Apple II Bits

In 2008, Geoff Weiss and I collaborated on a Juiced.GS article that described how to convert and play MOD music files on a modern computer. I was motivated by holiday memories of Christmas tunes piping out of Tony Morales’ Sonobox NDA. How could I get these songs back and into a format that I can enjoy in iTunes?

The first step in the solution came from Dr. Steve Weyhrich, digital historian extraordinaire, who at KansasFest 2008 presented a session on audio preservation, during which he mentioned PlayerPRO, a music player for Mac OS X. I went home to play with the program and was thrilled to find it plays the hundreds of MOD files I’d collected on my Apple II. Converting the MODs to MP3s, as detailed in Juiced.GS, provides the added benefit of accessing them from iTunes and, thus, your iPod — but if all you want is to play them in your Mac environment, PlayerPRO can do it for you without the effort of conversion.

PlayerPRO, which was first released in 1990, was most recently updated in January 2010. I haven’t explored alternatives to PlayerPRO, but whatever your operating system, there’s likely to be a MOD music player available.

Once you have the software, you can find several hundred, if not thousand, MODs to play in Esprit de Apple Corps, a once-commercial product that Russell Nielson and I reclassified as freeware at the 2008 KansasFest.