Professional Music Driver PMD

File Format
Name	Professional Music Driver PMD
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Audio and Music Professional Music Driver PMD
Extension(s)	.m, .m2

Professional Music Driver (PMD) is a music macro language format by Masahiro Kajihara. PMD was popular on Japanese PC-98 games, targeting Yamaha FM sound chips, and also supported Adlib/Soundblaster FM, as used by a few games localised for the western market. The format has a human-readable macro language for writing music, which compiles into .m and .m2 binary files.

Identification

Files don't have clear identification, but usually begin with a mode byte (0, 1, or 2) followed by 12 or 13 sequential word offsets into the file.

Specifications

• PMD English Documentation Translated documentation of the macro language
• PMD .M files Technical description of the binary file format

Software

• Ｃ６０のページ FM-PMD music player for Windows, FMPMD2000 has an English interface
• Battle of the bits: Professional Music Driver (PMD) Description, guides, and tools
• pmdplay

Sample files

• Hoot Archive The PC-98 game music list includes many PMD soundtracks, eg. diesirae_98, eve_98, and inma_sei_98