High Voltage SID Collection

HVSC is the ultimate SID tune collection featuring more than 46,000 popular and requested SIDs from the Commodore 64. The collection includes SIDs (aka C64 music) from games, demos, intros, etc. HVSC has been in the making for more than 15 years and is the result of many contributors. This page has wiki versions of some of the information files and mirrors for downloading the collection.

Please note that the official site for the High Voltage SID Collection is at http://hvsc.de

Current Version

Release v79 - July 1, 2023

Download

HVSC_79-all-of-them.7z (7ZIP Archive)
HVSC_79-all-of-them.rar (RAR Archive)
View/Download individual files from the collection

As of HVSC v50, all the old _PSID files that have a RSID equivalent have been removed from the main collection. Those _PSID files were only hacks meant for digitized sounds to be played in Sidplay1, but not on real C64. The _PSID files will be eliminated in every future releases as soon as new RSID versions of the same .sid files are added. For those still needing the _PSID files they are now available in a separate archive:

C64MUSIC_PlaySID.rar

Documentation

The latest version of this documentation is available in plain text in the main archive. Provided here in a more web browser friendly format. Please feel free to keep up to date with changes in the text versions, but do not add "new" information here. Instead send it to the HVSC maintainers for inclusion with the official releases.

Web Interface and Instructions for use

You can find the interface at the Special:HVSC page.

ExoticA provides an interface to the High Voltage SID Collection which allows searching and browsing by filename, author, year and directory. It also allows the searching and displaying of relevant information from the Sid Tune Information List as well as showing remixed tunes available on http://remix.kwed.org.

Browsing

Use the browse section to navigate through the collection by name, author, year or directory location. After choosing the the initial browse criteria, you can filter the results down further by specifying the starting characters of the name. There is a button to switch on the display of the STIL data.

Searching

By default the search boxes use a boolean search. To make a search enter one or more keywords with an optional prefix of +, - or |. + means the word must appear in the data. - means the word should not appear in the data. If no prefixes are used, the + prefix is assumed so the word must appear in the search results. To match an exact phrase enter the string in quotes. To make this clearer here are some examples

apples oranges would match data that contains both the words apples and oranges (in any order)
+apples +oranges is equivalent to above.
+apples -oranges would match data that contains the word apples but not oranges.
|apples |oranges would match data that contains either the word apples or the word oranges.
"apples and oranges" would match data that contains the phrase apples and oranges

You may also use the wildcard * for partial word matching. For example

lem* would match any words starting with lem such as lemons or lemmings.

Note that in boolean mode the wildcard only works appended to a word. You can not use it at the start of a word.

The boolean search can only search on words of 3 characters or more in length, unless searching for a phrase where it can match against phrases containing shorter words (so long as one word is more than 3 characters).

Some of the input fields also have a check box next to them. This enables exact mode. In this mode, the search doesn't recognise the entered text as separate keywords but one entire string (similar to that of the boolean phrase mode). This is useful to match against exact module names especially if they contain non alphanumeric characters which the boolean mode does not handle. The exact search also supports the wildcard * for partial matching. For example searching for format: *tracker* will return any formats with the word 'tracker' in the name, or a search for author Coma* would return any authors which start with 'Coma'. Note that the exact search with wildcards is *much* slower than the default boolean search (although a wildcard can be can be used at the start and end of a string so it can be useful in a few cases).

The quick search box works in the same way, but matches against all the available fields except the STIL field.

The STIL search only supports a boolean search method. The same rules apply as explained above.

Ogg/mp3 Downloads

We provide links on the interface to the SOASC collection that has high bitrate mp3 recordings from original c64 hardware. You may prefer these over the sidplay emulation recordings we provide.

The search supports downloading of the music in Ogg Vorbis format as well as mp3. We recommend using the ogg download, but the mp3 download is there should you need it. This feature allows you to play the music on the site with most media players, without having to download a variety of different specialist players. The oggs/mp3s are created on the fly in real-time, and as such are provided for convenience rather than 100% accuracy, however you may well be surprised at how good they sound. To access the ogg/mp3 downloads browse or search for a tune, and a button will be displayed above the results that allows you to show the ogg/mp3 download links.

