Sorry about the wall of text that follows!

After working my way through my collection and uploading some missing modules to AMP, I've now decided to turn my attention to my Unknown Modules directory, which tbh, has been long overdue I may add. At the moment, it currently contains 146 unknown modules (.mod) which have been sitting there, probably for at least 15 years or more! 

It has become apparent that this isn't going to be easy.  Just within the first dozen or so modules I looked at, I managed to find just 3 that could be identified and 1 a possibilty from the AMP database. There is a number of variables why this is so:

fakes
dupes
bad rips
naming conventions
the mists of time! 
the list is endless... 

The 3 I have identified were obviously downloaded many years ago, or ripped (possibly by me or someone else), but with a bit of detective work, identified from this site. Back in the day, if I ripped something and I had no idea who the author was, I would name it from its group or production, at least it gives me something to look for, hence how I identified the 3 anyway.

I named one unk_arise minimum 1.mod, so looking for "minimum" on AMP reveals 34 mods with minimum in their title, mostly by Taron, who happens to be in Arise, fortunately, using the info (minimum1) button reveals that mine and yours is in fact the one I'm looking for. Good job I didn't have to look through all 34 to find it.  Was the same process for the other 2. I did notice that one of them had a credit in the AMP mod, whereas mine had the same sample text but not the credit, in this case, <soldier of eclipse>.  The 1 possibility one is, on AMP you have it in .med format while mine is in good ol' protracker format.

I've attached 3 modules to illustrate what a pain in the arse, trying to identify unknowns are!

AmigaTrek

Listed on AMP by Feanturi but in .med (octamed), mine is a protracker mod. no credits. Did he convert it to .mod or someone else ripped/converted it.

Adprod-music

Looks like a ripped mod by Gryzor and probably from his Mods Anthology collection.

Artemis or (c)1991 npd v2.0

No idea where this came from, maybe Mods Anthology again, no credits and no mod name as such.

The last two maybe already on AMP, under their proper mod names. No idea because I can't find them.



So, how do you lot identify and verify what is on AMP already and what is added in the future?

Is there a possiblity to add some extra functionality to the AMP search options? or some form of filtering for it?

Its a pity that some of the Info data couldn't be added to the module search results, like

samples used
number of patterns
patterns used

Filesize is irrelevant because the results return compressed size rather than uncompressed size, but even using the big modlist doesn't always help identify a mod if they don't match by a few bytes.

Or any other advice to making the job easier?

/end of wall of text!