[HN Gopher] Online Collection of Keygen Music
___________________________________________________________________
Online Collection of Keygen Music
Author : mifydev
Score : 367 points
Date : 2025-07-30 02:53 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (keygenmusic.tk)
(TXT) w3m dump (keygenmusic.tk)
| stuckkeys wrote:
| That is awesome.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >There is no illegal content. Just music from keygens
|
| Does this mean this site properly licensed these songs?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Yes, I believe it does. No lawyer knows who the hell these
| underground artists are or if it is even possible to sue them.
| The first step in any lawsuit is have someone to take from.
| dehrmann wrote:
| It's actually the artists who can sue since it's their work
| being distributed. The distributor might have a fair use
| argument since the purpose is artistic preservation and the
| artists clearly never intended to profit off the songs. If a
| trendy DJ remixed one and it saw commercial success, the
| original artist might have a case.
| charcircuit wrote:
| The fair use exception for preservation doesn't give them
| the master or mechanical rights needed to stream them to
| other people.
| iamtedd wrote:
| The fact that their music was originally distributed
| uncontrollably and for free within keygens and cracks
| probably means that the artists don't care about sites
| like this.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| brought back lots of nice memories
| glimshe wrote:
| Great memories. "Keygen music" feels like a genre of electronic
| music... Are there people making electronic music that sounds
| like Keygen music but with modern instruments?
| nvllsvm wrote:
| mind.in.a.box's album "R.E.T.R.O." (2010) has a few songs that
| sound keygen-esque (aka chiptune).
|
| Not all their stuff sounds like that, but I've been a big fan
| since first discovering them via a sample included in the XMMS2
| media player way back in the early 2000's.
| lock1 wrote:
| Tracker music? Pretty sure communities that develop those tools
| and use them to create music still exist.
|
| Relevant link: Ahoy - Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
| webstrand wrote:
| Well, there's still people making still making chiptunes, and
| there's still interest in developing tracker technology both
| for chiptunes (i.e. OpenMPT) and for music composition in
| general (Renoise DAW).
|
| <https://4mat.bandcamp.com/album/modern-closure> came out in
| 2019 and is one of my favorite albums of all time, but I'm not
| sure that it fits all of the elements of "keygen music" which
| are hard to pin down.
| JdeBP wrote:
| It's a whole YouTube genre. Witness this chiptune version of
| Howard Carter's _Stand-up Maths Theme_ :
|
| * https://youtube.com/watch?v=PHiJpwrLCUA
| iamtedd wrote:
| While not _strictly_ on-topic, this is another great re-
| arrangement of the Stand-up Maths Theme.
|
| https://youtu.be/PtKhbbcc1Rc?t=50
| jaharios wrote:
| The Glitch Mob?
| pfcd wrote:
| Check out [MASTER BOOT
| RECORD](https://www.youtube.com/@MasterBootRecord) and [KEYGEN
| CHURCH](https://www.youtube.com/@KEYGEN_CHURCH).
|
| Same guy is behind these both.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| They performed live at Revision demoparty this year! Here's
| my recording of the ending to their incredible set:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=D_60udyrK-I
| ninjin wrote:
| Official website with links to Bandcamp, live streams, IRC,
| tour schedule, etc.
|
| https://mbrserver.com
|
| Also, DRM-free music and streaming for KEYGEN CHURCH on
| Bandcamp:
|
| https://keygenchurch.bandcamp.com
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Saw them live. Fantastic gig
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Extension of the modtracker demoscene. I remember one of my
| friends from high school later won an international music
| contest and was included in some ftp mod collection.
|
| PS: Not to be confused with British mods. ;)
| ethan_smith wrote:
| Check out artists like Fearofdark, Zabutom, and labels like
| Bandcamp's "Future Funk" scene or Data Airlines for modern
| takes on the keygen/chiptune aesthetic.
| chrisco23 wrote:
| Ha! Memories from 25 years ago when you had to run Windoze for
| your audio and sometimes chess software.
| JdeBP wrote:
| More than 25 years.
|
| The first thing that it played to me was _Crockett 's Theme_.
|
| I spent the first few seconds looking at the description, which
| said something else, and saying to myself "No, that's
| definitely _Crockett 's Theme_.".
| nocoiner wrote:
| Haha, nice. I searched and there's one keygen that also
| played Crockett's Theme, but at least it credited it. Then
| another one I shuffled to was the theme from Airwolf.
