Remastering tracker modules like S3M oder XM

While going through some old CDs I found some tracker modules I created back in the day. Naturally I wondered how to convert these Scream Tracker 3 and Fast Tracker 2 files to a more easily playable format like ogg or mp3. For starters, this could be done by playing the files in winamp with the wave writer plugin enabled which writes the rendered audio to disc.

A more flexible solution is using the Open ModPlug Tracker, though. The OpenMPT is full featured tracker in the form of an open source windows application. I reads all kinds of tracker module formats including S3M and XM and has the ability to export a whole song as wav file. The real advantage over winamp is the channels option to render each channel to an individual wav file for further editing or mixing.

And that’s what I did with some of my modules. I took the wav files generated from OpenMPT and dropped them in Adobe Audition 2.0 to add some filters and equalizer settings for each channel and finally exported the songs as mp3s. If you don’t want to bother running a multitrack audio editor OpenMPT also has some options to enhance the playback (eg. dynamics correction) which I did not try but may be sufficient.