5 ms·

Nitpicky factoid: the correct name for this type of music, as used in the scene where it originates from, is CHIP MUSIC or CHIPTUNES.

vardump 3y ago
Also these tunes are XM modules. XM is a popular tracker. Trackers are type of music making software pioneered by Soundtracker on Amiga. I wouldn't be surprised if many of these tunes have just been ripped from somewhere else and not actually made by keygen crackers themselves.
- bananaboy 3y ago
  To be even nitpickier the tracker that makes XM files is called FastTracker2 ;)
  - vardump 3y ago
    Oh, you're absolutely right. :-)
- vintermann 3y ago
  Most of them are, but the reason why (in the words of YouTuber Ahoy) piracy has such an awesome soundtrack, is that the cracking groups grew out of the Commodore scene.
  - underlipton 3y ago
    Yup. I learned about it way after the fact, but you have the cracker scene, which crosses over with tracker enthusiasts and produces demoscene in the 80s/90s. Demoscene crosses over with a lot of early PC game dev, which loops us back around to crackers. The next gen picks up the echoes of this stuff through keygens and romhacks, and we eventually get stuff like Barkley Gaiden (whose theme song remixed the Space Jam theme with a mod from a tracker composer who went on to cofound Swedish House Mafia) and Undertale (which is the culmination of a stupidly-interesting chain of chiptune/indie game dev influences).
    - amiga386 3y ago
      > a tracker composer who went on to cofound Swedish House Mafia Axwell aka Quazar: * http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/Protracker/Quazar/ http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/Protracker/Quazar/ * http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/Fasttracker%202/Quazar/ http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/Fasttracker%202/Quazar/
      - underlipton 3y ago
        Yup, that's him. And the remix in question spawned an avalanche of copycat "Slam Jams" and, in turn, a surge of geeky game/anime-hip hop mash-ups. For the past decade, the actual musical underground has been online. Axwell is just the start; one of these days, something in the lineage, and closer aesthetically to the pure deal, is going to break out, and people are going to wonder where the hell it came from. 30+ years of grassroots culture development happening right under everyone's noses, that's where.
    - jstarfish 3y ago
      Dubmood managed to get a song onto the Hotline Miami soundtrack ("Richard").
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Music trackers are so cool. Instead of recorded audio, they produce modules which are essentially programs that the tracker software executes to reproduce the sound. You can even see the unmixed waveforms of each instrument being generated in real time. It's just so cool to watch. https://youtu.be/eclMFa0mD1c https://youtu.be/eclMFa0mD1c
  - chromoblob 3y ago
    Meh, they are unlike programs. Rather, they are grids of notes and special commands that alter the pitch, velocity or timing, together with a bunch of samples and envelopes used to play those notes. Some formats also have simple filters for subtractive synthesis. Modern tracker-based programs, though, have capabilities for complex signal synthesis/processing (Renoise, Sunvox).
- amiga386 3y ago
  Most of them are. The first two things this site played at me was the fruit machine music from Superfrog (Amiga, 1993, Allister Brimble) [0], then the DisIsSid#3 intro (Amiga, 1996, Manfred Linzer) [1] That's not to say that crackers and musicians don't mingle. While there was not only music made for games, demos, intros, musicdisks and other demoscene productions, there was certainly a lot of chiptunes commissioned for or widely spread by cracktros, with the musicians' support In one particularly interesting case, Mark Knight [2] got a permanent job as a musician for the game company Mindscape, and he could hear his own music, [3] that he'd given to Melon Dezign and had been used by their cracking friends Crystal for the cracktro [4][5] to their crack of Mindscape's game, Moonstone [6] > I received a call from Richard Leinfellner at Mindscape offering me some freelance work, converting the Wing Commander music for the Amiga. I snapped it up and when (almost) completed, he offered me a full-time position as in-house composer. > It could have been the shortest career in history when, during the first week, I heard one of my chiptunes playing in the production office. Mindscape had just released Moonstone, and had downloaded a copy from a bbs. I stuck my head around to see why they were playing my tune, and quickly saw that the crack intro introducing Moonstone was playing. I silently shuffled out, went back to my room, and shut the door very worried about the consequences of this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfrog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfrog [1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3416 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3416 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Knight_(musician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Knight_(musician) [3] https://marktdkknight.bandcamp.com/track/maintheme-2-original-amiga-mix https://marktdkknight.bandcamp.com/track/maintheme-2-origina... [4] http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=7902 http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=7902 [5] https://flashtro.com/crystal-moonstone/ https://flashtro.com/crystal-moonstone/ [6] https://archive.org/details/AmigaDownload/page/n259/mode/2up?q=moonstone https://archive.org/details/AmigaDownload/page/n259/mode/2up...
