Furnace – the biggest multi-system chiptune tracker ever made

[alister]

Definitions:

Chiptune, also called 8-bit music, is a style of electronic music made using the programmable sound generator (PSG) sound chips or synthesizers in vintage arcade machines, computers and video game consoles. The term is commonly used to refer to tracker format music using extremely basic and small samples that an old computer or console could produce.[1]

A music tracker (sometimes referred to as a tracker for short) is a type of music sequencer software for creating music.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptune

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

[ttul]

For people who didn’t grow up in the 1980s and 1990s, these will be key insights!

[tobr]

What I’m wondering is what they mean with “biggest”, though. Largest binary? Most features? Highest resolution? Most users?

[djdrone]

I tried Furnace Tracker earlier this year. I always wanted to learn more about using trackers to create chiptunes. I followed a tutorial from Button Masher:

How to Learn Chiptune Trackers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q37XuOLz0jw

The tutorial uses Furnace. It provides a great overview of the components, and then guides you through a hands-on exercise of transcribing an existing demo. This was a nice way to get more familiar with Furnace. Button Masher provides some demos to use, but also there are many demos at the furnace github project:

https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace/tree/master/demos

[chrismorgan]

I wanted to try composing some music in this way and this style, but I found it hard to get started, being paralysed by choice. It’s big, it’s multi-system… but I just want to start with something decent. I’m not targeting any particular device, just making music. Sometimes simple, sometimes with more harmonisation, effects like wobble and pitch bend and such, but I’m not interested in things like sampling; mostly I just want something a bit more powerful than BeepBox. I know I’m being vague, but does anyone happen to have any suggestions and recommendations for which systems might work well?

For a different project, I’d also like this sort of thing but with a Web Audio API-based player, potentially real-time scriptable rather than static. So ideally the perfect system would also be easy to use on the web.

[snowram]

A classic for starting is the NES sound chip (Ricoh 2A03). It only has 5 channels and is very straightforward to use. FM chips like the one in the Megadrive or Commodore 64 have a way steeper learning curve in comparison.

[dimatura]

Like other commenters said, I would just choose a single chip and limit yourself to that. That's pretty constrained by today's standards (arguably, even all of furnace tracker is rather limited compared to your typical modern DAW) - but still plenty to make great music. Which chipset? Maybe you can listen to tracks made with any of these and see which you like best (if you search for the chip name you'll probably find examples on youtube). Good ones are Gameboy (hugely popular thanks to gameboy-native software like LSDJ and nanoloop), YMF2612 (the Sega Genesis chip, primarily FM-based, so can be pretty modern), YMF262/OPL3(also FM, ubiquitous in old PCs), NES (very barebones, more so than gameboy), SID (the commodore chip, which was pretty ahead of its time in terms of sonic capabilities, has a cult following).

[rob74]

Calvin Harris famously used an Amiga 1200 for his first album (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Harris#2006%E2%80%93200...) and even had one on stage for the Brit Awards this year (https://www.retropassion.co.uk/at-the-brits-well-one-of-our-..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8vaccttxsg) - although I'm not sure to what extent it was actually used...

[HelloNurse]

> I’m not targeting any particular device, just making music.

Then think of the music first and then find a suitable target device and configuration: enough tracks and channels for the various parts, appropriate synthesis and effect possibilities (FM/PM, phase distortion and wavetables, good filters, LFOs, reverb and distortion...) for the timbres you intend to use, a sufficiently high bit depth and sample rate to avoid unwanted artifacts (or a sufficiently low bit depth and sample rate to cause wanted artifacts).

[chaosprint]

perhaps give https://glicol.org/ a try?

[bartread]

This is pretty crazy - even the ZX Spectrum beeper is supported. Is there some Z80 player code allowing the music to be played on real hardware?

