Chiptune Tracker

A tracker-style DAW for creating authentic chiptune music, built from scratch in C++20.

⬇️ Download latest release HERE

Download latest release HERE — Windows, no installer, no dependencies

Unzip and run ChiptuneTracker.exe. Everything is statically linked, so there is nothing else to install. All releases and release notes.

Overview

Chiptune Tracker is a real-time digital audio workstation for writing retro-style music. It emulates vintage hardware like the NES 2A03 and the Game Boy LR35902 with mathematically accurate synthesis, and pairs that with five configurable modern engines, a modulation matrix, audio clips and a full mixing chain.

Three ways to write: piano roll, tracker grid and an arrangement timeline
Sixty-seven instruments plus wavetable, FM, sampler, granular and modelled-drum engines
Sing or beatbox a part and have it written out as notes
Ten themes, three workspaces, and a genre focus that puts the right tools in front of you
Exports to WAV, MP3 and MIDI

Screenshots

Every image below is the program itself, captured from the running app.

Piano roll

Draw notes directly, or place whole chords and drum patterns from the sound palette. Sixty-seven instruments across oscillators, synths, drums and genre kits, plus five configurable engines of their own.

The three edit modes

Draw places notes, Select picks them up for editing, Erase removes them. The active mode is marked with the theme's accent.

Draw	Select	Erase

With notes selected, the Note Editor switches to editing the whole selection at once — duration, velocity, fades and every tracker effect.

Instrument macros

The heart of chiptune sound design. Four step sequences per instrument, each with its own loop and release point. Drag across the bar graph to draw the shape.

Volume macro	Arpeggio macro

A 0 4 7 arpeggio macro fakes a whole major chord on a single channel — the defining chiptune trick. Right-click a step to make it fixed rather than relative to the played note.

Euclidean rhythms

Distributing k onsets as evenly as possible over n steps produces a startling number of the world's actual drum patterns — E(3,8) is the tresillo, E(5,16) the bossa clave. Live step preview, per instrument or as a full kit, with nine named presets.

Tracker view

The classic hex grid, for when you would rather type than draw.

Arrangement

Lay patterns out along a timeline to build the full song structure.

Mixer

Eight channels with live level metering, pan knobs, mute and solo, and a full effects chain behind each one.

Effects that cannot answer instantly — a convolution reverb, a pitch shifter, a hosted plugin — make their channel come out late. Everything else is delayed to meet it, including the copies going out to and coming back from the aux buses, so a part never drifts out of time with the rest because of what you put on it. A send used for parallel processing lands exactly on top of the dry signal instead of comb-filtering against it.

Pad controller

MPC-style pads for playing drums and auditioning sounds live.

Analysis and sound design

Spectrum analyzer	Wavetable editor

Parameter automation	MIDI input

Instrument engines

Five engines with editors of their own, found under Engines in the sound palette. Each opens with a short row of starting points rather than sixty parameters and no idea where to begin.

Six-operator FM	Multisample sampler

Granular	Modelled drums

The palette section they live in, and what a genre focus does to it — chiptune is shown the wavetable and FM engines, and not the sampler.

Modulation

Nine sources to nine destinations, with per-voice LFOs so held notes do not wobble in lockstep. This is what makes the engines worth having: a wavetable whose morph never moves is a sampled waveform.

Audio on the timeline

Recorded or imported audio on a channel, drawn as its own waveform and running through that channel's volume, pan, effects and sends like anything else. A clip whose file has moved keeps its place and its edits and says so.

Note FX

A second rack on every channel that changes which notes play rather than how they sound. A Chord module turns one written note into three; an Arpeggio turns those into a running sequence; a Strum stops them all landing at once. Transpose, Octave, Scale, Range and Velocity too, up to eight in any order — Chord above Arpeggio is an arpeggiated chord, the other way round is a chord on every step of one.

Nothing is written into the pattern. The pattern keeps the note you played, and the rack decides what is made of it — so you can change the rate, reorder the modules, or switch the whole thing off while it plays. The panel runs a middle C through the rack and shows you what comes out, so you can see what a setting does without pressing play.

Plugins

Per-channel racks for hosted VST and CLAP plugins, with a scanner that finds what is installed and remembers it between launches.

This build cannot load plugins yet — none of the three SDKs ships with it. What works today is everything around that: scanning, the rack, and the project format. A project made where plugins do load keeps every plugin, its parameters and its state when opened here, and gives them back intact — so nothing is lost by moving a project between machines.

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for what each format needs.

Browser and command palette

One place to find what you have — the samples in the project, every instrument and engine, the shipped presets, and the audio and project files on disk. Drag any of it onto a channel or onto the timeline.

