The Music of Amnesia

I'm very proud to feature the first music distribution of the won't-run-on-Pentiums-anymore classic Amnesia by Renaissance. Why redistribute the music? Some background:

In 1992, Tran wrote a new experimental music system called The CDFM composer. CDFM files (and their demo-offshoot, 670 files, which had no song/title/instrument text) contained 4 channels of digital sound, just like regular mod files, except they also contain 9 FM channels, just like an Adlib tracker. This means a standard cheap Sound Blaster could produce 13 channels of music, and in stereo on a Sound Blaster Pro--and all on a 386-16 (the machine Tran owned for much of his demoscene development). This was nicely demonstrated in Amnesia, as there was not only great music, but enough CPU time left over for some good effects as well. Daredevil remembers where the idea came from: "Tran thought of that one on his own, but I'm sure CC probably had some say in it. CC was never a demanding musician, he could compose with anything."

Renaissance never formally distributed the CDFM composer, claiming it was too unfinished to release. Recalls Daredevil, "There were things in the help screens like 'Don't press ALT-J or you will suffer' and 'ALT-X summons the devil and makes you pay'. I can't believe Ken put up with that for as long as he did... heheh ;)"

The innovative Amnesia demo used an early version of Tran's PMODE extender, and as a result, does not run on most modern machines. So, when discussions in the demo newsgroups mentioned Amnesia's technologically groundbreaking music, and newbies complained they couldn't run Amnesia to hear it, I thought I'd make the music available (with Tran's and Daredevil's blessing, of course :-). Daredevil sums it up: "CDFM was the official name... And we even put together an archive file ready to release, however it never made it out. The tracker looked/felt much like Composer 669, however it was not for the novice. It had alot of little quirks/unfinished features that would have made it difficult for the average user to deal with. The actual file format that the tracker uses is "C67" and "670" is the format used for demos and such. The latter of the two does not contain any instrument names or other data not required for playback in a demo."

The music below is the full music from the demo, as played on a 386sx25 with a Sound Blaster Pro. There are two formats to choose from:

• The MPEG selections are full quality stereo sound. To hear the MPEG selections, you'll need an MPEG level 3 decoder. If you need an MPEG audio player, visit www.mpeg.org.
• The RealAudio selections are real-time streaming audio; that is, you can listen to the music as it is downloading in real time. (The quality is not as good as the MPEG selections, however.) For the RealAudio 3.0 selections, you'll need the RealAudio 3.0 player, available from RealAudio's home page.

UPDATE! I've inspired DareDevil / Renaissance to rewrite the CDFM engine! These remastered clips were played back on a Mediatrix AudioTrix Pro sound card using a modified version of Tran's original DFM32 music driver mixed in 44.1K stereo and recorded onto a Digidesign Pro Tools system. The FM portion of the songs was processed using a Yamaha SPX1000. You can even hear the flaws in the samples now! :)

Coming soon: More CDFM music from RMUZIK0, Ren's Black Glass Demo 2, and some unreleased tunes!

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• How To Win a Demo Compo

Other than that...

Demos are Kewl! %-)