Music disk
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about computer music collections. For the Purple Motion album, see Musicdisk (album).
Music disk, or musicdisk, is a term used by the demoscene to describe a collection of songs made on a computer. They are essentially the computer equivalent of an album. A music disk is typically packaged in the form of a program with a custom user interface, so the listener does not need other software to play the songs. The "disk" part of the term comes from the fact that music disks were once made to fit on a single floppy disk, so they could be easily distributed between friends and at demo parties. On modern platforms, music disks are usually downloaded to a hard disk drive.
Songs in a music disk are typically composed with a tracker, a type of program popular in the demoscene. Amiga music disks usually consist of MOD files, while PC music disks often contain multichannel formats such as XM or IT. Music disks are also common on the Commodore 64 and Atari ST, where they use their own native formats.
Related terms include music pack, which can refer to a demoscene music collection that does not include its own player, and chipdisk, a music disk containing only chiptunes, which have become popular on the PC given the large size of MP3 music disks.