| JdeBP wrote:
| These are pretty much staples for any synthesizer music
| collection that ever was. There's going to be an _Axel F_
| in there somewhere, too. And possibly _Chariots of Fire_.
|
| I was amused that _Crockett 's Theme_ was the very first
| one played to me. Alas, I didn't note the sompletely
| unrelated title before closing the page, and have no clue
| now where it is in the collection.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| What MOD producers at my high school used in the mid 90's:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_Tracker
| fortydegrees wrote:
| I've been looking for that Paradox Photoshop CS2 one for years.
| Great nostalgic memories.
|
| I've always been in slight awe of these kind of teams/releases.
| Cracking (mostly) for the raw intellectual challenge and bundling
| it with demoscene-ish artistic expression - usually a unique UI
| and obviously a great chiptune. I've always wondered why that
| behaviour emerged..
| bryant wrote:
| > I've always wondered why that behaviour emerged..
|
| Speculating: there may be parallels between this and other
| fields with entirely unnecessary artistic expression. Think
| watchmaking where watch movements with superlative finishing
| are celebrated and often command premium pay (e.g watches with
| the Geneva Seal). Beyond a certain point, the finishing adds
| absolutely nothing to the watch aside from showcasing talent.
|
| There's something to the idea that if someone spent a ton of
| effort building something, even if it's superfluous, it garners
| a level of trust in the end product.
| x______________ wrote:
| >Speculating:
|
| Know your customer
| xyst wrote:
| I used to hang in those IRC channels. Some of the "crews"
| mentioned spending more time on creating graphics, mixing new
| sound rather than cracking/reverse engineering the software
| itself.
| sim7c00 wrote:
| haha mind you a lot of (not all tho!) cracks back in the day
| was a few nops , changing a je into jne, etc.
|
| not the most elaborate things.
| daneel_w wrote:
| _> I've always wondered why that behaviour emerged.._
|
| Because they share the same roots, the same general "scene".
| The demo groups and the crack groups always mingled. We were
| all "sceners". Tons of groups had a presence in both areas.
| Most of the graphic artists and musicians were mainly part of
| the demo scene but lent their talent here and there.
|
| (Computer-wise I grew up in the C64 and the Amiga demo scenes
| during the early-to-late 90s.)
| nativeit wrote:
| alt.binaries.goodtimes
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I think a good part of it is the tooling and how it looks a bit
| like reverse engineering. Ever play with a tracker? It's like
| editing MIDI triggers with a hex editor. Here's aphex twin
| making music in one
|
| https://vimeo.com/223378825
| amy_petrik wrote:
| > I've always wondered why that behaviour emerged..
|
| Pretty straigthforward. "The scene" originated in 6502 or 68000
| or what have you assembly programmers in the '80s. If you
| program assembly, you crack software. If you program assembly,
| you make cool graphics tricks to show off your fast code. And,
| if you program a computer in the '80s, the sound card is
| basically just a synthesizer chip, waveforms and shit, thus,
| chiptunes.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That's not how these mods are created though.
|
| They are composed on trackers and the mod files are more akin
| to a MIDI file than they are "waveforms and shit". At least
| not if you talk about "waveforms" in the PCM sense of the
| term.
|
| The evolution of these mod files is an interesting one. Epic
| were the ones who most leaned into this for commercial uses.
| Games like the original Unreal and Jazz Jackrabbit 2 had some
| awesome sounding music and was the same mod files.
|
| As a much younger nerd and hobby hacker too, I always
| wondered how those keygens were so small in size yet sounded
| so modern. Took years before I learned about trackers. I was
| pretty late to the game on that one.
| tscherno wrote:
| Sound can be synthesised out of few basic waveforms. It's
| the most common approach.
| vidarh wrote:
| In terms of cracked releases started with simple text and
| screens to let people know who had done it, and escalated from
| there.
|
| In parallel people were writing more and more elaborate demos
| to show off skills or just demonstrate what was possible, and
| the two naturally coalesced since the people overlapped.
| MatthewRayfield wrote:
| that paradox bop is truly one of my favorites. back in the day
| i would just leave the keygen running for the tunes. what other
| software can people say they leave on just for the vibes ??
| good times
| nocoiner wrote:
| Windows XP installer, lol
| Sophira wrote:
| The thing that ties cracking to the demoscene is that, as
| Trixter/Hornet states in the excellent documentary
| "Demographics: Behind the Scene"[0], copy protection itself is
| a creative process; you need to think about how the hardware
| works.
