Another BRILLIANT compilation released on C-Jeff’s Ubiktunes, featuring a lot of new names for me that I was happy to discover, and a bunch of the good ones, showing their autumn-inspired tunes.
Catchy pop-ish tunes that will make this week a better one. Quality release, of the type we don’t see much anymore.
The British chipmusician Syphus is a schooled composer who has been active in the Amiga demoscene for ages, written his dissertation on chip music and how its formats have survived the age of MP3-recoded music. Now he’s developing a DJ-tool for Amiga MOD-files, where instruments and sequence data is individually accessible. Recorded music enables very limited manipulation of the music but with the MOD-format you can change potentially every aspect of a song; tones and scales, rhythms, volumes, arrangement, etc. This is an old dream of mine coming true; an untapped potential of well-archived and “open source” chipmusic.
EDIT from comments: I’m making it in Processing, and will eventually be a Windows/Linux/Mac executable AND a web-based Java applet.
I might tidy it up and cobble together a Processing library so that other people can use the IBXM replayer system (by Martin Cameron) in their Processing sketches.
This will be my principle means of releasing mod/xm musicdisks in the future, with the possibility of releasing web-based versions of old Amiga/etc musicdisks. For the native executables, I may see about building in a ‘render to mp3? function, so I can distribute small disks from which people can build large mp3-player-friendly albums.
I’ve been asking for similar DJ type players for other chips for years.. especially for my Hardsid!
So an interview I did a while ago for a journalist got heavily used in his rather good GamesTM piece this month. Normally when I give an unsuspecting journo about 50 times more than they ever wanted to hear about my own tedious interests, I end up seeing a three word platitude lazily dribbled onto the page…but this guy did a great job and used nearly everything I had to say across the entire article :D Also featuring everyone’s favourite Bit Shifter (Josh)
Download a scan of the article here! Nice TCTD Plug!
Another group to check out at the Bent Festival is The Chiptune Marching Band.
The name is a bit of a misnomer, but its fun chip-type noise, as Syphus explains:
Yes, I hear you cry, there are no actual ‘chiptunes’ involved, per se. The phrase is attention-grabbing, though, and reflects the fact that people are making crazy chip-style noises with squarewave generators, and it’s all terribly good fun.
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