Music

Digital Symphony music | SONAR music | TimPlayer demo songs | Really ancient music

All music on this page was composed by Martin Bazley. This page has now been divided up into sections, so in addition to my main music archive, you can now download a few extras and some older tunes as well.

Enjoy the music, and I hope you like it. Feel free to use it in productions of your own (I really don't think it's good enough to bother with trying to restrict distribution), and if you like it or want to use it, don't forget to email me to keep my ego happy or so I can see what you've done. Remixes are welcomed as well, if anyone's mad enough to try.

All files on this page should be playable straight off using DigitalCD and the modules distributed with it. For Windows computers, MP3s shouldn't present a problem, but for Digital Symphony files, xmp seems to be the only player currently capable of handling them.

Finally, if you like the music on this page, I recommend checking out Amiga Music Preservation.

Digital Symphony music

The music in this section was composed using using Digital Symphony, a descendant of the various tracker programs out there, and the most complex one for RISC OS.

Most of the samples were ripped from music in my extensive collection of early 90s tracker files. The tunes with &FF9 in their titles had some or all of their tune samples created by dragging sprites into the Digital Symphony sample window to see what it would do (it was a very boring afternoon...), some of the newer ones had some or all of their samples created with a preliminary version of a program called 'WaveForm' which I wrote myself (and gave up trying to finish when I heard the samples it produced), 'World of Shards' used free samples off the Internet (from, if I remember everything correctly, here, here and here), and the rest simply used samples supplied with Digital Symphony (for an interesting example of this, see Wormhole Travel II).

Each track is available both in its original Digital Symphony format and in the ubiquitous MP3 format, to give them the widest possible audience. These have been converted from the original trackers by means of TimAbs by André Timmermans to convert the Digital Symphony tracks to WAV format, and then Pete Everett's port of Shine to encode the resultant files as MP3s. All MP3s have had ID3v1 tags added, giving details about the track.

The Digital Symphony files have been zipped in order to preserve their RISC OS file type (&10B); to listen to them you will need a compatible tracker music player such as DigitalCD. None of the symphonies are Delta-Sigma compressed, so they should be compatible with older versions of TimPlayer and the like. You can also download an archive of all the Digital Symphony tracks in their original format (5  MB).

SONAR music

This music was composed during school music lessons using Cakewalk SONAR Home Studio 4, during a period of time which started before the Digital Symphony compositions, and overlapped until mid-2008. I never actually bothered to learn how to use the program properly (unlike I did - eventually - with Digital Symphony), so most of this is pretty godawful.

You can download a zip file of these tracks in their original format (52 KB), which I can neither read nor play myself, but someone might find it useful. To the best of my knowledge, no original data survives for Supernova or Raindance Rumba.

Many thanks to John Garside for supplying the MP3 conversions of all the other tunes.

I would greatly appreciate it if somebody could tell me the difference between the two versions of Country Garden.

TimPlayer demo songs

Ever wonder how the glitches in the MP3s on this site came to be fixed? Well, this archive had something to do with it. André Timmermans and I discussed the matter at length, and I used Digital Symphony to track down the relevant glitches and produce test cases to ultimately get them fixed.

And, yes, I haven't composed in a while, and I got a bit carried away.

In this archive are six of my favourite songs, each illustrating a different obscure part of the workings of Digital Symphony, and, thanks to André's efforts, all now play correctly in TimPlayer. But I decided some of them were simply too good to waste, so I uploaded them here.

The first version of this archive was uploaded on 5th July 2010, containing a selection from the files I used to fix TimPlayer sufficiently to get it to record the files hosted on this site accurately, plus a few other improvements. These files, in alphabetical order, are:

• BrkInvalid: Contains a pattern break to an event number greater than 64.
• LastPos: Contains a position jump to the last sequence position of the song (yes, this was broken).
• LineJump: Contains a Digital Symphony-specific command to jump within the same pattern.
• PosInvalid: Contains a position jump to a value greater than the last position of the song.

(These are the only ones which actually resemble songs in any way - don't worry, you're not missing anything.)

The second version was uploaded on 15th September 2011, and added the following files, which played some small part in some of the bugfixes made in releases of TimPlayer since then:

• OneLoop: Contains a pattern with a position jump to the same position of the sequence as the current one. Quite possibly my very favourite piece, this wasn't broken - apparently one-position-long sequence loops only failed if it was the last position - but there's a bonus pattern at the end of which I didn't want to waste.
• RepeatNest: Contains, in the second subsong, two pattern loop commands preceded by only one pattern loop start (i.e. broken), which should have looped infinitely but used to loop 256 times. The first subsong contains a correct set of loops for reference.

Download (17 KB zip archive)

Really ancient music

The music in this archive, as the name suggests, is really ancient. This is what I did before the main archive up above, and before I lost my first copy of Digital Symphony for a couple of years. Composing was one of my many computer-based hobbies way back when, along with implementing new Marsquake levels, and not implementing new Doom levels. Now, you know exactly what to expect in here, don't you?

This is only for history's sake, and because I can't bring myself to delete the whole shoddy lot. MP3s are not available, because it would be a shocking waste of bandwidth and there are so many of them anyway.

Download (3832 KB zip archive)

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