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Comment by daneel_w | Hacker News Reader

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

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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://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakbeat_hardcore

It's almost like language is fluid and descriptive, not proscriptive.

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.

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.

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.

> "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."

Thousands upon thousands of chiptunes were composed on the Amiga. Hundreds of chiptune collections and so-called "music disks" were made specifically targeting this subcategory. In the Amiga scene it was a musical artistic phenomenon in its own right, and the term was solidly cemented. What you're saying is not one bit in parity with reality.

And, they're all tracker modules, whatever the genre. Chiptunes are a specific subcategory.

I suppose I wasn't clear -- I meant the actual term "Chiptune" or "Chip Music." I feel like it just wasn't called that back then, like those actual terms didn't show up until people actually began to seek out the sound as a retro thing.

I may be wrong here -- I can personally attest to consuming a lot of this material (demoscene stuff, games, tracker songs, etc) -- but I will admit I didn't make it or actually directly interact with many humans who did.

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

More details: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/66nvia/w...

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.

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.

To be even nitpickier the tracker that makes XM files is called FastTracker2 ;)

Oh, you're absolutely right. :-)

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.

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).

> 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/Fasttracker%202/Quazar/

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.

Dubmood managed to get a song onto the Hotline Miami soundtrack ("Richard").

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

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).

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

[1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3416

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Knight_(musician)

[3] https://marktdkknight.bandcamp.com/track/maintheme-2-origina...

[4] http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=7902

[5] https://flashtro.com/crystal-moonstone/

[6] https://archive.org/details/AmigaDownload/page/n259/mode/2up...

not all are XM, some are s3m (ScreamTracker 3) ;-)

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

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.

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.

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).

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