|
| For example, one of the earliest copy protection methods - and
| one that still underpins a lot of today's copy protection - was
| to include intentionally-bad sectors on the floppy disks that
| you shipped. That's not something you'd normally even consider
| - why would you ever want to have intentional errors? And it
| makes even less sense to the non-creative mind when you
| consider that you can't just "write an error" - that's not how
| the common abstractions for disks work, and hardware is
| normally built in such a way that it's difficult to
| intentionally introduce an error. You actively have to go out
| of your way to misuse the hardware capabilities available to
| you in order to do so.
|
| However, that very same difficulty in "writing an error" is
| also what made it such an effective copy protection method! Any
| traditional disk copying program would consider an error to be
| proof that your disks were corrupted, and many wouldn't even
| continue past the point of the error because it could lead to
| disk thrashing. Meanwhile, because you had much more control
| over the hardware back then than you do today, the copy-
| protected program could actually use the floppy disk controller
| directly to put in its own tests for detecting an error in a
| particular spot, such as reading the same sector multiple times
| and seeing if it got different data, or perhaps even by
| measuring the flux directly, and only proceed with the program
| if the error is there as it expected it to be.
|
| You can't do these things using the standard INT 21 calls that
| DOS gives you, or even through the BIOS. (Actually, for many
| years PCs were considered useless for demomaking compared to
| other platforms such as the Amiga.) Finding a solution like
| that takes a creative mind - and conversely, so does working
| out how to defeat it. You have to know what your hardware can
| and can't do, or you have to work it out through
| experimentation. And as it turns out, you had to have exactly
| these same skills if you wanted to be able, say, do 3D on a
| system that has no floating point processor, or to be able to
| draw 4096 colours simultaneously, or to be able to arbitrarily
| draw to the overscan area of the screen, or any of the other
| things you might be able to figure out and want to show to the
| world what your chosen platform can do. And thus, cracktros
| were born.
|
| [0] https://archive.org/details/Demographics_BehindtheScene
| mdavid626 wrote:
| Really cool!
| djeastm wrote:
| This music was always great, but always played so loudly.
| dkh wrote:
| I felt the same way, but admittedly the scenario in which I
| would encounter it was always "in a dark, quiet room at 3am
| after downloading something and forgetting once again that the
| .exe is probably going to play music"
| darknavi wrote:
| Seems to be missing one of my most nostalgic from Sony Vegas 9
| cracks:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmdprbBOMT8
| SuperShibe wrote:
| ,,This is EPIC" - King Harkinian
| swinglock wrote:
| Unreal Superhero 3! I'm also fond of the ORiON Nero tracks for
| some reason. Also dubmood.
| Sayrus wrote:
| The music might be over a decade old but it still plays. I
| heard it in Infinitode 2 released in 2021.
| mavamaarten wrote:
| That's exactly the one I searched first!
| officeplant wrote:
| Impressive collection, the although website is slamming my poor
| T8100 powered thinkpad to 100% at times listening to the
| collection.
| kls0e wrote:
| try Estrayk - Her Collection
| pie_flavor wrote:
| An album of keygen music covers and remixes:
| https://sgfr.highquality.rip/sgfr-0009/index.html
| irusensei wrote:
| "I've opened that site and the activate windows watermark on my
| desktop vanished."
|
| I'm joking. I don't use Windows.
| EDM115 wrote:
| as covered in this YouTube video : "The Soundtrack of Online
| Piracy" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHgcrdv8zpM)
| larodi wrote:
| 2621 is sa remix of Bubble Bobble II gameplay music.
| throaway5454 wrote:
| I forgot about this site! Keygen music is one of our unsung
| cultural treasures imo
| cluckindan wrote:
| If you like this kinda music, check out 4champ and modizer on
| iOS.
| daneel_w wrote:
| I always considered this the real deal and authorative collection
| of chip tunes: https://ftp.modland.com/
|
| Modland is over 20 years old at this point.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Oh nice. I'll check this when I get home.
|
| I personally use: https://modarchive.org which has a grand
| selection too.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Wild they still have a .tk domain, I paid for one and when
| renewal came up it was not possible to renew due to the Meta
| lawsuit. Wonder how much time they have left....
| sdenton4 wrote:
| SharpPlus Sqlite Developer v3.2.8.354 goes hard.
