===================================================================
  DATE : 2021.01.29
  TIME : 11:43
AUTHOR : norris@sdf.org
 TITLE : WELCOME TO THE MODCAST
 
===================================================================
Shortly after I set up my gopher hole last year, I downloaded all
of the MOD files off of http://artscene.textfiles.com/music/mods/
thinking I would mirror them on my gopher site. I decided not to
once I had finished the 54 gig download of over 140,000 MOD files.
The directory structure of the downloaded files was going to make
it a little cumbersome to be useful on a gopher site. As an aside,
I can't remember the exact details, but I pretty sure I used wget,
or maybe it was curl, to grab the files; either way it was easy. I
kept the files and have enjoyed listening to them as background
music on several occasions since then.

But wait, what are MOD files? MOD is short for module, and
paraphrased from wikipedia at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOD_(file_format) is a file format,
first developed for the Amiga computer in 1987, and is mainly used
to represent music. A MOD file (including files with the extension
MOD, XM, IT, 669, MTM, and S3M) contains a set of instruments in
the form of samples and a number of patterns indicating how and
when the samples are played. More information about MOD files can
be found at the alt.binaries.sounds.mods FAQ at
http://cd.textfiles.com/darkdomain/faqs/faq-mod_v28-part1.txt,
retrieved and stored at http://textfiles.com.

All that aside, MOD files are both plenty fun and geeky; I have
fond memories of editing MOD files back in the day, changing the
instrument samples and completely changing the sound of the music.
And you can still do that today with with the MOD tracking program
MilkyTracker found at https://milkytracker.org/about/.

So, back to the story, a couple of day ago I decided I would
stream a randomly shuffled, continuous playlist of 140,129 MOD
files. That's a lot of MOD files; 309 days, 6 hours, 2 minutes,
and 48 seconds worth of mod files to be exact! With this many
files, there are sure to be some that are not your cup of tea, but
there will plenty of good ones too. So, if you feel so inclined,
tune in and give it a listen.  I can pretty much guarantee you
won't hear the same song twice in 309 day of continuous listening.

Just paste the following stream address in your media player of
choice:


http://lottalinuxlinks.com:8000/stream.m3u


I don't know for sure how much my daily internet usage will affect
the stream quality, but I know there will be times when the stream
is less than ideal. I really don't think this is going to blow
up the internet or anything like that, but if it gets to be a
hassle bandwidth wise (or even if it doesn't), there is a decent
chance that I may end up moving the stream to a slot on SDF's
anonradio at https://anonradio.net/listen/ or maybe tilderadio at
https://tilderadio.org/. We'll see what happens.

tl;dr: I set up a pretty awesome internet audio stream at
https://lottalinuxlinks.com/modcast/ of over 140,000 MOD files

--norris

(o\_!_/o)