory structure of the downloaded files was going to make it a little cumbersome to be useful on a gopher site. As an aside, I can’t remember the exact details, but I pretty sure I used wget, or maybe it was curl, to grab the files; either way it was easy. I kept the files and have enjoyed listening to them as background music on several occasions since then.

But wait, what are MOD files? MOD is short for module, and paraphrased from wikipedia is a file format, first developed for the Amiga computer in 1987, and is mainly used to represent music. A MOD file (including files with the extension MOD, XM, IT, 669, MTM, and S3M) contains a set of instruments in the form of samples and a number of patterns indicating how and when the samples are played. More information about MOD files can be found at the alt.binaries.sounds.mods FAQ, retrieved and stored at textfiles.com.

All that aside, MOD files are both plenty fun and geeky; I have fond memories of editing MOD files back in the day, changing the instrument samples and completely changing the sound of the music. And you can still do that today with with the MOD tracking program MilkyTracker.

So, back to the story, a couple of day ago I decided I would stream a randomly shuffled, continuous playlist of 140,129 old (from roughly 1987-1995) MOD files. That’s a lot of MOD files; 309 days, 6 hours, 2 minutes, and 48 seconds worth of mod files to be exact! With this many files, there are sure to be some that are not your cup of tea, but there will plenty of good ones too. So, if you feel so inclined, tune in and give it a listen. I can pretty much guarantee you won’t hear the same song twice in 309 day of continuous listening.

Or simply just paste the following stream address in your media player of choice:

http://lottalinuxlinks.com:8000/stream.m3u

I don’t know for sure how much my daily internet usage will affect the stream quality, but I know there will be times when the stream is less than ideal. I really don’t think this is going to blow up the internet or anything like that, but if it gets to be a hassle bandwidth wise (or even if it doesn’t), there is a decent chance that I may end up moving the stream to a slot on anonradio over at SDF, or maybe tilderadio. We’ll see what happens.

tl;dr: I set up a pretty awesome internet audio stream of over 140,000 MOD files.

-dsyates

(o\_!_/o)