SidList is the playlist for music files called SIDs, better known as musics for the very well known 8-bit computer Commodore C64. This computer had, without doubt, the best music in all 8-bits and related music production was the best in times of late 80s.

WHY DO I NEED THAT?

You don't need anything :) But if you want to hear C64 musics in your work or somewhere else, you have probably recognized that these musics have a big disadvantage - they haven't information about time of songs in them and that's why the songs play either unlimited time or the exact time you select in player. Fortunately, Michael Schwendt, author of SidPlay, released "song-lengths database", which automatically generates lengths of all songs available in this format, based on the HVSC Sid Collection, the biggest collection of SIDs in the universe. But, everythig has buts. This database has to be supported by Sid players. And at the time there isn't player on Windows system that supports it (only Linux players have built-in support for the database). So the solution for Windows is - SidList. It is nothing big, it's "only" playlist generated from songlengths database, with proper length of all songs. This version of playlist is based on version 3.8 of HVSC, which means it uses all songs from this version of HVSC collection. I know there is version 4.0 already released, but I've no time to download and correct it :) Of course this collection works with newer version of HVSC but the newer songs aren't included in playlist, so they won't play :).

WHAT IS INSIDE?

Inside are two playlist for most common Windows Sid players: Playlist for SidAmp (it's sid plugin for Winamp) is called 'sidlist38.m3u'. Just run it with proper HVSC setup in SidAmp and you should be done. Playlist for SidPlay for Windows is called 'sidlist38.spl'. I recommend you to hear songs in SidPlay, it has better output. But you have firstly to edit third line and write path to HVSC basedir there (so program should find the songs he has to play..).

WHAT DO I NEED FOR THAT?

For SidList you need this software:
WINAMP v2.60 with SidAmp plugin or SidPlay for Windows (any version)
HVSC Sid Collection - version 3.8 Update #23 or newer.

WHY AND HOW DID YOU DO THAT?

There is an interesting story about the idea of making this list. When I entered my new job (it was in May 2000), I got a very nice office and a fast computer, but it had one big problem - the CD-ROM in this computer didn't work. And because of my NEED to play music while working, I had to play music, which plays very long time and files are very small, so they don't take too much space on the disk. I have browsed the web and found HVSC Sid collection - it was a very very huge collection with more than 13000 SID tunes and its size was only 24 MB packed, which is only the size of a few MP3s :)). So I downloaded it and I told myself that I have one and a half year to hear all the tunes in this collection (that's 650 hours of music, which was a realistic estimation of my one and a half-year hard work on the computer :) ). Of course, before listening to the tunes, I've got to test every one song and all his subsongs in SidAmp and tried to edit the length of songs so it wouldn't have any silence in them. I really couldn't imagine how pretty hard work it is :). But I couldn't give up - during 5 months I tested 6396 records (the total number of songs had raised to 16000, because of many subsongs in songs, so I'm now behind one third of the whole collection :) ) and then I released very first version 0.01 of my own SidList. Just then I recognized that my whole work was almost useless. Why? Because I found Songlengths database (to be strict, I didn't find it, LaLa told me about it), so whole playlist was then the question of few Perl scripts that convert this database to the format recognizable by SidAmp or SidPlay. :) But I don't care, I have much fun doing it, because C64 music is really great. As I listen to the tunes one after another, I must agree that these tunes are among the best in the whole computer history.

WHAT ARE SPECIFICS OF C64 MUSIC?

As I told in my music history, I have never had C64. That is an advantage - I can compare C64 tunes with another ones without useless nostalgic prejudication :) So, my opinion is, C64 got its music mostly from european authors - that's a big difference e.g. between music for C64 and music for SNES, which comes mostly from Japan. Everybody can have his opinion, but I think that "our" european music is much more melodic and has much more "ideas" in it. That's why I like C64 music more than SNES music, although SNES is a newer machine and has much better sound hardware, which results in its better quality. As I told, on C64 you'll see most music from Europe, some from USA (I don't want to be sad, but I was very badly surprised by tunes from USA - it was mostly unhearable junk. It could be only my opinion, but there should be a reason why today game music is so bad - mostly coming from the US...). And one more idea about the history of computer music. Amiga, as C64 follower in Europe, was very similar in "ideas" of nice melodic music with C64. But comparing to the C64, music had, of course, much better quality. And that are the reasons why music on Amiga is IMHO the best. It had not only the quality, but also the heart. And heart it took just from C64.