Make music the way 8-bit consoles did

Chiptune is a free tool for writing short tunes on software copies of classic sound chips. Pick a chip, draw notes into one coloured lane per hardware channel, and hear them through a model of that chip, limits and quirks included.

The chips

• NES 2A03: two pulse waves, a triangle for bass, a noise channel for hats and snares, and 1-bit drum samples.
• General Instrument AY-3-8910 (ZX Spectrum 128, Amstrad CPC, MSX): three square waves sharing a single noise generator and a single envelope. When two channels want them set differently at once, the latest note wins, and the editor marks the clash in red.
• Texas Instruments SN76489 (Sega Master System, BBC Micro): three square waves and a noise channel that can take its pitch from Tone 3, which is how those games got their bass.
• MOS SID (Commodore 64): three voices with triangle, sawtooth, pulse and noise waveforms, ADSR envelopes, ring modulation, hard sync, and one shared filter in the darker 6581 or cleaner 8580 flavour, chosen per song.

Each lane plays one note at a time, as the real channel did, so drawing over a note shortens it. Composers on the real hardware worked inside those limits; that's where the sound comes from.

Your songs and your privacy

• There are no accounts and no cookies.
• Songs are saved in your own browser, not on a server. Clearing your browsing data deletes them, so use Export → Song file to keep a backup.
• Share links carry the whole song inside the link, after the #. Browsers never send that part to a server, so nobody stores or sees your song except the people you send it to.
• Visits are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies and doesn't track you across sites. It removes the part of the address after the # before sending anything, so shared songs aren't included.
• Audio is generated and exported entirely in your browser.

Works best on

Current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on a computer, with a mouse and keyboard. Shared songs play on phones too. On an iPhone, turn off silent mode to hear them.

Credits and licences

• The chip emulation is written from scratch for Chiptune. No code is taken from other emulators.
• The NES drum kit is synthesised by Chiptune itself from sine waves and noise; no samples come from existing games.
• MP3 export uses lamejs, licensed under the LGPL-3.0. It is served unmodified as a separate file and only downloaded when you export an MP3. Licence text.
• Built with React and Vite, and hosted on Cloudflare.