I. in case you don't know anything about modules etc.

you've come here and you are wondering what's this all about. well. there are people doing music with computers. some of them use special programs called trackers. it works (very simplified) like this: you take some sounds (let's call them samples - no matter where are they from (wavetable, synth, recorded from cds, tapes, vinyls, live played or taken from other module) and then you write down notes in those programms with name of sample and the program will play it.
songs are called modules - or mods. the oldest of them were made on amiga, atari, or other 8bit platforms and used only 4 channels (that means only 4 sounds played in one moment). 4ch mods are still alive and you can recognize them simply - it's .MOD format. after some time a big portion of the 'scene' (those are people who do the music in this way or they code intros and demos - programms to show their skills and ideas in various competitions) moved to pc. and new programms were made - till now two of them remain the most favourite - fast tracker II. (.XM format) and impulse tracker II. (.IT format).
those programms are also best for playing modules - but you may experience some problems running them on windows platforms. so the players were developed for better comfort. all around famous winamp is able to play most of the modules, but in many many cases tends to fuck up... my favourite player is modplug but have a look on maz's page and find out yourselves which one will suite you best.
don't mistake mod with midi or mp3! it's a completly different thing... yet lot of musicians use trackers and then other sound software (audiomulch, soundforge etc.) and they release songs as mp3s. mods are almost always much shorter (like 1 mb) and you can see how are they done - you can hear each sound separatly. and they will sound the same using (almost) every soundcard - that's often problem with midi.
the scene is based on communication, people are meeting on events called 'demoparties', they are founding groups in which lot of personalities release their music together, and they have their own channels (eg. #trax) on irc sites. the scene is most active in scandinavia, holland, germany or france, but you can find sceners all around the world!
and lot of music is produced every day. there are high quality and original songs, but it's clear that there's even more crap. so i've decided to help the listeners to get to what i call good music. give it a try - maybe you have listened to mp3s only... maybe you aren't familiar with computer music at all - this may be a friendly way to start!

in case you wanna know more about it all, have a look on those addresses: