Modland

Modland is a very large, and well organised module archive created and maintained by Coma (Daniel Johansson), which contains over 360,000 music modules in 290 different formats. The collection is distributed over FTP from the main site and a few mirrors.

Web Interface and Instructions for use

You can find the interface at the Special:Modland page.

Because of the size, navigating the collection can take some time, and looking for a specific file can at times be difficult. To remedy this, ExoticA provides an interface to the collection which allows searching and browsing by filename, author, format and collection. It even allows searching the instrument texts of some music formats.

The collection field handles an additional grouping level which some tunes have, and helps to find music from a set, for example the tunes from a game might well be together in a collection.

The instrument search will allow you to search the instrument texts or other information stored inside the modules. Currently Fasttracker, Fasttracker2, Protracker and PlaySID formats are supported. You can also display this information when browsing or viewing search results.

Browsing

Use the A-Z links for module name, author, format or collection. After choosing the starting letter, you can filter the results down further by adding additional letters. There is a button to switch on the display of instrument data. Only the formats mentioned above are currently supported.

Searching

By default the search boxes use a boolean search. To make a search enter one or more keywords with an optional prefix of + or -. + means the word must appear in the data. - means the word should not appear in the data. If no prefixes are used, and more than one keyword is entered, then the search would match all data which contains either of the entered keywords. To match an exact phrase enter the string in quotes. To make this clearer here are some examples

+apples -oranges would match data that contains the word apples but not oranges.
+apples +oranges would match data that contains both the words apples and oranges (in any order)
"apples and oranges" would match data that contains the phrase apples and oranges

You may also use the wildcard * for partial word matching. For example

lem* would match any words starting with lem such as lemons or lemmings.

The quick search box works in the same way, but matches against filename, author and collection fields.

The boolean search can only search on words of 3 characters or more in length, unless searching for a phrase where it can match against phrases containing shorter words (so long as one word is more than 3 characters). Some words are excluded from the search. These are "stop" words, or common words like "and, the, who" and so on. A full list of the ignored words can be read here Fulltext Stopwords.

Some of the input fields also have a check box next to them. This enables exact mode. In this mode, the search doesn't recognise the entered text as separate keywords but one entire string (similar to that of the boolean phrase mode). This is useful to match against exact module names especially if they contain non alphanumeric characters which the boolean mode does not handle. The exact search supports the wildcard * for partial matching. For example searching for format: *tracker* will return any formats with the word 'tracker' in the name, or a search for author Coma* would return any authors which start with 'Coma'. The exact search with wildcards is many times slower than the default boolean search, and for most searches the boolean search should be used.

The instrument search only supports a boolean search method. The same rules apply as explained above.

Changelog

v1.4: Added default boolean search mode which is much more flexible. Also included other optimisations and improvements.
v1.x: Display of instrument data and other improvements.
v1.0: First version

Structure

Because the database is created from a filesystem structure, there are some discrepancies. For example if two different authors have the same directory name in two areas, they will be considered the same author. To avoid confusion, different authors with the same name should be separated through adding country codes to the folder name. If you find two folders which accidentally have the same name, please notify Coma so he can correct it: coma [at] modland.com

Contacting

For questions regarding the collection, please contact Daniel Johansson at coma [at] modland.com. For problems or queries regarding the web interface please contact BuZz at buzz [at] exotica.org.uk

      __  ___               __ __                      __
    //  \/   \             |  |  |  .: welcome to :.  |  |
   |          |  _____   __|  |  |  _____   _____   __|  |
..:|          |// ,   |// ,   |  |// ,   |//     |// ,   |:..
   |___,__,__/|______/|______/|__|____,__|____,__|______/

External Links

ftp://ftp.modland.com primary FTP site (For contributing modules)
ftp://modland.ziphoid.com mirror provided by Ziphoid.
ftp://ftp.amigascne.org/pub/mirrors/ftp.modland.com mirror provided by http://www.amigascne.org
ftp://aero.exotica.org.uk/pub/mirrors/modland mirror provided by User:BuZz