| anthk wrote:
| The S3M modules which came with the BB demo from AAlib were
| magical.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Aalib <3. Last year, I wrote a diff to fix the fire aalib
| console demo to work on modern fast machines.
| anthk wrote:
| BB needs a fix too; it hangs when the audio begins to play.
| It might be an issue on threads.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I just wish it has a loop option. I absolutely love the design
| and varieties of the music.
| mdtrooper wrote:
| Related, there is a awesome online radio (it was born 2006) game
| music: https://rainwave.cc
| fao_ wrote:
| in a similar vein, there's also Nectarine Radio for demoscene
| music: https://www.scenestream.net/demovibes/
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Someone should gather up, curate, organize, and release a giant
| collection of keygens containing music as a torrent. (I doubt IA
| or elsewhere would host it for very long.)
| larodi wrote:
| Given intros (where these keygen chiptunes originate from) were
| the precursor for, and are also considered by many to be part
| thereof, the demoscene, are we to assume this is also a UNESCO
| cultural heritage as per these news headlines...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876961
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26522681
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36597460
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43533362
|
| ...?
| amiga386 wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211204202302/http://pub.keygen...
|
| https://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/
|
| https://amp.dascene.net/
|
| https://files.scene.org/browse/music/
| cantalopes wrote:
| So cool! I used to collect the ones i came across too, they are
| always awesome
| dogcow wrote:
| This is amazing. Thank you so much to the authors for putting the
| time into this and sharing it. I would love a way to download a
| local archive of music like this.
|
| Also, I hope this site doesn't disappear if/when the rather
| unpredictable .tk TLD operator decides to do something dumb.
| montag wrote:
| Wow, very nice! Interestingly, uses a completely different set of
| player libraries compared to https://chiptune.app (chiptune2.js
| and libopenmpt vs. libgme and libxmp, etc.) Also was started way
| back in 2015. And yet there are many similarities.
| swoorup wrote:
| Nostalgic xD
| panicpigeon wrote:
| This made me remember my favorite cracktro from INC. Something
| about this song captures how I felt about the whole "warez" scene
| when I was a kid... cool, mysterious -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9-5bQ4mSQI
| twothreeone wrote:
| mr spock's cryo-bed <3
| lukesdadsdad wrote:
| Didn't really understand what keygen music meant until I did a
| Google, clicked, outstanding archiving
| globular-toast wrote:
| Ah, memories from when the internet was still good. Anyone know
| of any good writing about that time on the internet? IRC, FTP,
| USENET etc? There was a miniseries called "The Scene" which
| captured some of it. Some of it is just childhood memories, but
| I'm also convinced it was a special time that won't be coming
| back.
| kekebo wrote:
| I apologize for shortness but <3
| a022311 wrote:
| You also may find this interesting: https://pixeltune.org
|
| They have a large collection of tracker music and while it's not
| strictly keygen music it is still worth looking at.
| sim7c00 wrote:
| YESSS <3 699 :D happy to see Air on there haha
| joseda-hg wrote:
| Really nice, only thing missing is, the site load starting a
| random tune at like 300% volume late at night, for the full
| experience
| wackget wrote:
| This one lives rent free in my head:
| https://keygenmusic.tk/#track=ORiON/ORiON%20-%20Nero%206.3.0...
| 74B5 wrote:
| Something to evict it:
|
| https://keygenmusic.tk/#track=Reloaded/RELOADED%20-%20Seriou...
| darqis wrote:
| Flashbacks to the 90s and y2k. The internet was a better place
| back then and not just because of nostalgic reasons.
|
| Nowadays you have a few large companies dominating everything.
|
| There are no forums, there's reddit and discord.
|
| The are no private websites, there's uniform Meta Twitter.
|
| Google search sucks.
|
| Everything is AI.
|
| Toxicity is rampant.
|
| Pirate sites, the few are full of racists and other assholes.
|
| The communication on "social networks" is post, like, comment,
| like, next.
|
| You may not speak your mind, including HN, you get censored
| and/or otherwise canceled.
|
| And this whole thing bleeds into real life. People are edgy,
| dissatisfied, unfriendly, can't take criticism, even if it's
| constructive.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| I fed your (extremely depressing) comment to an LLM:
|
| > Your example shows classic rumination: taking a nostalgic
| trigger (keygen music) and spiraling into a litany of
| everything wrong with the modern world. The person isn't just
| observing changes - they're cementing a worldview where
| everything has gotten worse and will continue to be bad.
