Chiptune Sequencer - C.H.I.P.

C.H.I.P. is a Chiptune Handheld Instrument Player: sequence and build four channel chiptune, the sound of a 1989 handheld console. Arrange is your song. Sections stack top to bottom and play in order. Drag one to move it, or drag its right edge to loop it. Pattern is where notes go. Four lanes down, time across. Tap a cell, then play a key or a drum pad to fill it. Effects come from a menu you can read, so you pick Arpeggio, major instead of memorising a code. Sound is the synth. Every control has a plain name, a sentence saying what it does, and a button to hear the result. There is a preset library if you would rather start from something that already works. Song is everything else. Tempo, tuning, the mixer, saving, and export. The whole interface is drawn a pixel at a time, in the style of an early nineties desktop. Have it in grey, or behind a green LCD. Every sound is made as you play. Nothing streams, and there is no sample pack hiding in the background. Two pulse channels, a wave channel you can shape, and a noise channel, emulated at the register level so the controls mean what they meant on the original chip. Plug in a MIDI keyboard to play the instrument you are editing, and write notes straight into the grid. Export a mix as a WAV, or the song as a MIDI file to carry into whatever studio you use. There is a compare screen for the curious. Load a recording of real hardware and it lines the two up to the sample, matches their levels, and tells you how far apart they are and where. You can listen to just the difference. Songs and save files read and write in their original layouts, byte for byte, so something you write here can go back to the device it came from. Whether you want a quick lofi beat or a finished song, it is a music maker for sitting down and actually writing. Made for people who like retro sound and do not want a manual to get going.