so many WebAudio players but which one to use?

The attempt to play original sound files from obscure legacy systems (e.g. as can be found in the modland.com collection) can be a daunting endeavor. The originally required hardware is more and more difficult to come by. And even if some workaround exists (e.g. you can run old 16-bit MS-DOS crap in a DOSbox) the user experience often leaves a lot to be desired since the UI usability of the old software is usually quite bad from today's perspective.

The Web enabled players available here solve part of the problem by providing a cross-platform solution: They run in any Web browser with respective WebAudio/WASM capabilities (that all modern browsers have). The different "players" are actually "plugins" that are used with one generic player. Respective plugins can be individually picked/used as needed, e.g. if nothing but VGM files need to be played then only the "VGM plugin" is needed. But if many different formats need to be supported then this can also be accomplished by using more of the available plugins (e.g. see PlayMOD that uses all the plugins to provide online browsing and playback funtionality for 99.9% of the modland.com and vgmrips collections.)

Finding a suitable plugin to play some random legacy music file may still be a challenge: Many of the files from the old platforms were not meant to be pulished as standalone files and were never properly documented. General purpose players may have a hard time to automatically detect the correct format of respective binaries.

In other instances there may be format variations that some players may not manage to distinguish properly (For illustration here Claudio Matsuoka's "history of trackers" graph that shows the sheer number of different music tracker programs that people have created over the years.).

Some files found today may already have a multi-platform journey behind them, e.g. some 80s ZX Spectrum file may have been collected by some Amiga user in the 90s to eventually end up where it is today. On that journey files were often modified or renamed - to accomodate the platforms that they were then used on (e.g. a ZX Spectrum file might not have had any filename extension orginally but a person using it on the Amiga would have invented a filename prefix to make the Amaga happy, etc). Many players depend on specific filename extensions and you may need to rename your music files for them to be detected correctly by a particular player (upper-/lowercase naming limitations may be a story of its own).

It may be difficult to find information about software that predates the Internet era and if you search for some 80s company (let alone product) Google will typically spam you with its unrelated payed ads or current day companies that have meanwhile grabbed that same name. The below table therefore also tries to provide some background information about the music file formats that my Web player plugins currently support.

Use the below table to search for specific "filename extensions" (see affix) and click on the respective "player" links to get to a page that lets you test a specific player plugin (you can drag&drop your own files there to test them).

format description affix system type player
format description affix system type player

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