Another very cool discovery: the (brand new) LSPX - made by Dan Salvato.

I already knew the LightSpeedPlayer, by Leonard / Oxygene.
It has rapidly become the default music replayer for Amiga OCS demos because it is faaaaaast.
It reaches this speed by converting your music .mod file to an intermedate custom file format that is more or less a pre-prepped stream of data that can be quickly written to the data registers so Paula can do its thing.
This makes the replayer also super small, coming in at only 500 bytes.

For a new project, I was bumping into the 31 sample limit of the .mod fileformat.
I "almost" pulled the trigger to move to AGA to use something like OctaMed or even a FastTracker replayer, but then Gigabates pointed me to LSPX.
Wowzy!!!
What a GEM of a tool!
It converts various tracker formats to the LSP-format, INCLUDING formats like .xm (Fasttracker), .s3m (ScreemTracler) and .mptm (Open ModPlug Tracker)
This sounds almost too good to true, because those tracker are all from the post Amiga era and support all kind of nifty features that a humble Amiga 500 just can't do.
Except ... with some constraints and trough the LSP format ... it CAN!
Because LSP is in essence a stream of low-level commands that tell Paula to play a certain memory range (the sample data) with a certain speed at a certain volume, it is not tied to the .mod format and it can transcribe other formats to this same subset of commands.
This means that you can use all the 127 instrument slots and the full range of the FastTracker volume commands (volume envelopes, an extra volume effect channel) and pitch commands (vibrato).
Features that are not supported are the panning envelopes and you are still limited to 4 channels because there is no software mixing (yet !)
Still... this is a HUGE step up.
What a luxury.
And there is more: LSPX also auto-converts your samples to something an Amiga can play. So you can use full 16-bit samples at 48KHz in FastTracker, and LSPX will find out the most optimal resampling rate to make it fit.
You can even give a quality paramater, so that last-minute stress when you find out your demo doesn't fit the disk? As sledhammer approach, you can quickly re-render your music with a slight lower quality setting, et voila: a smaller file.
Keeping your samples at the highest quality in the source file makes a lot of sense, because then you still can process them without qualityloss, something you can't do when you have moved to 8-bit.

My test .xm file of 2MB (with 16-bit 48 KHz samples) comes in at a nice 141 kb .lsmusic file while still keeping a very acceptable audio quality.
Excellent, excellent.

I'm so happy to see quality tools like this still being developed.
It (again) shows that there is still much progress to be found in the tooling.
For a demo, the Amiga becomes a "replayer", and the real gains come form better tools to prep high quality data in high-quality output for the Amiga to pick up.
Yes, there is an additional "compilation" or "transformation" step from your source data to the runtime data, but that trade off is worth it.

Amiga Forever!!!!