[mdp2021]

> even the ZX Spectrum beeper is supported

You know what we can do with 1-bit music, right? I.e. Tim Follin's Agent X ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T42WuUpBuHE ) or Agent X II ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNc_xczyGLc ) or Chronos ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-D24A_N4d4 ) or Raw Recruit ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl8dAVybwq8 ) or Future Games ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orEXKOBIv_8 )...

A modern attempt, the ON and OFF album by Rich 'Tufty' Hollins ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nEfO4Yu7Mg )

[klez]

Speaking of tracker music, I can't not mention "Professional Trackers" by Hoffman & Daytripper. Not only because the music is cool but because of what they did visually.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9ErmKpTcFA

Even better, if you have a tracker that lets you see a whole patch at once (worked fine with milkytracker) download the MOD and play it directly in the tracker

https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

[sim7c00]

this is really epic. Little sad to see the instruments aren't vsti, but i guess that's totally understadable for such a project :D. work daily with Renoise tracker and was hoping to grab some haha!. Love trackers! <3 its the best way to make digital music!

Very epic project and a crazy achievement to make such a complete and huge tracker for chiptunes!

[superdisk]

This thing is truly a technical marvel and a massive accomplishment by the developer. He works tirelessly and at one point closed out every one of the hundreds of issues filed on the repo before it's 0.6 release. The number of supported chips and interacting features is unparalleled by anything else.

[mdp2021]

This is what I wanted:

> mix and match sound chips! // over 200 ready to use presets from computers, game consoles and arcade boards... // ...or create your own presets - up to 32 chips or a total of 128 channels

Do you want a SID chip based system with as many channels as you want? There you are...

[velo_aprx]

A cool feature for sure, but, kind of ruins the whole concept of that a chiptune is. For me its about the limitation of the system. If that is not one of the core reasons you are into chiptunes you might as well use whatever you like to make music that go plipediblop. (edit): Then again, i have always considered mod and xms that use samples and sound like chiptunes to also be chiptunes even though they fall outside of the true definition.

[foft]

Is it possible to use this to make songs for multiple chips at once?

In the pokeymax and sidmax projects I have dual pokey, dual sid, dual ym2149 and a simple dma sample engine available. It would be great to make some songs using all of them for their strengths at the same time.

[lloeki]

README:

    Features:
    [...]
      - mix and match sound chips!

[rsync]

Are there any sample tracks extant that utilize the broad range of chips that Furnace has ?

[sirwhinesalot]

Youtube is full of them! Search for Furnace Tracker and check out AshKirby's monster playlist.

[isaacn]

Looks awesome! But does it play s3m files? :-)

[alisonatwork]

Yes! XM and IT are coming too. This was the thing that helped it dislodge OpenMPT for me as a casual tracker for noodling around.

OpenMPT obviously has much more accurate playback of PC era mods, but the UI of Furnace feels less awkward to me and reminds me more of composing in ST3/IT without being a completely backwards-looking clone like Schism.

[Moru]

Isn't s3m a bit too modern for chip tunes? :-)

[fuhsnn]

I'll give the benefit of doubt in accuracy for chip emulations not executed in their real world clock rate, which would be quite expansive to do real-time. But as a creative environment, this is pure fun!

[MaanuAir]

These guys do this with real vintage hardware:

http://theotherdays.net/

[wdfx]

*shameless self promo*

Me too: https://doug.lon.dev/fourays

and I have 2 units for sale here: https://reverb.com/uk/item/83277820-doug-lon-dev-fourays-pol...

[shidoshi]

Lots of comments herein cover things I would otherwise post, so I'll just say this is great fun. Love that it's FOSS. Now, everyone go make some music!

[kinduff]

This is a delight. I loved the intro, had a blast from the past with the keygen exes back when.

Looks very sofisticated, gonna give it a go!

[spockz]

Here I was, from the title alone, under the impression that this was something created to be able to track different cars/engines based on their individual chip tuning (performance enchantments etc.). Boy was I wrong.

[RunSet]

I thought it was going to be a massively collaborative chiptune tracker.