Nectarine Demoscene Radio
September 8, 2010 4:51 AM   Subscribe

Nectarine Demoscene Radio streams Amiga demoscene music ("modules") 24-7. Registered users can queue up songs, comment and chat to each other with the "infamous oneliner". That's it.
posted by KMH (12 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Previously on metafilter.
posted by Glow Bucket at 5:42 AM on September 8, 2010


I really like the idea behind the site, and it certainly takes me back to the days of messing around with Scream Tracker (and later Impulse Tracker) on my SB16. But I find the logic behind the radio format to be somewhat frustrating. So I used the search and found a bunch of stuff I'd like to listen to, but my only option is to add it to a lengthy queue and just sit around and wait? Why can't I just download any of the files directly? On the other hand, I like the idea of having something that you could put on in the background and just listen to. I also wish there were better browsing options, like 'most requested', 'most often played', etc.
posted by Rhomboid at 6:25 AM on September 8, 2010


Rhomboid, most if not all of the songs have download links associated with them. You might also want to search directly on scene.org, modarchive or pouet.net For songs and even demos. You could also watch some demos on demoscene.tv.
posted by Glow Bucket at 6:34 AM on September 8, 2010 [1 favorite]


Where are these download links? I looked far and wide on every info page and couldn't find anything.
posted by Rhomboid at 6:55 AM on September 8, 2010


Checkout this link. I reached that via the songs link on the left of the starting page and then selecting the first song on the list. The download link is halfway down the page below a horizontal line.
posted by Glow Bucket at 7:06 AM on September 8, 2010


That's odd. None of the half-dozen songs I searched for and wanted to hear had such a link, but I do see it on that page.
posted by Rhomboid at 7:10 AM on September 8, 2010


Ha! Just this very moment when reading this post I have a very old modfile (so old it is simply called song1) playing in iTunes, having come up on shuffle.

Probably 12 years ago I spent a month sifting through a few gigs of downloaded mods whilst programming. I deleted the crap and sorting the rest into five categories (up, down, smooth, fast, hard, weird) which I then burned onto a CD for just-in-cases. Then through various life changes forgot about all that music for a decade. I just found the disc a couple weeks ago and, because iTunes of course doesn't support MODs (or S3M or IT), had to render them to MP3 using XMPlay/LAME. Yeah, it hurt to turn 650MB of mods into 9GB of MP3s but, well, one does what one must to deal with technological progress.

It is a blast hearing CTGoblin again and all the other old favourites. They really hold up well. They're even better, in general, than much (but not all) of the "chiptune" shit that is being created these days. And by better I don't mean more complex waveforms, I mean not an exercise in amusical ear-shredding harmonics. Same "back to the transistors" feel but much better music.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:39 AM on September 8, 2010


Sean, I too have a 650MB CD-R from many moons ago laying about... somewhere in here. Now that I have ample free time due to.. circumstances... I need to find it.

KMH, thanks for the post... it's pulled a lot of good memories from my past firmly forward in a time when they are needed.
posted by PROD_TPSL at 8:29 AM on September 8, 2010


PROD_TPSL - I enjoy the nostalgia trip *a lot* too. It gets me through many dragging days at work. Glad to have brought a little sunshine to you :) I'm sure I'm not the only other one here who knows how tough circumstances can be.

Glow Bucket - thanks for the previously!
posted by KMH at 9:10 AM on September 8, 2010


There used to be download links for nearly every song -- often for the original format (.mod, .s3m, etc) but sometimes for mp3s. There also used to be a lot more information, in the form of platform info, ratings, comments, links to demo/party/composer pages, etc. But the site was hacked twice by script kiddies and had to be restored from dubious backups. It then came under new management.

It was a great site in 2003. Best of the web, even. I even remember the tune that was playing the first time I tuned in, Skaven's "Mercury Rain". Good stuff.
posted by Maximian at 10:22 AM on September 8, 2010


Thanks for this post. I used to listen to Nectarine frequently, but the last I heard the operator had a hard drive crash and they weren't sure they were going to continue. And then I just forgot about it.
posted by Ceniac at 2:16 PM on September 8, 2010


Always lovely to hear old Amiga mods. The musicians got so much out of four channels. Kohina, another demoscene radio station.

So, some more Amiga mod links:
Amiga Music Preservation
amiga mods as mp3s!
Amiga Remix
Chiptune.com (with DHTML workbench)
ModLand

People also post remixes of C64 tunes at Remix64, plus Reformat the Planet is a documentary on the chiptune scene if you want to find out more, currently available to watch free on Penny Arcade TV and 'Endless loop: A brief history of chiptunes' being a more academic look.
posted by Z303 at 2:44 PM on September 8, 2010


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