What plays .MOD, .S3M, .XM and .IT files on Windows 11?
Short answer: almost nothing that ships with Windows. Media Player, Groove and the browser will all shrug at a tracker module. This page is the full list of the 76 audio extensions VPX opens — 41 tracker/module formats and 35 ordinary audio formats — so you can check yours with Ctrl+F instead of installing three codec packs to find out.
Want to test a file right now, without installing anything? Drop it on the free web player — it runs the same module engine in the browser, nothing is uploaded, everything decodes on your machine.
Open the free web player Get the desktop appTracker and module formats (41)
These are songs stored as instructions plus samples, not as recorded audio — the file says "play this sample, at this pitch, on channel 3, now". That is why a four-minute Amiga song fits in 80 KB, and why each channel can have its own oscilloscope on screen. VPX plays MOD, S3M and XM on engines written from scratch for this player, and the rest through libopenmpt.
The big four
| Extension | What it is |
|---|---|
| .mod | The original Amiga Soundtracker/ProTracker module, 1987. The format the whole demoscene grew out of. |
| .s3m | Scream Tracker 3 (Future Crew, 1994) — the DOS PC sound of Second Reality and a thousand game intros. |
| .xm | FastTracker 2 extended module — multi-sample instruments, envelopes, up to 32 channels. |
| .it | Impulse Tracker — the most capable of the classic formats, NNAs, filters, 64 channels. |
Everything else the module engine opens
| Extension | What it is |
|---|---|
| .mptm | OpenMPT's own extended format. |
| .mtm | MultiTracker (Renaissance, DOS). |
| .med | OctaMED, the Amiga tracker that went past four channels. |
| .okt | Oktalyzer, eight-channel Amiga. |
| .669 | Composer 669 / UNIS 669, one of the earliest PC trackers. |
| .amf | DSMI / Asylum module — used by several DOS games. |
| .ams | Extreme's Tracker / Velvet Studio. |
| .dbm | DigiBooster Pro (Amiga). |
| .digi | DigiBooster 1.x. |
| .dmf | X-Tracker (DOS). |
| .dsm | DSIK internal format. |
| .dtm | Digital Tracker / Digitrakker. |
| .far | Farandole Composer. |
| .gdm | General Digital Music (BWSB sound system). |
| .imf | Imago Orpheus. |
| .ice | Ice Tracker / SoundTracker 2.6. |
| .j2b | Galaxy Sound System — the music from Jazz Jackrabbit 2. |
| .m15 | 15-instrument Ultimate Soundtracker, the oldest of them all. |
| .mdl | DigiTrakker module. |
| .mms | MultiMedia Sound. |
| .mo3 | A module whose samples were compressed to MP3/OGG — same song, a fraction of the size. |
| .mt2 | MadTracker 2. |
| .nst | NoiseTracker, the ProTracker ancestor. |
| .oxm | OggMod — an XM with Vorbis-compressed samples. |
| .plm | Disorder Tracker 2. |
| .psm | Epic MegaGames MASI — Jazz Jackrabbit, One Must Fall 2097. |
| .pt36 | ProTracker 3.6 with its IFF container. |
| .ptm | PolyTracker. |
| .sfx / .sfx2 | SoundFX (Amiga). |
| .st26 | SoundTracker 2.6. |
| .stk | Ultimate Soundtracker variants. |
| .stm | Scream Tracker 2 — the one before S3M. |
| .stp | Soundtracker Pro II. |
| .symmod | Symphonie / Symphonie Pro. |
| .ult | UltraTracker (Gravis Ultrasound era). |
| .umx | Unreal/Unreal Tournament music packages — yes, the UT99 soundtrack is a bunch of modules. |
| .wow | Grave Composer, a MOD lookalike with a different magic number. |
Ordinary audio formats (35)
The everyday half of the list. Nothing exotic to install: the lossless and legacy codecs are
decoded by an ffmpeg build bundled inside the app, so .ape and .wma behave
exactly like .mp3 does.
Lossy and common
| Extension | What it is |
|---|---|
| .mp3 / .mp2 / .mpga / .mpeg / .mpg | The MPEG audio family, layer II and III. |
| .m4a / .aac | AAC, the iTunes and YouTube default. |
| .ogg / .oga / .weba / .webm | Vorbis and Opus inside Ogg/WebM containers. |
| .opus | Opus, the modern low-bitrate winner. |
| .wma | Windows Media Audio — the format your old ripped CD folder is probably in. |
| .mpc | Musepack, the audiophile lossy format from the MPEG layer II line. |
| .ra | RealAudio, from the streaming era. |
| .amr | Voice recordings from older phones. |
| .spx | Speex, spoken word. |
| .ac3 / .dts | Dolby Digital and DTS tracks pulled out of video. |
Lossless and uncompressed
| Extension | What it is |
|---|---|
| .flac | Free Lossless Audio Codec, the standard for archiving CDs. |
| .wav | Plain PCM. |
| .aiff / .aif / .aifc | The Apple and Amiga side of plain PCM. |
| .ape | Monkey's Audio — very common in older lossless torrents, and refused by most players. |
| .wv | WavPack. |
| .tta | True Audio. |
| .tak | Tom's lossless Audio Kompressor. |
| .shn | Shorten — the format live-concert tapers used before FLAC existed. |
| .au / .snd | Sun/NeXT audio, the ancestor of the web sound file. |
| .caf | Apple Core Audio Format. |
| .mka | Matroska audio. |
Common questions
Why won't Windows play a .mod or .xm file?
Because it is not recorded audio. There is no waveform in there to decode — the player has to run the song: read the pattern data, mix the samples, apply the effects, sixty times a second. Windows has never shipped a tracker engine, so the file just fails to open.
Are the oscilloscopes real, or an animation?
Real. Each tracker channel is tapped separately before mixing, so what you see is the actual sample data that channel is playing. On non-tracker formats there is a single stereo scope plus a 10-band equaliser, because a decoded MP3 has no channels to separate.
Is there a way to try a format before buying?
Two. The web player is free and needs no install — drop a file in and it plays, locally, in the browser tab. The desktop app has a 3-day trial, and after that it is a one-time payment, not a subscription.
How do I install it?
Windows 10 and 11, per-user install, no administrator rights. Via a package manager:
winget install SgarD.VPX
scoop bucket add vpx https://github.com/hellfirespriston-art/scoop-vpx then scoop install vpx
Or the plain installer from the product page.
Format missing from this list? If libopenmpt or ffmpeg can read it, it can very likely be added — tell me which one and where you got the file.