News/2010

A Pokey Xmas


A few days ago the Atari SAP Music Archive (http://asma.atari.org/) was updated with 1024 new tunes. We offer an alternative web interface at ExoticA that allows to search and download recordings from the collection (as ogg or mp3) over at the ASMA Search page. This update brings the collection to 3862 tunes.

Have a lovely Xmas.

News roundup


Seems a little quiet round here doesn't it. At least where this news page is concerned. Apologies for the lack of updates. There have been changes to the site, but they didn't quite make it to being news until now.

UnExoticA - our Amiga Game and Demo music collection - has received four updates. You can see a breakdown of the changes on the UnExoticA/Updates page.

Back on the 26th of June an update was released of the High Voltage SID Collection. This is not our project of course, but we do have a search engine for it on the site available on the Special:HVSC page. You can also use it to download recordings as mp3 or ogg, as well as linking across to http://remix.kwed.org for tracks that have remixes available.

Being a wiki, there have of course been page updates and additions, that you can track on the recent changes page. Thanks to everyone who has chipped in with an addition or correction. It all helps!

Perhaps not directly related to this site, but one of the reasons why activity has been a little less is that BuZz has been quite busy on some other projects, including some updates to his MediaWiki::API module for interfacing with MediaWiki from PERL (which we use for the automation of the UnExoticA collection), as well as working on XBMC (A Media Center) for the XBOX1 (now called XBMC4XBOX - http://www.xbmc4xbox.org), that should be due out soon.

Update about recent downtime


Some of you might have noticed that the site went offline last Friday, and then came back in read only mode (and the other sites on the server remained off for a few days). Just our bad luck, but we had yet another server failure. Last year around the same time the main harddisk failed, and we switched over to a new machine. Then two days short of a year, the new machine has a failure, and on a Bank Holiday weekend too! This time the harddisk was fine though luckily (restoring from backups is not fun). I brought this site back up in read only mode on my home connection, and a few days later Mythic-Beasts our friendly hosts swapped the disk into a replacement machine. Sorry for any inconvenience by the downtime. We don't plan to go offline again soon! Fingers crossed!

Maybe not news but News


Just a brief update on things. Those utilising the modland ogg/mp3 recording service may have noticed a temporary loss of service for a couple of days. This was due to a rebuild of the server that is used for streaming. It would have been wise to report on this but unfortunately other unrelated problems caused a failure in the PR department ;-). All is well now though. Hopefully I can update you with some new changes soon. In the meantime, if you haven't tried the recording service, I can give you a couple of my favourite searches : Drax's fantastic Fasttracker II tunes, and Pink of Abyss' great AHX tracks.

Actually there has been a couple of updates in the recording backend. It now only should show ogg/mp3 links for formats that are actually playable, and the psf format was added, meaning you can download a variety of Playstation 1 tunes for playback. Enjoy!

BuZz 03:06, 27 February 2010 (GMT)

New album "Gravity Crash Anthems" from Cold Storage


Tim Wright (aka Cold Storage) has released his 5th studio album entitled "Gravity Crash Anthems". With this album Tim has gone back to his roots, with some 80's inspired electro style synth sounds including the Commodore 64 SID Chip. The album is based on his soundtrack for the game "Gravity Crash" now available for the PS3 (on PSN), but with with extended remixes and other extras. It is well worth a listen (User:BuZz especially likes the Scarface 6581 remix), and you can get it from the Cold Storage page on Bandcamp.

His next album will be to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Psygnosis (on the 3rd July 2010) which should be available later this year. We look forward to this eagerly, and wish Tim all the best with his future projects.

Modland and reLive plugins for XBMC


We have released two plugins for the popular media centre XBMC (http://xbmc.org), one that allows listening to music from the Modland Collection, as well as a reLive plugin for listening to archived shows supported by the reLive system from SceneSat (An excellent demo scene radio station with live hosted shows - one to broadcast at 19:00GMT tonight). reLive allows browsing of old SceneSat shows as well as some podcasts that work with the system including the excellent BitJam podcasts from Bitfellas. You can download the latest versions of the plugins from the http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-addons/ site as well as downloading directly from within XBMC using the "SVN Repo Installer", that is shipped with many builds (also available from the add-ons site). Thanks to Ziphoid from SceneSat for his support.