Greetings Hive :)
I've decided to share with you my new small project that I'm working on.
It'a another radio (from the Telegram one that I told you about earlier).
Here's the link if you want to check it out right now:
https://dlive.tv/securityxiii
If you want a longer explanation, I am happy you do! And please read on! :)
This time, I am telling you about online stream (video + audio) of keygen music. It can be referred as chiptunes, 8bit, tracker, cracker, computer, synth, electronic music.
But what does not change it is that it's a whole large genre of music!
What is good about keygen music?:
(1) HUGE: it's still a large musical genre with different sub-genres (examples: chiptunes, keygen, intro, cracktro, demoscene music, bytebit music, inside each there are plenty of sub-genres)
(2) DIVERSE: there are a lot of different formats and programs about it (examples: MilkyTracker, PureData, Orca, Protracker, Renoise, OpenMPT, etc) - both to listen and create
(3) COMPACT: musical files are super-small (counted in kilobytes or hundred kilobytes, but usually not even a megabyte) while still same length as "normal" "wave-form" music of 4 to 6 minutes (or, sometimes, even INFINITE in length even music rhythm will still change)! The size is small because files does not actually contain music, only instructions for a computer how to synthesize it. Even more, you can checkout the bytebit music which is totally different level of sizing for music - for example, this is a track that is infinite length and is sized just 75 BYTES yes that's right you can see it here on the screenshot:
So, this is whole track:
(t&(t>>6)+(t<<((t>>11)^((t>>13)+3))|((t>>14%64)+(t>>14)))&(-t>>5));
If you want to check out bytebit music, try reading this article, watch video with examples from viznut, play with bytebit right in your browser by using my sample cover track in this stereo-mode online tool or maybe share your creation in here. Last but not least, as it can be generated by algorithm or even a neural network, it's quite easy to make the actual track unlimited length.
(4) FRUITFUL: you can "render" tracker music with different actual sound "colors" by changing the "rendering" (or sequencing) settings in your tracker program. Simulate sound (how it would sound?) from Commodore Amiga? Here you go. Want to hear the classic linear interpolation? No problems! It's called Resampling in more professional terms.
(5) EXPRESSIVE: everyone combines their favorite software to produce chiptune music. A huge variety of tracker software, resamplers, renderers etc. etc. are available for your and other's tracks! The software scene around this is about 90% opensource, so go grab a tracker source code from github OR write your own!
(6) SKILLFUL: it can be referred as the most "artistic" and creative "branch" of electronic music, because it takes not only compositing skills, but also very often coding or programming skills to make your song sound pretty and still be just 20 or maybe 50 kilobytes in size!
(7) FREE: usually it's not falling other copyright or other similar problems (that is especially good for youtube or twitch)
(8) EASY-TO-JUMP-IN: as I said it's whole friendly and open community, there are hacker meetups (online & offline) on tracker music (examples include, but not limited to, CC, FOSDEM, Chaos Constructions (in Russia), and thousands of others (checkout events here)[https://www.demoparty.net/]) where everybody is sharing and exchanging their experiences, tools, ideas, code snippets, knowledge, etc. A lot of online blogs are there about the topic, thousands of videos on youtube, books, everything you would like to see or read or listen. Open science!
(9) DOUBLEEFFECT: while improving your musical skills and knowledge, you can also improve your coding skills AND speed of finding information, knowledge of integration of computer systems, and other side-effects are also involved
(10) COLORFUL: generative music is linked to ideas of generative animation (ex., ProjectM), demoscene, and other interesting ways to express yourself as an artist. Use all the possibilities for expression!
So, this sums up to 10 attraction points. If you never heard about this whole story, check out my radio, maybe you will love it.
https://dlive.tv/securityxiii
Keygen Music Opensource Radio specifications
As it's opensource, I am sharing my example set up that is used live on the stream right now:
- Manjaro 19 (as host OS)
- OpenBroadcastStudio (OBS) 25.0.4 (streaming software)
- ProjectM (animation)
- OpenMPT (CLI tracker music player)
- Dlive (streaming decentralized platform)
- Cheap Chinese action camera for webcam stream background: Dazzne P2 (Aliexpress 10 $)
- Old 5-or-so-years HP elitebook laptop for streaming (Finn 20 $)
I am not using JACK(d) and real-time kernel here because I am lazy.
Tracks / music source and credits
The actual radio track files are gathered from KeygenMusic.net MEGAPack collection. Whole collection lasts about 180+ hours of music contain currently 5300+ tracks. This stands for medium length of ~2 minutes per track, as this collection was intended to be used inside of the keygens for computer software. And, remember, most of these tracks are created the way they actually can loop forever even if they are just few minutes length. Whole collection is about 331 mb in size which stands for medium of 60 kb size per track.
Format list statistics from the collection
Note: this collection includes around 80 tracks (out of ~5300) that are actually not trackers - these files are in OGG, WAV and MP3 formats accordingly. Reasons for this, is that not 100% of the times keygen music can be found in the source formats (that's the case for less then 2% of the collection). I didn't removed these tracks as they are still in same genre even not being as small as real XM, MOD, S3M files. Most rare source files in the collection (<10 tracks) are in d00, NSF, MO3, BP, FC13, SPC, HSC, and MTM formats.
| Tracks | Archive size | Length, hours | Length, minutes | Formats |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ~5300 | 331 MB | ~180 hrs | 10,800 min | 26 delivery formats |
I do plan to update stream sometimes with new experiences like Bytebit streams and some other experimental stuff.
Hope you like it, please subscribe to my channel if you do:
https://dlive.tv/securityxiii
Please comment the article with all or any of your thoughts.
Also, all tracks and source code for everything is available in KMOR github repo:
https://github.com/sxiii/keygen-music
Thanks & CYA
D from O