Thanks to the creators of the following software that is used for the music playback and encoding

UADE - Unix Amiga Delitracker Emulator, used for playback of the Amiga formats
XMP - For the playback of the multichannel PC formats.
Blargg's Audio Libraries - For console music playback
ASAP - Another Slight Atari Player, used for the playback of the Atari 8 bit music.
Sidplay-residfp - For playback of the Commodore 64 Music.
sc68 - For the playback of the sc68 format and SNDH Atari ST music.
sexypsf - For the playback of the Playstation music.
oggenc - To encode the ogg audio.
Lame - To encode the mp3 audio.

Changelog

v1.7: Added SOASC Links
v1.6: Added ogg downloads
v1.5: Improved fulltext searches to make a boolean "and" for keywords if no operator is specified.
v1.4: Added cross linking to http://remix.kwed.org remixes. Thanks to Jan/RKO.
v1.3: Added default boolean search mode which is much more flexible.
v1.2: Added support for searching by SID Model.
v1.1: Various bug fixes with STIL display
v1.0: First version

Compiled By

Current Members: Emiliano Peruch (Ian Coog) <iancoog (sid) alice.it> - ITALY; Inge Høie Pedersen ("448") <ingehp (sid) outlook.com> - NORWAY; Wilfred Bos <wilfred_hvsc (sid) xs4all.nl> - NETHERLANDS; Mariusz Rozwadowski (Ramos/Samar) <ramosc64 (sid) o2.pl> - POLAND; Mariusz Mlynski - POLAND; Sebastian Sprenger (Professor Chaos) - GERMANY; Chris Abbott <chris (sid) c64audio.com> - ENGLAND; Tobias Samuelsson (McLoaf) <dasforum_91 (sid) hotmail.com> - SWEDEN; Zack Thompson (Karmic) - CANADA

Retired/Inactive Members

The Shark of INC <shark (sid) dhp.com> - USA

Michael Schwendt - GERMANY

Darren (Bod/Talent) - ENGLAND

Jan Krolzig - GERMANY

Imre Olajos, Jr. (LaLa) - HUNGARY

Warren Pilkington - ENGLAND

Gabriele Priarone (G-Knight) - ITALY

Michal Hoffmann (Smalltown Boy) - POLAND

Kristoffer Johansson - SWEDEN

Pawel Ruczko (Murdock/Tropyx) - POLAND

Peter Sandén (Yodelking) - SWEDEN

Laust Brock-Nannestad - DENMARK

Luca di Pasquale - GERMANY

Jan Diabelez Arent Harries (rambones aka SIDwave) - DENMARK

Adam Lorentzon - SWEDEN

Andreas Varga (mr.sid) - AUSTRIA

Andrzej Wilk (Motion/GMI) - NEW ZEALAND

Oliver VieBrooks (Six/DLoC) - USA

Simon White - ENGLAND

Stefan Wolff (j0x/WOW) - DENMARK

Rafal Szyja (Raf/Vulture Design) - POLAND

Stephan Schmid <steppe (sid) demodungeon.com> - GERMANY

Members of the C64 Historical Preservation Society!

Copyright Notice And Disclaimer

All of the tunes available in the High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) are copyrighted.

Such copyright may be owned by the original authors/software companies or a third-party publisher or other organisation. The copyright ownership of the tune is not necessarily the same as the attribution in the SID itself, or in any of the STIL documents. It might be owned by the composer, the software house, a publisher, or some other third party organisation.

Use of the SIDs in this collection for any purpose other than private enjoyment is subject to relevant copyright law. While remixing of the tunes for non-commercial audio purposes without the permission of the composer tends to be tolerated or encouraged, this is not a right, and any other use (including YouTube use) requires additional permissions.

Please also note that these tunes are unsuitable to be used within anything released on Creative Commons licences, without a further agreement with the rights holder.

Unauthorised commercial exploitation of any tune in this collection is illegal.

Please note that the creators of this collection do not have (and neither do they claim) the legal authority to grant licences or collect royalties or other contributions to permit any use. Do not offer any such contributions to them, for none will be accepted.

The copyrights to some of the SID files in this collection are now copyright administered by High Technology Publishing Limited and appear in HVSC with their explicit permission on behalf of the composers. All other rights are reserved.

For any usage apart from audio remixing, you should endeavor to contact the original C64 composer to ensure not just permission but also that the composer gets due authorship credit (and any appropriate payment).

As a first point of contact for matters such as these, feel free to contact Chris Abbott <chris (sid) c64audio.com>.

Further, HVSC accepts no responsibility for the use of any language, whether it be in the SID file names or any speech samples, which you may consider offensive. It is up to you to decide whether to listen to those SIDs or not.

External Links