Micromusic.net chiptune radio (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Micromusic.net chiptune radio (1999)

micromusic.net

68 pointshnzix16 comments

If you like this, there are quite a few good internet radio stations that focus on video game and chip music. One of my personal favorites is rainwave.cc.

My favourite is http://www.slayradio.org

I used to rely on http://kohina.com/ about a decade ago, but most of the streams are dead now.

Me too. They are facing some sort of infrastructure trouble at the moment, but there's a temporary stream up here: http://kohina.duckdns.org:8000/stream.ogg

I enjoy listening to Nectarine Radio https://scenestream.net/demovibes/ which streams demoscene music, a significant portion of which is chiptunes.

Of course, we can't forget SceneSat, if we're talking demoscene.

Listening in and loving it. Probably going to listen to this all day.

I'm a huge chiptune fan, this is perfect for me for coding. Thanks! :D

Terrifying.

The bitrate, I assume? :)

It's funny; I wanted to upload a bunch of music from KeygenMusic.net into iTunes Match; but it wouldn't take them, because iTunes Match thinks that anything with a bitrate below, I think, 128kbps, is speech from a voice-recorder rather than professionally-mastered music.

In the end, I re-rendered all the music myself using a tracker program to FLAC, and from there to Q=256 constrained AAC. Each file was probably four times the size for no noticeable gain in sound quality, but at least they upload now. :)

Was it not possible to get the source modules themselves and actually record them at a higher bitrate?

That’s what I said I did, in the second paragraph. “Render” is the verb for going from a digital sequencer file to an analogue output (just like going from SVG to PNG is “rendering.”)

Ah, I see, sorry for the confusion. I've always personally used terms like re-encode because the end product is still a digital encoding.

I suppose a lot of people in the music world would prefer to call it bouncing. I think all these terms are valid.

> the end product is still a digital encoding

A digital encoding of Nyquist samples, though—meaning that you've got something which, at that point, is a lossless description of the equivalent analogue intensities that would be cut into a depth groove. (Provided that none of the data is above the Nyquist frequency, which is usually true-by-design in the kind of chiptune audio being discussed here.)

There isn't really any difference between holding onto the digital data after rendering it, and holding onto an (ideal, lossless) recording medium containing the analogue waveform you got by putting that digital data through a DAC. There's a bijection—you can always recover one from the other.

So why not think of PCM audio as an "analogue medium"—just one that requires a blob of digital logic to turn it into a signal on a wire, rather than a stylus?

If anyone else wants to do this: find one of the 7z files from pub.keygenmusic.org, grab OpenMPT [1] and export to WAV. It looks like ffmpeg can also link to libopenmpt but I haven't tried.

1: http://openmpt.org/

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