chipsound

Chipsound is a browser-based music player for tracker module files, the audio format used extensively in 1990s PC games, the Amiga computer scene, and the demoscene. Tracker formats like MOD, S3M, XM, and IT store music as sequences of notes and instrument samples rather than recorded audio, which made them very compact. Thousands of these files were distributed freely and are still collected by fans today. Chipsound lets you play them directly in a web browser with no installation required.

You can drag a file onto the page and it starts playing immediately, or load a file from a URL using a query parameter. The player shows a real-time view of what each channel in the module is doing, with per-channel visualizations that you can cycle through. You can mute individual channels or isolate a single one to hear it on its own, which is useful for studying how a piece of music was constructed. Modules that contain multiple subsongs have a picker to switch between them.

The interface has multiple visual themes that can be cycled with a keyboard shortcut, all implemented through CSS so they are easy to customize. Everything runs locally in the browser: no files are uploaded to any server and no account is needed. The player works on mobile devices as well as desktop.

Under the hood, the audio decoding is handled by libopenmpt, a well-regarded open-source playback library compiled to run inside the browser. Chipsound builds on top of that to provide the visual interface, the theme system, and the interaction controls. The project is pure static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with no build step required. You can run it locally with any basic web server, or self-host it by deploying the src folder to any static hosting service.

The project is open source under the MIT license. A live version is available at chipsound.com.