- dark-star 3y ago
  not all are XM, some are s3m (ScreamTracker 3) ;-)
  - vhold 3y ago
    For the fun of it: jq '.[]["songs"][].file | match("\\.([^.]+)$") | .captures[0].string' songs.json -r | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr 3169 xm 1011 mod 226 it 86 s3m 4 nsf 3 rad 2 amd 2 S3M 1 mtm
nonethewiser 3y ago
Its not mutually exclusive. These chiptunes cone from key generators which is why its called keygen music. > Illegitimate key generators are typically distributed by software crackers in the warez scene and demoscene. These keygens often play "Keygen music", which may include the genres dubstep or chiptunes[1] in the background and have artistic user interfaces. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keygen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keygen More details: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/66nvia/why_is_keygen_music_a_thing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/66nvia/w...
- daneel_w 3y ago
  Some of them come from there, a few of them even exclusively composed for this or that cracking group to use in their key generators, but the vast majority of them were just taken from prior intros (demos) and crack intros from a time before software began commonly using calculable serial keys. The history is not the least unknown to me, as I grew up in both the demo scene and the "elite/piracy" scene of the Commodore 64 and the Commodore Amiga - where all of this began.
jrm4 3y ago
Nitpickier: Fairly certain the music itself strongly predates these terms. I'm reminded of when the phrase "mash-up" got popular; though hip-hop DJ's doing "blends" had been happening for years before.
snowram 3y ago
Chiptune does have its subgenres. Keygen chiptune usually have a very distinct style with a lot of fast arpeggios and mainly pulse waves instruments with no attack or delay.
kortex 3y ago
Chip music / chiptune specifically to music produced on/for sound chips, or produced using tracker software which was commonly used to produce this kind of music. "8-bit" is also often used to refer to the genre of chiptune, even though much of the music is produced for higher bit depth systems. Many keygen tunes are chiptunes, produced on trackers, but many are not. Some are straight-up DnB, techno, or trance, not remotely chiptune. E.g. Here's a track from downthread which would be considered rave/ old skool / breakebeat hardcore or just "hardcore" (not to be confused with like a dozen other genres called "old skool" or "hardcore" (it's a very ineffable genre from a fairly narrow time period, from a fairly underground at the time subculture, who released via physically unstable "dubplates" that haven't survived well through digital archiving)). https://cable.ayra.ch/webxmp/#835 https://cable.ayra.ch/webxmp/#835 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakbeat_hardcore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakbeat_hardcore It's almost like language is fluid and descriptive, not proscriptive.
- daneel_w 3y ago
  It was never really about the genre per se, though there is a certain artistic similarity that can be gleaned, similar to how e.g. Japanese game music of the early 90s has a certain red thread to it. It was always about the nature of the instruments used in the tracker music: a notable use of simple looped waveforms and minimal samples, instead of extended samples of a real or synthesized instrument, and often a desire to squeeze the file size of these tracker modules down to a minimum to the point where it became a bit of a craft to some. People (like me) who spent a lot of time in the scene when this era of computer music came into existence have a specific and widely shared opinion about what is a chiptune and what isn't.
- bananaboy 3y ago
  I was only ever involved in the PC demoscene back in the day, and on that platform chiptunes generally referred to mods that were tiny, using very small samples or even not many samples e.g. playing the same samples at different pitches for different instruments.
- jrm4 3y ago
  Right, I tried to say this elsewhere; I ended up hearing a LOT of this music when it was actually being made, and neither "Chiptune" nor "Chip Music" was widely in use, if at all. If anything, "Tracker" was the word most used, I thing.
tom_ 3y ago
Depends on the tune... some of these sound more like mods or xms, made up of samples rather than synthesized notes (the synthesized nature being one of the distinguishing characteristics of the chip tune).

