Where have the music-disk interfaces gone?

Written by Makke

Some things that I find nice in the scene seem to have died away the last years. I have previously talked to a few people (big hellos to Simon here :-) about the fact that less and less groups make intros for their demos / diskmags. And that's kind of sad as I, and many with me, found it to be a great deal of fun studying the intros, and reading the scroll-texts.

These intros don't have to be a huge production. It only has to be something small. Less than 50K is preferred!

I mean, if you spend half a year designing and making the demo, you could spend a few hours to make a cheap-ass logo a few ugly pixels flying around and a scroll text to that. Many people would appreciate that, and it would put a nice personal touch to the production.

Now! What I was really going to write about is the fact that interfaces of music-disks almost have disappeared from the face of earth. The last music-disk I listened to with an interface was a music-disk by Necros (or at least I think so). And that disk was made in '96!

So I start to wonder why they disappeared?

Was there no interest in them anymore? I don't know. This discussion might have been up before. I have after all only been active in the scene since late '97 when I got my PC. (I was a bit active since May '97, when me and Wolk formed the Destruction Duo, or The Einstein Crew that we later renamed to.)

The good thing with an interface is that you can read a scroll with comments from the composer at the same time as listening to the songs. This can also be achieved with a text file and a windows player (like ModPlug or Mod4Win), but how personal is that?

The fact that some archives (like Hornet) want the songs on the disk to be separate files could be one answer. So you can't make one big EXE file of the disk, and there by force the listener to use the interface, if he doesn't know how to rip the songs. And then many probably thought that it was meaning less to make an interface, as making an interface takes a lot of knowledge and effort.

But I'm not blaming anybody! I myself have released two music-disks and I didn't have a thought of making an interface.

The fact that I wasn't in any demo group then, and the fact that I didn't know HOW to make an interface made me release them without an interface.

But now I'm in a group, and when I came with the idea of releasing a music-disk everybody started to discuss how the interface was going to be done.

My first thought was:

"Why the hell do we need an interface?" But when I heard all the cool ideas everybody came up with I thought:

"Yes! A music-disk is only a half music-disk without an interface!"

After thinking some more about it I came up with the idea that maybe people don't want to listen to it in an interface because then you can't see how the song is tracked.

This is something I enjoy a lot! That's a big part of tracked music: To actually "see" the music as it is played. That's why I don't like the idea of MP3 encoding modules so no one can copy it, and it might be the same effect with an interface.

A dilemma had accrued!

I wanted an interface because that gives the disk a special touch of originality and personality.

But I didn't want an interface because that would ruin the pleasure of looking at the track!

The solution I found to the problem was to make a disk with the modules as separate files that could be played with an interface if the listener wants to.

But maybe we're so used to the fact that there never are any interfaces that we don't even will notice it, and only listen to the songs in a player or tracker?

- Makke / Comic Pirates

(Btw: The music-disk isn't released yet.)