Chiptune

[Amiga1992]

Chiptunes are the tunes made (first by 4mat, by general belief, also believed to have coined the term) to sound as if they were created with a sound synthesizer chip that lies inside the machine.

Completely created out of small looping files, this was also a clever way to compose using very little space, thus ideal for cracktros n shit.
These are the only tunes that I consider chipTUNES. Anything that uses synthesis, be it real or emulated (trackers like MLine, AHX or Octamed which posss softsynth capabilites), is not a chiptune to me.

Confusing chiptune with chipmusic is one of my biggest pet peeves. The Wikipedia entry is utterly wrong IMO. Fucks it up completely from the beginning, saying "A chiptune, or chip music"..!!!!! Then again, many chipmusic artists say they make chiptunes, this is most common in UK artists.

Get your terms straight dudes :P

[Hungry Horace]

Akira - dont be such a language puritian!!

meanings and phrases change over time, although we dont always like it, we have to accept it. If 'chiptune' defines a song/tune/track from which the sound is produced via an onboard sound chip (such as SID or AY3) in the eyes of many producers and listeners, then it has to be accepted that as such that is -one- of the definitions.

If the term was technically wrong (such as calling it say.. a 'romtune' or something) then i could understand such a grievance, but as it stands there is no inaccuracy, so it stands to reason that it's simply a broadening of the definition. perhaps a ' 2) ' type dictionary entry!

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Hungry Horace

Akira - dont be such a language puritian!!

I am NOT a language puritan

I call things by what they are.
Chiptune is a chiptune and chipmusic is chipmusic.
They are in essence different as I explained pretty well.

This confusion has started in the wrong hands, producers in the UK getting both terms mixed up and starting to spread them like the plague.

Also Micromusic is a lot to blame for this.

I fight for the right utilization of terms. .

[Hungry Horace]

I fight for the right spelling of 'utilisation' - but sometimes you just have to live with it

[Amiga1992]

That's syntaxis, I am talking semantics.

Very different fields, actually, contrasting

[Yaz]

For reference, first chip music that I know of the Amiga (way before Hippel did it) was Hybris:

http://downloads.khinsider.com/game-...game-music.mp3

These were 'proper' chip instruments too (i.e. player creates sine/saw waves) rather than soundtracker with lots of little waves using the hex values to flick between waves using his own player I believe.

[Scyphe]

Necrowaking this thread. Someone haven't even mentioned Aegis Sonix which had it's own editable sine/square/sawtooth/noise-generator with attack, delay and all that. It worked pretty much like a pure sine-generator. It COULD use samples as well.

I did my first chiptune (the term hadn't been coined, or I hadn't heard it at the time) in early 1988. I simply took a sample and turned it into a 96-byte loop of the waveform (which is essentially what a sample is, a combinations of various sine waves with different amplitudes etc.) and cut away the rest and ended up with a very very short module (well, since it was soundtracker 1 it wasn't a module, it was a song and a single 96-byte instrument). I changed the offset of the 96-byte loop until I found a sound I was happy with and cut away the rest (some st-00 instrument).

Future Composer 1.3 and 1.4 basically did the same thing as aegis, they calculated sinewaves and used modulation, vibrato and whatever else could be done with sinewaves to generate a sound, then sent the output as sample data for D/A-conversion.

So all samples on Amiga are complex waveforms just as simple sine waves are waveforms. The only difference is how the waveforms are generated.

Btw, look at a sine wave in a hex editor and it will still have hex values for each point just as a sample.

Now back to finding a 16/12-bit sinus generator with editable amplitude/frequency/length that saves the data as $xxxx (1 word per value) which is how I ended up finding this thread.

[Capitaine]

Back in 93 or maybe 94, I had a high school friend who had an Amiga.
Chiptunes had quite grown to be popular.
PC had been sounding for years like blip-blop with its buzzer, and then suddenly, orchestral / midi with soundcards.

But my friend didn't knew anything of C64 ! So I invited him to my home for showing games and demos.
As soon as C64 crack intros were popping up on the screen, he shouted : "Wow ! That sounds like an Amiga !"

Many geeks know the technical stuffs, and can avoid confusion.
But most people don't know.

Now with those internet days when everything is further messed, maybe there was a need for some to separate "keygen music" from synthetic music. And so, they might have started to talk about chiptunes like it was just synthetic music.

At least, Amiga and C64 made history !

Synthetic musics on C64

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Chiptunes on Amiga

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[chip]

Hey, but this is my old thread

We could say that a chiptune is a standard Protracker module with small samples ?

[Capitaine]

Generally yes. You can load some modules in Protracker and check the samples size.
The chippiest modules are around 15Kb.

Intron96.mod 10Kb
Mindtrap.mod 16Kb

Some people might say the samples have to be computed.
As tracker mods only contain static data, players just load them.
So you find the world smallest chippy in executables 4Kb demos files where waveforms are generated on the fly.

But there have been so many variations and we are 30 years later since it started.

Now chiptunes are pressed on vinyls, or played at concerts.
It's great to see them going from a few bytes to a different new life but less easy to define them by now !

So... when size mattered and bytes were expensive, they are born in a technical and community context.
Now bytes are cheap and chiptunes are pretty much cultural.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by chip

Hey, but this is my old thread

We could say that a chiptune is a standard Protracker module with small samples ?

You could say that SOME chiptunes are. Many are written in other trackers, eg Future Composer.

[chip]

Yep, you are right Hewitson

Those other music formats like "Delta Music" and "Sonic Arranger" which i call the Exotic ones ( or synthetics )

[saimon69]

I usually call those chiptunes made with protracker chiptune-like and the small waveforms microsamples