OS/2 e-Zine! - Mod Players Revisited

Mod Players Revisited

- by Chris Wenham

My December review of Mod players brought by far the most feedback that I've ever had for anything I've written for OS/2 e-Zine!. Most of the letters pointed out mistakes and omissions which made the review unfair.

It's also true that since that review, at least one major MOD player has been updated; UltiMod 1.5 has been rewritten to use SOM (IBM's Object technology that's built into OS/2 and the Workplace Shell) and an OS/2 port of another player has been released too. December's review also missed covering Muse/2, a player that would have been reviewed if it wasn't for technical reasons and a deadline that I had to meet. The other discrepancy in last month's review was that many players were optimized for the Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) sound cards, but little was mentioned of the higher performance these players achieve when used with one. Unfortunately, I cannot reasonably judge this feature seeing as I don't have a GUS to test them on.

But since human ineptitude is no reason not to provide the absolute best service for our readers, here's my follow-up review to help tie a few loose ends.

Muse/2 1.3 by Jason Gunthorpe

The DART enabled Muse/2 (GIF, 11.3k) was released first as an OS/2 S3M player, appearing as the music engine for the "Ethos Peripheral Evolution Demo" -- a program that entertainingly shows off the skills of a team of programmers, artists and musicians. Later it was released separately and now boasts the ability to play more digital music formats than any other player for OS/2. Its most notable feature is support for IT and IT2 formats -- not seen in any other OS/2 player I've reviewed -- and very welcome considering the number of excellent quality songs written in this format.

Muse/2 runs in text-mode and does not have a PM front end, however its interface does provide better flexibility for controlling playback than any other current OS/2 music player. However, this extra flexibility can be confusing for users who don't understand what many of the features do and the documentation doesn't go very far to explain everything either.

On the Digital Mixer Control Panel (GIF, 10.3k) you'll find a number of filters for improving the playback quality of music files, mostly noise reduction though and nothing like the special effects filters you get in DMP for OS/2.

Aside from the filters there is something called Dynamic Scaling Control, a system for adjusting the scaling and amplification of the song on the fly during playback to help bring out the richness of the music. It's this part which is a little foggy to understand and not covered very well in the documentation. The 'Auto Spike' setting can noticeably improve the playback of the more advanced digital music formats like .XM and .IT, which can support a wider number of output channels. On some music files this doesn't seem like a good idea to have switched on, since it can amplify in the wrong places and give you a bit of a shock if you have the volume up high.

Playback of .IT digital music files is outstanding, crisp and clear at 44khz sampling rate. MOD files, however, sound a little 'out of tune' compared to other players. A big problem with Muse/2 is that there doesn't seem to be any way in which one can increase the size of the DART buffer, meaning that when you run it in the background alongside other applications you could experience annoying pauses in the music. This doesn't seem to be too much of a problem for songs that are inherently low on CPU drain (the more channels the music file demands then the more processor power is needed to play it) or if you're playing them back at 22khz.

Fans of Muse/2 enjoy its support for the entire .S3M digital music format, plus the unique ability it has for playing files stored in .ZIP or .RAR archives. Muse/2 will seamlessly extract the song from the archive, play it and then delete it before moving on to the next one. Considering that digital music files compress very well it's a valuable feature for those conscious of disk space.

Supported file formats: MOD, STM, MTM, 669, S3M, XM, ULT, FAR, WOW, IT, IT2

Ratings:
Play Quality: For .IT and most other formats; 10 For .MOD format: 8
User Interface: 7
CPU Load: 8 (Also has GUS support)

Refresh of UltiMod 1.5

Even though the version number hasn't changed (although the minor revision number has) UltiMod was recently re-released having been retrofitted with IBM's SOM technology. The features and play quality remain unchanged but the user interface has been updated a little, inheriting the colored notebook (GIF, 5.5k) tabs of Warp 4.0 and adding the ability to associate your music files with the player. According to the author, this lays down the base for more interesting features to come, such as further WPS integration. With future versions of UltiMod we can expect the ability to create song lists just by dragging and dropping them into a Desktop folder.

Ratings (from last month):
Play Quality: 8
User Interface: 7
CPU Load: PM Front-end: 9 Text mode: 8

MikMod 2.09b for OS/2 MMPM

This is a simple recompile of an existing DOS player with drivers added to support OS/2's MMPM. It has no DART support and the user interface is command-line and as bare-bones as it gets. The author of the port, Stefan Tibus, has included the source code for his OS/2 drivers so the user can recompile the player with newer versions of the original program.

Ratings:
Play Quality: 7
User Interface: 3
CPU Load: 6

Muse/2 v1.3
by Jason Gunthorpe
download from Hobbes (ZIP, 270k)
Registration: Freeware

UltiMOD
download from the UltiMOD homepage
Registration: GUS version is Shareware, DART/MMPM version is freeware.

MikMod v2.09b
download from Hobbes (ZIP, 202k)
Registration: MMOS/2 Drivers freeware, original package Shareware (US$25)

Chris Wenham is a Team OS/2er in Binghamton, NY with a catchy-titled company -- Wenham's Web Works. He has written comedy, sci-fi, HTML, Pascal, C++ and now writes software reviews.

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