AdLib Music by Jozz

The Danish pianist Johannes Bjerregaard not only composed great C64 tunes, he also created a lot of AdLib tunes in 1991-93 in his own players. There were two different player systems – the early JBM player with about 9 tunes, and SEQPLAY that recorded songs through MIDI.

This blog post contains all of these AdLib tunes, of course saved as MP3 for easy listening.

The JBM Player

As far as I can tell, the first player system from 1991 was a classic music player like on the C64 where notes were somehow typed in instead of recorded. Johannes made 9 tunes in 1991 to 1992. My favorite among these is “DDD” which is truly amazing. Make sure you check that one out.

Note that “15L” is a conversion of his own C64 tune “Shape” from 1988.

Download the original DOS files: Jozz_AdLib_JBM.zip (21 KB)

I recommend you use a DOS emulator to play these files. Go to the folder and type PLAY followed by the file including the extension – for example, PLAY DDD.JBM plays my favorite tune.

The SEQPLAY System

This was a MIDI editor system with recorded notes from a keyboard, then edited in a proprietary character screen editor written in Borland Turbo C. Each song had three files; INS, PAT and SNG.

The music player could play songs on a Roland SCC-1 as well as AdLib, but as far I as I can tell, the INS file had to be populated with instrument data before an AdLib version would play as well. Most of the songs I have from him are supported this way, but not all of them – about 70 to 80% or so. The ones that had an INS file with all zero bytes played nothing but noise on AdLib.

The songs without instrument data are of course not included, but I also discarded one or two songs that sounded like Johannes had merely dumped in an AdLib instrument set then forgot to tweak them. I also had doubts about a few others that were included – maybe an instrument or two needed a twist too.

The theory that Johannes first recorded a song using Roland SCC-1 and then later adapted an instrument set for the AdLib version is also supported by the fact that a few of the songs have a second “Edit” version where the instruments have been tweaked, yet all the notes are virtually the same.

Download the original DOS files: Jozz_AdLib_SEQPLAY.zip (580 KB)

I recommend you use a DOS emulator to play these files. Use the PLAY.BAT file to list and play the files. PLAY without a parameter lists all the files on one screen (very handy) and then PLAY followed by the file but this time without the extension – for example, PLAY YOEL plays the last one. Note that the archive include songs that doesn’t have AdLib instrument data. These will just mostly sound like noise.