For you, cohost, a little something I have that I think you might like too.
I've always liked tracker music - mods, XMs, ITs, S3Ms, all of them. It's a kind of format that only exists because of the limitations of the time when it was created, and those limitations gave it some fun constraints. It's a kind of sequenced music for computers based around samples that's fully synthesized on the device where it's being played - designed in the era of floppy disks, of pre-56k modems, where every kilobyte really did matter.
Sample-based tracker music grew out of the Amiga and DOS scenes, so it was more popular in countries that grew up with those computers. Japan had less of a tracker tradition, and the Japanese tracker musicians I'm familiar with largely used western tools and formats.
With one exception - Ultramarine. I stumbled on it way back in the day when I found its website. They gave away all the tools (even a browser plugin to listen to UM music in your browser!), and linked to a few sites with music.
And what I found there was unusual. See, in western tracker formats, the music and the samples are bundled together into a single file. You get the one file, you have everything you need to listen. Ultramarine, though, is different. Ultramarine has sample banks that live separately from the actual music data. It limits you to just the sounds in the sample banks you have, but it means your songs can be super tiny - maybe you have a single 6MB high quality sample bank, and then countless 30KB songs that use it. It's an interesting idea!
At least, it's an interesting idea if you don't lose the sample bank. And you can probably guess what happened with link rot. See, I said "back in the day" - that was back in high school or maybe early undergrad. It was more than 20 years ago, and I lost those files a long time ago. When I tried to rebuild my collection, I found a single site with archived Ultramarine music - the site belonging to a musician named GAY.LLA:
And he pointed you to a sample bank called "AOUM01.PAC", created by a musician named TAN-Y. That bank seems like it was popular - a bunch of the other sites I'd seen with Ultramarine music used it. But I couldn't find it. I had music and no samples to go along with it!
I tried contacting TAN-Y, who understandably wasn't really maintaining these old files in a convenient place and wasn't really interested in going back into them.
Well, what else was there to do but post on cohost.org, the home of other wonderful weirdos who'd care about this? @kkzero did some digging and discovered that a few of the files on TAN-Y's site had been archived after all, and it specifically included the high-quality, high-def version of AOUM01.PAC. None of his own UM music was archived, but with this sample bank I could at least play GAY.LLA's music. And it turns out, it really is as fun as I remember.
Like a lot of Japanese fan music of that era, it's covers of other songs. In this case, all covers of music from visual novels. The first two are from a game called Love Escalator. I don't know the first thing about it, but I do know it must have been really popular, or at least had popular music - because the fan musicians back in the day loved to make covers of its songs, especially its signature opening track. The first song at the top of this post is one of two covers of that song that GAY.LLA did.
Judging from the filenaming, I'm guessing one of these is based on a CD soundtrack with arranged music and the other is based on the in-game version. This second one is the non-CD one.
His other two covers are from the visua novel ONE, which was also very popular and is very well known for its music. This one's a fun upbeat track.
This second one is much moodier - definitely exactly the sound I expect from a visual novel of that particular vintage.
If you want to listen to these in the original format, you can grab the files from the links above and toss them into KBMedia Player. When I do a longer writeup for my main blog I'll also repackage the songs in a more convenient format with instructions.
...and that's it. That's the only four songs I have in the Ultramarine format. I'm guessing others might have been distributed offline, say on floppies or CDs at fan expos. There are a handful of sites linked to from the Ultramarine homepage that once had songs for download, like this one, but none of them were archived.
It's a little sad, but these kinds of fan activities were always pretty ephemeral. They were in a place and a time, and didn't necessarily expect that they'd be available forever. So really, I'm grateful that any of this survived so that I can listen to it - and now you can, too. Let's enjoy these four songs together, and enjoy them in this time we have. Isn't that nice?
