There's also new hardware being made, but yes I whole heartedly agree with the sentiment.

hahaha, nice

you can't do this in an emulator.

I still share my music as XM and MOD. VLC can play them and anyone who matters has VLC on their computer.

great point about chipmusic distribution as source files

yes.

ilkae - pistachio island (99-01)
http://eerikinpujsound.com/legacy/INPUJ … tachio.rar

ilkae - bring extra dragons (01-02)
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/23631269/dragons-xm.rar

ilkae - stained glass pinata (03-04)
http://eerikinpujsound.com/legacy/subdo … sn/666.rar

Still a lot of confusion as to the actual topic of this topic.    @goto80 - maybe you could edit the thread title to something less inflammatory like "chipmusic post-hard/software - what's next?"

Ilkae has illustrated a lot of the points that make this topic interesting.  Mainly, hard/software was not a concern in the early years of chipmusic.  It was just music being made on the tools of the time.  The hard/soft argument has been a big part of chipmusic's adolescence.  As chip continues to grow and with more tools like deflemask, 1tracker, lgpt, and various emulators and ports (just saw that windows hivelytracker post, awesomesauce!) physical hardware seems less and less critical.

So what makes chipmusic chip, anyway?

"If it sounds like chipmusic then it is."  Ok, great!  What does chipmusic sound like?  Like Hubbard or Nullsleep?  Like early Nullsleep (Depeche Mode Mega Mix) or more current Nullsleep (Disaster Fetish)?  Anamanablueberryyogurt?  godinpants' "whalecore" stuff?  This just isn't a very usable metric...

"If it was made using [some of the generally accepted chip platforms like C64 or whatever] then it is."  Personally, this is one of my default definitions but... emulators?  Ports of classic trackers to modern PC?  Using something like Pixelh8's carts to play a GB in real time?  What if the chip element is only part of the setup in the "use chip as an instrument" way that so many people were pushing there for a while?  This isn't very good either...

I don't want to believe that chipmusic means being stuck in some foggy past where getting a snare sample into your software took 5 minutes of load time and then you accidently recorded over the data cassette with a Randy Newman song that came on the radio.

I also don't want to believe that chip is some artificially restricted sound pallete.  This was never the case in a general sense, only when speaking of specific platforms.  Have you listened to CCDM's amiga mods?  There's certainly nothing lofi about that.  Same with O2star's FM stuff.

All of this is why I think it's the *physical act* of creating chip music that is it's core attribute.  The interaction of the person with the set of options they choose (the interface, i suppose).  I've called this "methodology" in the past but I may not be using the term correctly.

How to share this experience with the listener without waving an NES over you head while your tunes play?

1.  You don't have to!  Let your music and art speak for themselves.  Interested people will dig deep enough to find out and those are the people we want to become part of our community.

2.  Share source files!  Hell, share your music music as source files ONLY.  This is something that really needs to come back hard.  Except for Hexawe who've kept the torch burning bright.    Check out lamptonworm's thread where he shared the tape audio data of his spectrum track on Soundcloud.  Now that's how you share tunes AND interest!  http://chipmusic.org/forums/topic/10100 … -datatape/

3.  ...i dunno...

When soft/hard no longer define what you're doing then just what are you doing?  The answer is "what you are DOING has always been the important aspect".  Keep DOING chipmusic.  It's only going to become more interesting!

*this post was not proofread or edited in any manner flarpafart*

Personally, I think you should make more skweee, loving the beatles thing you did years ago and just got released as vinyl!

For the topic, I cant really say anything. Ive always sampled stuff and at the moment my favourite way of making music is using sampled c64 waveforms and even instruments. And since beginning have mixed hardware and software, so I dont really have that much of opinion about whats legit or not. I wish to see just broader scale of music, hard or software.

ferreal

ilkae speaketh the truth.

Good stuff, Ilkae. There is room for debate though, because I think that the chipscene is entering a new phase. Hardware purism was sort of the center of the scene for the past decade or so. And now it's wearing off now. There's much less drama. So I'm curious about what will happen next. Personally, I don't think that the hardware/software dichotomy will be around as much.

THIS THREAD - TIME TO MOVE ON?

Word

I got into tracking during the DOS years, so the rigid re-defining of the word "chiptune" has seemed really strange to me.

For me, it's more of a musical form with tropes/conventions and a limited sonic palette than anything hardware-defined.
Whether the limited sonic palette in a chiptune comes from hardware choices, software limitations, or user-made choices doesn't seem all that important to me.

I understand the logic in approaching chiptune from a modern interpretation of the term (hardware = real, software = fake), but very few artists are interacting with their hardware without a software interface; one likely installed on a modern personal computer and written by somebody else.

A lot of the innovative programming stuff that people tout as the "legitimizing factor" of hardware in this debate has been very much present in all forms of tracker music: it stems from clever people using a software interface.

To some people, the hardware/software/means of production seem to be of paramount importance - almost to the point where this "legitimacy" concern presides over any consideration of the musical content. I would strongly caution against this attitude, simply because there is so much good stuff out there made with sample-based trackers. The "pushing the envelope" factor was even more prevalent, I would argue, from a user input/pattern data standpoint. Since music was always released as source files, there was a constant incentive to show off your tricks to the rest of the community: be it for scene cred or motivated by good natured one-up-manship.

Is all mod/s3m/xm/it stuff "chiptune"? Not by a long shot.

Back then, it seemed to me that people were more interested in producing music that _didn't_ sound like it was made in a tracker. People would stem out tracks just to add DSP and hide the typical sonic traits associated the format. (ie: add reverb)

Was there a massive amount of legitimate chipmusic made using these formats? Absolutely.

Broadband and the sudden viability of 5mb music files (mp3s) changed a lot of this, mostly by eliminating file size concerns for PC-based tracker music outside of a demo/compo setting, as well as effectively killing the tracker scene as musicians switched to releasing in .mp3 format.

Nobody cared about tracker music at all in 2004: It had faded into contemporary electronic music seamlessly. (Huge generalization)
What put it back on the map was stuff like nanoloop and LSDJ - new software platforms developed for previously underexploited hardware.

People often forget that the "chip" in "chiptune" never used to refer to an actual hardware component.
It _definitely_ does nowadays.
This gradual shift in meaning over the last 10 years or so seems to be the at the root of all of these debates.

I fucked up my SMMM cart and recorded this in less time than it took me to write this post. 100% legit, 0% talent. (At least on my end.)

http://chipmusic.org/ilkae/music/2a03-autechre-clone

Hey, at least it's not fakebit, amirite? (Thanks, Baldwin, now I can make fake "realbit")
Check out that dirty line noise

There doesn't need to be a debate at all, in my opinion.
People using trackers to make music: awesome.
People developing new tracker software: awesome.
People expanding the range of legacy hardware that music can be written for: awesome.

It's all good.

don't open that can of worms around here dude