Contents

• New here? Start with these
• What it does
• Plays what other players will not
• Keeps playing when you leave
• Your whole folder, grouped by what a module actually carries
• Playlists and favourites you can keep
• Five pages, one tap apart
• Watch the music go past
• A row per channel, and every reading is live
• Reads the file properly, and shows its working
• Yours, on your phone
• Requirements

ZMS MOD PlayerIn development

Point it at your modules, press play. Then watch every channel of it.

ZMS MOD Player is a free Android player for tracker modules. It plays your .mod, .s3m, .xm and .it files, and dozens of formats besides, straight from the folder they already live in. It reads them straight out of .zip, .lha and .lzh archives too, without unpacking anything.

A module is not a recording. It carries its own samples and its own score, which is why a four minute tune fits in forty kilobytes, and why this app can show you the notes while you listen. See Module Formats.

It plays through libopenmpt, the playback engine from OpenMPT, which is unusually careful about getting old files right. It knows which tracker wrote a file and imitates that tracker's own behaviour, quirks included, rather than playing everything one way. A module that sounded a certain way in 1993 sounds that way here.

It is free, and it stays free. No ads, no accounts, no trial, and nothing to unlock. There is no INTERNET permission in the app at all. Made by James Woodcock of Pixel Refresh, in his spare time, for the love of tracker music.

New here? Start with these#

• Installing - what your phone needs.
• Quick Start - a folder, a file, and play, in three steps.
• Module Formats - MOD, S3M, XM, IT and the rest, explained.
• Glossary - pattern, order, tick, sample. The words trackers use.

What it does#

Plays what other players will not#

MOD, S3M, XM and IT, and past those the long tail: MED, STM, 669, FAR, ULT, PSM, DBM, OKT, PTM and many more. Archives are opened in place, .zip for the PC packs and .lha and .lzh for the Amiga ones, so a thirty module archive appears as thirty tracks and the archive becomes the album. Nothing is unpacked and nothing is written back.

Keeps playing when you leave#

Playback lives in a service, not in the screen, so it carries on when you switch apps or lock the phone. The notification and the lock screen carry the controls, and it appears in Android Auto with your queue.

Your whole folder, grouped by what a module actually carries#

Point it at the folder your files live in and it catalogues everything: by format, by how many channels a file uses, by folder, and by folder-with-a-cover-in-it, which is the closest thing a module has to an album. Nothing to tag, nothing to import. See The Library.

Playlists and favourites you can keep#

Both are saved as ordinary files in your own music folder, so they are backed up with the music and readable by other players. Restore your folder onto a new phone and they come back with it. See The Library.

Five pages, one tap apart#

A bar across the bottom holds the pattern view, the channels, the visualiser, your library in the middle, the queue, the keys page and the info page with the author's own message in it. What is playing sits on a strip just above the bar on every page, so the player is always one tap away. See The Pages.

Watch the music go past#

The pattern view is the tracker's own grid: notes, instruments, volumes and effects, scrolling up through a lit bar as they are played. It is the file itself, not a visualisation of the audio.

A row per channel, and every reading is live#

The channels page gives each channel its level, its note, its instrument and the effect running on it right now, with the effect named in words rather than left as a hex code. See Effects Explained.

Reads the file properly, and shows its working#

Format, tracker, channels, patterns, orders, samples and instruments, all read from the file. And the song message, which is where the author said hello, credited a friend, or left a note about which tracker to load it in.

Yours, on your phone#

Files are read through Android's own picker, so the app needs no storage permission. Cover art comes from your own folder and is never downloaded. See Cover Art.

Requirements#

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