vardump 3y ago

Also these tunes are XM modules. XM is a popular tracker. Trackers are type of music making software pioneered by Soundtracker on Amiga. I wouldn't be surprised if many of these tunes have just been ripped from somewhere else and not actually made by keygen crackers themselves.

bananaboy 3y ago
To be even nitpickier the tracker that makes XM files is called FastTracker2 ;)
- vardump 3y ago
  Oh, you're absolutely right. :-)
vintermann 3y ago
Most of them are, but the reason why (in the words of YouTuber Ahoy) piracy has such an awesome soundtrack, is that the cracking groups grew out of the Commodore scene.
- underlipton 3y ago
  Yup. I learned about it way after the fact, but you have the cracker scene, which crosses over with tracker enthusiasts and produces demoscene in the 80s/90s. Demoscene crosses over with a lot of early PC game dev, which loops us back around to crackers. The next gen picks up the echoes of this stuff through keygens and romhacks, and we eventually get stuff like Barkley Gaiden (whose theme song remixed the Space Jam theme with a mod from a tracker composer who went on to cofound Swedish House Mafia) and Undertale (which is the culmination of a stupidly-interesting chain of chiptune/indie game dev influences).
  - amiga386 3y ago
    > a tracker composer who went on to cofound Swedish House Mafia Axwell aka Quazar: * http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/Protracker/Quazar/ http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/Protracker/Quazar/ * http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/Fasttracker%202/Quazar/ http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/Fasttracker%202/Quazar/
    - underlipton 3y ago
      Yup, that's him. And the remix in question spawned an avalanche of copycat "Slam Jams" and, in turn, a surge of geeky game/anime-hip hop mash-ups. For the past decade, the actual musical underground has been online. Axwell is just the start; one of these days, something in the lineage, and closer aesthetically to the pure deal, is going to break out, and people are going to wonder where the hell it came from. 30+ years of grassroots culture development happening right under everyone's noses, that's where.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    Dubmood managed to get a song onto the Hotline Miami soundtrack ("Richard").
matheusmoreira 3y ago
Music trackers are so cool. Instead of recorded audio, they produce modules which are essentially programs that the tracker software executes to reproduce the sound. You can even see the unmixed waveforms of each instrument being generated in real time. It's just so cool to watch. https://youtu.be/eclMFa0mD1c https://youtu.be/eclMFa0mD1c
- chromoblob 3y ago
  Meh, they are unlike programs. Rather, they are grids of notes and special commands that alter the pitch, velocity or timing, together with a bunch of samples and envelopes used to play those notes. Some formats also have simple filters for subtractive synthesis. Modern tracker-based programs, though, have capabilities for complex signal synthesis/processing (Renoise, Sunvox).
amiga386 3y ago
Most of them are. The first two things this site played at me was the fruit machine music from Superfrog (Amiga, 1993, Allister Brimble) [0], then the DisIsSid#3 intro (Amiga, 1996, Manfred Linzer) [1] That's not to say that crackers and musicians don't mingle. While there was not only music made for games, demos, intros, musicdisks and other demoscene productions, there was certainly a lot of chiptunes commissioned for or widely spread by cracktros, with the musicians' support In one particularly interesting case, Mark Knight [2] got a permanent job as a musician for the game company Mindscape, and he could hear his own music, [3] that he'd given to Melon Dezign and had been used by their cracking friends Crystal for the cracktro [4][5] to their crack of Mindscape's game, Moonstone [6] > I received a call from Richard Leinfellner at Mindscape offering me some freelance work, converting the Wing Commander music for the Amiga. I snapped it up and when (almost) completed, he offered me a full-time position as in-house composer. > It could have been the shortest career in history when, during the first week, I heard one of my chiptunes playing in the production office. Mindscape had just released Moonstone, and had downloaded a copy from a bbs. I stuck my head around to see why they were playing my tune, and quickly saw that the crack intro introducing Moonstone was playing. I silently shuffled out, went back to my room, and shut the door very worried about the consequences of this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfrog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfrog [1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3416 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3416 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Knight_(musician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Knight_(musician) [3] https://marktdkknight.bandcamp.com/track/maintheme-2-original-amiga-mix https://marktdkknight.bandcamp.com/track/maintheme-2-origina... [4] http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=7902 http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=7902 [5] https://flashtro.com/crystal-moonstone/ https://flashtro.com/crystal-moonstone/ [6] https://archive.org/details/AmigaDownload/page/n259/mode/2up?q=moonstone https://archive.org/details/AmigaDownload/page/n259/mode/2up...
dark-star 3y ago
not all are XM, some are s3m (ScreamTracker 3) ;-)
- vhold 3y ago
  For the fun of it: jq '.[]["songs"][].file | match("\\.([^.]+)$") | .captures[0].string' songs.json -r | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr 3169 xm 1011 mod 226 it 86 s3m 4 nsf 3 rad 2 amd 2 S3M 1 mtm

