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Aye. The drums ruin it. It's like listening to loose change falling on a wet washcloth down the corridor. j00 needz the b4ss.

Touché

I would argue that you're much better off posting chiptunes on your own facebook page where you'll be spreading the stuff to people who might be more inclined to check it out since it comes from someone they know, rather than to try and spread the word by creating something entirely new that people don't know about and that you'll have to promote the shit out of until it gets 10% of the audience of the other ten million similar pages and websites.

The thing about trying to describe chipmusic in a paragraph or so is that it's ultimately doomed to fail if you're trying to explain more than the surface of it. Although anybody who's been into it for long enough clearly understands all the nuances by sheer force of exposition, it's not easy to put into few words.

For example, for me chipmusic is an esthetic choice. I don't give much thought to what tools were used to create the music, as long as you respect a few loose "rules" about the sound. For others, it's strictly a choice of tools. Some think that sample trackers aren't chipmusic because there's no actual sound chip involved etc. Then there's the whole crossover thing where a lot of people use chipmusic as an instrument rather than a genre. You'll get chip-rock, chip-house, and etc etc. Some people call it 8bit music even though the (very) large majority of platforms used to make chipmusic isn't 8bit. Some people try to sound like videogames, some like the demoscene, some stay away as much as possible from this and try to make "modern" music on old hardware... some make "old" music on modern hardware.

In short.. it's a fucking mess. But it's not very confusing when you get familiar with it. The scene is usually both very elitist and very loose about what qualifies as chipmusic. Contradictory? It sure is.

When I say your description is "wrong" it's mostly because you state clearly that chiptune is something that doesn't use samples. The "official birthplace" of chipmusic is the Amiga, a computer that didn't generate any real time sound and relied strictly on samples. The term "chiptune" was invented in that era because they were "tunes that sound like old sound chips". One can argue that the C64 which came before was chipmusic too, and you'd be both right and wrong. Right in the sense that.. by today's standards and definition, all the pre-amiga soundchip-based platforms are seen as very valid chip machines. But wrong in the sense that back then.. it wasn't called chiptunes, it was just called music...or computer music... or noise, by the parents being subjected to it.

In a sense.. it's like any other genre of music. Since music is an ever changing, very organic and living thing.. new genres generally just don't happen overnight. They are a result of years of permutation and kinky interracial sex between other genres. Nobody knows exactly when rock n roll became rock n roll. It was a result of RnB being pushed outside of its standards, Of blues being played "wrong". Of country/western being played too hard etc etc. But for simplcity's sake, people generally tend to agree on a starting point/era, even though it's almost meaningless since all that came before it shares tons of similarities. In the case of chiptunes, the accepted birthplace is the Amiga where the term was coined and the genre refined into something identifiable. And in those days, we used only samples. Super short samples, often a single cycle, but samples nonetheless.

I find myself constantly changing the way I refer to chipmusic or try to explain it depending on my audience. For some of my friends.. I can say "chipmusic" and they know instantly what I'm talking about. For others.. I have to call it "my nintendo music" otherwise they don't get it. If you're trying to explain it in a single paragraph for people who have never heard it before, don't give specifics about the technical aspects of it like "it has no samples" or "it's from sound chips" because you'll always get nitpickers, like me, to point out it's not quite right

"Chipmusic is a forward-facing and ever evolving genre of music deeply rooted in the early digital computer music of the 80s"

Or something like that... yknow.. keep it simple and surfacey, otherwise you'll end up saying something that's not true

.... damn that was a uselessly long post.

This could've gone much wrongier (yes it's a word now) than it did. I think your honest reply saved your ass there. I think you'll notice that a lot of people here feel pretty defensive about chipmusic

So to explain the reaction... It's just that such posts, either here on this forum or in any other chip community, are fairly common. "Hi I've just head a guy make a song with some sounds that I once heard in a videogame and since I didn't know that existed before, I assume nobody else does and I want to change the world and fill stadiums with this and open a label and print tshirts and get a tattoo and then do coke, buckets and buckets of coke."

Usually people are introduced to chipmusic by way of the more "mainstream" (gawd.. I'm already making it sound like this is some avant-garde elitist shit.. haha) remixes and dubsteppy/dancy material on teh tubes of you. Just bear in mind that by now chipmusic, as defined by the esthetics and technology, is about 30ish years old now and there is still a lot for you to discover, which is good Pages like the one you created are always welcomed as it makes the community grow, but we've all seen many of them pop in and out of existence in a few months because the creator's temporary affection for chipmusic was just a highschool crush that didn't last. So forgive people if they don't seem too excited about the page, nobody means to be an asshole to you really...it's just the way she goes.

If I may, I would suggest that instead of creating another low-traffic, short-lifespan hub of "surface" material, if you're really into the music then try and pitch in with the existing communities instead. Ask questions, lurk around, listen to the classics and explore, figure out what you like best and maybe even try your hand at it. Once you find what floats your boat, you'll be much better equipped to make a web page that people will be interested in visiting. Most people here are bombarded by all things chipmusic every day in their facebook news feed, reddit, forums, email etc etc. Another "be all end all super general page about everything and the world" is probably not going to gain much traction.

That said. Welcome to CMO.. since nobody said it yet.

Also.. your description of chipmusic IS STILL WRONG.

Where's Xyno? He used to do killer shit on Atari.. then one day pow...disappeared.

I heard he joined a circus. He's the bearded lady in the freak show

Aye.. that's basically it, an amplitude click when the panning moves. If you're using all that fancy sixty four bit math now, I'm guessing there's a way to make it more precise. If not, maybe fade in/out the steps?