Just took read through the Chip Maestro manual. Seems you are limited to note only data. Notes that fall below the range the NES is capable of playing are used to cycle through the available pulse widths or changing between "tinny and crunchy" on the noise channel. It has no sample bank and makes no use of DPCM. Just raw square waves.

Authentic NES sounds!!!

MidiNES crushes this thing.

If chip maestro only does notes and not fancy effects and that is broken, then whats the point? You might as well as get a retropak and do songs in a tracker.

The only real way to get a Midines is through EBay. And for around $200 it seems pricey for what it does. Chip maestro has given me a lot of issues in terms of pitch and tracking but still works okay with a few of my controllers.

Let me begin by saying I love my midiNES. I don't have a Chip Maestro so I can't comment on how it compares personally. However, I believe all sound programming on the Chip Maestro is done via note data? Took a look at the manual and this seems to be right. A couple of us were asking for CCs to have more control over parameters if we ran it from a PC but I don't think they made it in to the final build.
If that is truly the case, the midiNES simply has a ridiculous amount of control in comparison. In whatever program you use, I am sure you could create a midi out instrument and map CCs to controls to automate. That's what I do and I have no problems with it (outside of the the fine pitch mod CC8 on the pulse channel not behaving properly most times). The 2 banks of samples are great and you can definitely manipulate it in unique ways (pitch bending and offsets used to try to get "Cowabunga!" for the intro of a TMNT themed song).

chipmaestro is p much novelty garb

midiNES is cool but!!!!!!!!!!!! to really get good use out of if you're going to have to do a lot of research on the CC info to get it to sound like anything but generic sounds you could just emulate with magical8bitplug imo. SHRUG

Myself I've never had a problem with my MIDINES that I've had for years, just bought mine fleabay, no issues. It's midi implementation is far superior plus it has some useful DMC samples. The aforementioned wave traveller and sample start done by CC is completely unique to ANY sampler, MIDINES or not.

Never tried chipsounds but YMCK Famicom is very very close to the real deal. I also have an AY3 though sort of similar it's got something.

You can definitely do some neat things with the Midines. It has some rather unique features like the pulse mod hack and DMC wave traveller that can be really rather powerful.

I received my midines for free so I never had to deal with the shipping nightmare, but I'd avoid purchasing one new from Wayfar. Such a large number of horror stories it's hard to ignore.

Pony vs. Unicorn.

wayfar is by far the superior product in terms of features.. Both of them have their flaws. Both have questionable shipping policies. Chipsounds works fine for me tbh.

He guys

I was wondering. I've got 2 ChipMaestro's and well....I like 'm. But I just saw a really cool video of a dude working with the Wayfar Midines and I was wondering what's the difference?

Is there any difference or is it basically the same?

I currently got the Meeblip, ChipMaestro, Ay3 and a Arcano MIDI NES is on it's way.....still I just love using hardware in combination with my VST's so I'm really interested if the Wayfar Midines is a good addition to this .

Thanks all

George-Tanooki

https://tan00ki.bandcamp.com/album/bits-bones