Add UADE decoder plugin for Amiga music formats

[jtraeholt]

Feature Request: Add UADE decoder plugin for Amiga music formats

Summary

Request to add a decoder plugin based on UADE (Unix Amiga Delitracker Emulator) to enable MPD to play Amiga music formats including TFMX, ProTracker modules, OctaMED, and many others.

Background

UADE is a mature, well-established library that provides accurate emulation of Amiga music formats. It supports a comprehensive range of formats used in the demoscene and classic Amiga games/demos. Currently, users need separate players like uade123 to play these formats, breaking the unified music experience that MPD provides.

Supported Formats

UADE supports numerous Amiga music formats, including but not limited to:

• TFMX (.mdat, .tfmx) - Used in many classic games like Turrican series
• ProTracker (.mod) - Classic 4-channel tracker format
• OctaMED (.med) - Advanced Amiga tracker format
• Future Composer (.fc)
• SoundTracker variants
• AHX/THX formats
• And many others (50+ formats total)

Technical Details

• Library: UADE is actively maintained and available at https://gitlab.com/uade-music-player/uade
• License: GPL-compatible
• Stability: Mature codebase, widely used in various music players
• Dependencies: Relatively lightweight, mainly requires the UADE library itself
• Platform: Cross-platform (Linux, macOS, BSD, Windows)

Precedent in MPD

MPD already includes specialized decoder plugins for niche music formats:

• sidplay - For C64 SID music (libsidplayfp/libsidplay2)
• gme - For various game music formats (Game Music Emu)
• mikmod - For tracker modules
• adplug - For AdLib music

A UADE decoder would follow the same pattern and philosophy.

Use Case & Community Benefit

• Demoscene community: Large collection of high-quality Amiga music
• Retro gaming: Soundtrack preservation from classic Amiga games
• Music enthusiasts: Comprehensive format support in a single daemon
• Existing MPD users: Many users already use MPD for specialized formats

The requester successfully integrated SID support into MPD using NixOS package overrides, demonstrating both demand for retro music format support and the extensibility of MPD's plugin architecture.

Implementation Considerations

• File detection could use UADE's built-in format detection
• Configuration options might include:
  • Subsong selection (many Amiga modules contain multiple songs)
  • Playback duration limits (some modules loop indefinitely)
  • Audio quality settings
• Integration with MPD's existing tag system for metadata

Alternative Solutions Considered

Currently users must:

1. Use separate players like uade123 for Amiga music
2. Convert files to standard formats (lossy process, loses authenticity)
3. Use different music players entirely

None of these provide the unified experience that MPD aims to deliver.

References

• UADE project: https://gitlab.com/uade-music-player/uade
• UADE documentation: Available in the project repository
• Amiga Music Preservation Project: https://amp.dascene.net/
• Example integration: Various music players already integrate UADE successfully

Request

Would the MPD team consider adding UADE as a decoder plugin? This would make MPD the definitive solution for both modern and retro music formats, serving the needs of a dedicated community while maintaining MPD's philosophy of comprehensive music format support.

Thank you for considering this feature request and for maintaining such an excellent music daemon!

[MaxKellermann]

Writing a decoder plugin for MPD is not hard. Why don't you try to implement one for this library?
Here's the most recently added decoder plugin: #2306

[MaxKellermann]

I added the "postponed" label because I am not interested in spending time on implementing this plugin. I suggest you write the code and submit a PR, or motivate somebody else to do it for you.

[jtraeholt]

I'm going to look into doing it myself when I have the time. I'm not a C developer, but I do know the language.

[mschwendt]

* **TFMX** (.mdat, .tfmx) - Used in many classic games like Turrican series

The original file extensions for TFMX modules, which are stored as a pair of files, are "mdat." and "smpl." and on Commodore AMIGA these are a prefix to the filename.

Some modules collections for PC have changed that to .sam and .tfx which creates a mess. Others have kept the original naming style.

The .tfmx extension is rare and not well-defined since it is shared by a conflicting set of tools that create single-file modules.

Finally, some TFMX files are in an entirely different format. Jochen Hippel's proprietary music player was called TFMX, too, and files start with a "TFMX" tag as the first value of the header structure. As they are single-file modules, sometimes but rarely they end with a .tfmx file name extension.

* **Future Composer** (.fc)

Here, the full set of file name extensions is: .fc, .fc13, .fc14, .fc3, .fc4, .smod

Wherever possible, module collection maintainers ought to reduce it to ".fc", possibly both ".fc" and ".smod". The other variants about Future Composer v1.3 and v1.4 don't make sense.