| GlacierFox wrote:
| The fact you didn't that is depressing in itself.
| nvllsvm wrote:
| > Nowadays you have a few large companies dominating
| everything.
|
| We now also have a web where ActiveX, the Windows-only IE
| browser engine, and Flash+Shockwave binaries are no longer
| exist as mainstream web technologies. As a Linux user, this is
| great!
|
| > There are no forums, there's reddit and discord. > The are no
| private websites, there's uniform Meta Twitter.
|
| Incorrect. I regularly read the VOGONS forum
| (https://www.vogons.org/) for retro computing related topics.
| Is the forum for you? Maybe, maybe not. There are plenty of
| others as well though many are specific to niches. Hacker News
| is also a kind of forum.
|
| Focus on what you want to get out of a forum rather than a
| forum for the sake of a forum.
|
| > Google search sucks.
|
| Yeah, modern Google search really sucks. I often find ChatGPT
| or Claude better at fuzzy-finding than modern search engines.
| Depends on what I'm looking for.
|
| > Everything is AI.
|
| AI as a concept has existed in marketing for decades. The term
| has picked up again and todays LLM's will probably seem quite
| dumb in a decade. They're great fuzzy-finders though - I
| regularly use Claude for various dev tasks including DOS and
| embedded development.
|
| > Toxicity is rampant.
|
| I have a childhood memory, early 90's, where the news was on
| the TV talking about a bombing/attack/similar in the middle
| east. It's a fuzzy memory, but it continues having a strong
| impact on my life with regards to negativity in the world.
| Things have always sucked, will continue to suck, but likewise
| for the opposite. Focusing on what is in my control and
| positive has helped me a lot here.
|
| > Pirate sites, the few are full of racists and other assholes.
|
| I can't say I've ever spent enough time on pirate sites to
| bother with conversation. Plenty of these sites continue to
| exist and media is still aquireable. I'm amused anytime
| _someone I know_ finds a 10-year-plus old torrent that still
| has seeders.
|
| Side note, there's even a modern, open-source keygen for older
| versions of Windows available on GitHub that has not been taken
| down (user Endermanch). It even has keygen music!
|
| > You may not speak your mind, including HN, you get censored
| and/or otherwise canceled.
|
| _Someone I know_ has been a life-long pirate and has always had
| this problem with regards to pirating things.
|
| > And this whole thing bleeds into real life. People are edgy,
| dissatisfied, unfriendly, can't take criticism, even if it's
| constructive.
|
| Some people suck, some don't. I was lightly bullied through my
| entire childhood so this was kind of the status-quo for me.
| However, my friends were an exception and they were and still
| are great! The only recent change I've noticed in my
| socialsphere is a change in family members for the worst. One
| side of my family went down the path of becoming pushy
| Grumpelstiltskin's, so I did have to make a choice to remove
| them from my life. The keyword for me was pushy, not
| necessiarily a difference of opinion. It was difficult to cut
| off contact, but doing so allowed me to spend mental energy on
| people who have positive impacts on my life.
|
| The internet became less of a place for people like us as the
| rest of the world embraced it. This does extend beyond the web
| as even culture is more varied than ever (music, shows, memes,
| etc). It might take more work to find what fits you, but it's
| still out there.
| efilife wrote:
| > Toxicity is rampant.
|
| > You may not speak your mind, including HN, you get censored
| and/or otherwise canceled.
|
| This sounds contradicting to me. By the way, the internet was
| always toxic, way more than now. From my experience the
| toxicity is very toned down due to the censorship you
| mentioned. Now it's mostly snark.
|
| > Pirate sites, the few are full of racists and other assholes.
|
| So should we censor them or not? Choose what you are
| complaining about
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| A more proper name for this music is chiptunes. Unless it was
| produced for an actual key generator.
| imiric wrote:
| Great collection!
|
| My favorites from this era:
|
| - DataChild of SAE - Tune 1[1]
|
| - Zoef of FAiRLiGHT - Tune 2[2]
|
| They're from a CLASS installer of THPS2. _Allegedly_ :)
|
| [1]: https://archive.org/details/DatachildOfSae-Tune1
|
| [2]: https://archive.org/details/ZoefOfFlt-Tune2
| bestham wrote:
| Aryx.s3m 21 kiB of magic.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-08-03 23:01 UTC)