Hi everyone,

In my last post, I wrote about the new Amiga music album called Immortal 4. This time I’d like to tell you about a website that seeks to preserve Amiga music for future generations. The name of the website is Amiga Music Preservation, or AMP for short, and it was launched on the 14th of December 2000.

AMP has created the largest and most accurate resource on Amiga music on the Internet. According to the authors, the site is meant to bring Amiga enthusiasts together with the people who made the music in the first place. In their own words:

– “It’s the chance for anyone to discover the amazing contribution of Amiga artists to the world of music creation.”

The website does not only preserve Amiga music, but information on the authors as well. If you look up a random musician, for example Jeano, you’ll see that there are 38 modules for download. You can also read which groups he was a member of in the past or check up on his real name. Another example is the composer known as Powerslave. Here you’ll find an interview of him!

How many modules are currently available for download at AMP? A quick look at the news section of the site gives us an answer..

On the 23rd of September 2011, they had collected and made available for download a whopping 115.000 tunes! These can be divided into the following formats:

• 81462 MOD’s
• 14768 XM’s
• 4760 S3M’s
• 3447 IT’s
• 3634 MED’s
• 6929 Others

Totally amazing.. 🙂 I remember back in the 90’s, when I was proud to have a partition on my hard drive consisting of over 400MB (!) of mods.. that’s apparently not much these days. 😉

To play the music, you’ll need a module player. On the Amiga I recommend the brilliant Hippoplayer. You can find it here. It’s easy to use, not resource-hungry and very tidy. I like it a lot. I’m a bit unsure on which program to choose for PC’s running Windows though, but I think Deliplayer or XMPlay would do the trick. Deliplayer is unfortunately not supported anymore, but XMPlay is. I tried to find the official page for Deliplayer, but it was down and replaced with a generic blog. If you have some suggestions for modplayers for Linux, MAC, Atari and the likes, please feel free to leave a comment below. 😉 Thanks in advance.

If you’re interested in retro computer music, I recommend that you visit AMP at once. The music you’ll find there (for free of course) will keep you busy for years to come! There’s s much cool stuff to discover. If you happen to have some old mods you’ve made that was never released, but you’d like to share them with the world now, I’m sure the authors of the site would be interested. 🙂

Happy listening! Hope you’ll find many nice tunes. If I had to recommend five artists to check out, it must be Jeano, Bethoven, Dr. Awesome, Jester and Dreamer.