nonethewiser 3y ago

Its not mutually exclusive. These chiptunes cone from key generators which is why its called keygen music. > Illegitimate key generators are typically distributed by software crackers in the warez scene and demoscene. These keygens often play "Keygen music", which may include the genres dubstep or chiptunes[1] in the background and have artistic user interfaces. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keygen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keygen More details: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/66nvia/why_is_keygen_music_a_thing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/66nvia/w...

daneel_w 3y ago
Some of them come from there, a few of them even exclusively composed for this or that cracking group to use in their key generators, but the vast majority of them were just taken from prior intros (demos) and crack intros from a time before software began commonly using calculable serial keys. The history is not the least unknown to me, as I grew up in both the demo scene and the "elite/piracy" scene of the Commodore 64 and the Commodore Amiga - where all of this began.

jrm4 3y ago

Nitpickier: Fairly certain the music itself strongly predates these terms. I'm reminded of when the phrase "mash-up" got popular; though hip-hop DJ's doing "blends" had been happening for years before.

snowram 3y ago

Chiptune does have its subgenres. Keygen chiptune usually have a very distinct style with a lot of fast arpeggios and mainly pulse waves instruments with no attack or delay.

kortex 3y ago

Chip music / chiptune specifically to music produced on/for sound chips, or produced using tracker software which was commonly used to produce this kind of music. "8-bit" is also often used to refer to the genre of chiptune, even though much of the music is produced for higher bit depth systems. Many keygen tunes are chiptunes, produced on trackers, but many are not. Some are straight-up DnB, techno, or trance, not remotely chiptune. E.g. Here's a track from downthread which would be considered rave/ old skool / breakebeat hardcore or just "hardcore" (not to be confused with like a dozen other genres called "old skool" or "hardcore" (it's a very ineffable genre from a fairly narrow time period, from a fairly underground at the time subculture, who released via physically unstable "dubplates" that haven't survived well through digital archiving)). https://cable.ayra.ch/webxmp/#835 https://cable.ayra.ch/webxmp/#835 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakbeat_hardcore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakbeat_hardcore It's almost like language is fluid and descriptive, not proscriptive.

daneel_w 3y ago
It was never really about the genre per se, though there is a certain artistic similarity that can be gleaned, similar to how e.g. Japanese game music of the early 90s has a certain red thread to it. It was always about the nature of the instruments used in the tracker music: a notable use of simple looped waveforms and minimal samples, instead of extended samples of a real or synthesized instrument, and often a desire to squeeze the file size of these tracker modules down to a minimum to the point where it became a bit of a craft to some. People (like me) who spent a lot of time in the scene when this era of computer music came into existence have a specific and widely shared opinion about what is a chiptune and what isn't.
bananaboy 3y ago
I was only ever involved in the PC demoscene back in the day, and on that platform chiptunes generally referred to mods that were tiny, using very small samples or even not many samples e.g. playing the same samples at different pitches for different instruments.
jrm4 3y ago
Right, I tried to say this elsewhere; I ended up hearing a LOT of this music when it was actually being made, and neither "Chiptune" nor "Chip Music" was widely in use, if at all. If anything, "Tracker" was the word most used, I thing.

tom_ 3y ago

Depends on the tune... some of these sound more like mods or xms, made up of samples rather than synthesized notes (the synthesized nature being one of the distinguishing characteristics of the chip tune).