So, where's all the free music? Music & MP36/15/2000; 8:16:00 AM Linux demonstrates that software can exist where there is little or no money. Is there an equivalent demonstration for music? Actually, yes.Almost everybody has heard of "MP3" by now, but few have heard of a family of formats that pre-date MP3 by at least fifteen years: MOD files. Visit the Mod Archive to get an idea for what free music can be. (WinAmp should be able to play nearly anything you can find on that site.) MOD files store sounds and instructions for combining them, and actually started out on the Commodore Amiga. They attracted a "scene" and are still in development and use. I actually started out my computer music by created MOD files.The music is free, and it often shows in the quality, which goes down to as bad as you can imagine . Still, there is good stuff to be had. Three of my favorites are Inside Out, Unreal ][ (which is actually a soundtrack, not a "song"), and Space Debris. (Space Debris is truly an artistic masterpiece... at any given time, only four distinct sounds are playing... the chords count as a single sound as far as the computer is concerned.)What you'll see if you play around with the site for a while is that it tends heavily towards techno, European music, and atmospheric. That's mostly because of the "scene"... there's nothing about the formats limiting them to that (though classical doesn't work very well). But the kicker here is that the music is free... and some of it, like the songs I linked to, are of very high quality. Even now, ''free music'' isn't an oxymoron. Who knows what it could be like if this form of composing was brought more mainstream?And, a final note, if you are interested in creating this type of music, it's not as hard as you might think, though it does take work. If you can play the songs, you've already got all the hardware you need to create this music. You might start with The Tracker's Handbook. (Let me know if you do, I'd be interested.)