Ctrl+P opens a command palette that finds any command by name, so nothing is hidden behind a key you would have had to be told about. Ctrl+/ lists every shortcut, and any of them can be rebound.

Take lanes

Record a part several times, then build the keeper out of the best moments of each. Every pass around the loop becomes its own lane; drag across a lane to choose it for that stretch. Punch in to repair one phrase without risking the rest of the take.

What you comp becomes ordinary audio clips on the arrangement, so you can trim, fade and move the result afterwards like anything else.

Song structure

Tempo and time-signature changes, markers and regions. Bar lines follow the meter map rather than a modulo, and Snap-to-Bar walks the same function the ruler draws.

Demo songs

Four finished, mastered pieces built around the engines that are hardest to find by poking at panels — load one from the File panel and press play.

FM Bells — six-operator FM, inharmonic bells over an FM bass, through a convolution reverb
Wavetable Motion — a wavetable lead whose morph is swept as it plays
Granular Clouds — granular pads through the shimmer and hall reverbs
Modelled Drums — one drum algorithm tuned three ways, with a dynamic EQ and bus compression

Each sets its own channel levels, pans and master chain, so they are demonstrations of what a finished mix sounds like rather than test tones.

Voice Mode — sing your song

Build a whole song a part at a time, without touching a note editor. Beatbox a groove, keep it, hum a bass line against what you just made, keep that, then a melody over both. Each part plays while you record the next, so you are playing along with your own song rather than into silence.

You make one decision — drums, bass, lead or chords — and it sets everything else: what to listen for, which octave the part belongs in, how long the notes are held, the instrument, and the channel. A part you have kept is never overwritten by a later take.

It will also work out what tempo you played at, so there is no click to hum along to, and keep a hummed line in key if you ask it to.

Voice to notes

Sing a line or beatbox a groove and get notes — live as you make them, or from a recorded take. The capture callback fills a lock-free ring and does nothing else; every FFT happens off the audio thread.

Pitch and time

A phase vocoder: pitch shift, formant shift and autotune. Formant shifting moves the resonances without moving the notes, which is the difference between transposing a voice and turning it into a chipmunk.

Project Check

Settings that are switched on and doing nothing, or silently cancelling something else — a send into a muted bus, an effect with its mix at zero, a soloed channel that is why nothing else is audible. It reports and never changes anything.

Workspaces

Panels dock, and panels sharing a region become tabs. Three workspaces lay them out for the task at hand; drag anything anywhere from there, and Ctrl+0 resets.

Sound Design	Mix

Themes

Ten themes. Each defines its own colour and its own geometry — corner radius, border weight, grab size — so they differ in shape, not just in paint. The theme reaches the piano roll, the notes and the custom widgets, not only the window chrome.

Stock	Cyberpunk

Synthwave	Vaporwave

Game Boy DMG	Matrix

Retro Terminal	Minimal

Frutiger Aero	Daylight

Features

Sound Generation

Oscillators: PolyBLEP-corrected Pulse (variable duty), Triangle, Sawtooth, Sine, Supersaw
Supersaw: 7 detuned sawtooth oscillators for massive, wide sounds
Noise: 15-bit LFSR (Linear Feedback Shift Register) with short/long modes
ADSR Envelopes: Full Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release control
Per-note sound types: Each note can use a different oscillator
Sound Preview: Notes play a brief preview when placed in the piano roll

Synth Presets (16 types!)

Lead: Bright cutting lead with detuned saws
Pad: Soft atmospheric pad with slow attack
Bass: Deep punchy bass (sub + harmonics)
Pluck: Short plucky sound with fast decay
Arp: Crisp arpeggio sound (pulse + fast envelope)
Organ: Classic organ with additive harmonics
Strings: String ensemble (detuned + slow attack)
Brass: Brassy stab (saw + square + harmonics)
Chip: Classic chiptune lead (NES-style 12.5% pulse)
Bell: Bell/chime sound (FM-like synthesis)

Synthwave Synths (6 types!)

SW Lead: Bright PWM lead with warmth - perfect for main melodies
SW Bass: Deep 808-style saw bass - massive low end
SW Pad: Warm lush evolving pad - atmospheric backgrounds
SW Arp: Crisp sequence/arp sound - rapid passages
SW Chord: Polyphonic stab for chords - punchy chord hits
SW FM: Classic DX7-style FM brass - metallic and bright

Drum Kit (26 sounds!)

Kicks: Standard, 808, Hard, Soft
Snares: Standard, 808, Rimshot, Clap
Hi-Hats: Closed, Open, Pedal
Toms: High, Mid, Low
Cymbals: Crash, Ride
Percussion: Cowbell, Clave, Conga, Maracas, Tambourine
Reggaeton: Guira, Bongo, Timbale, Dembow 808, Dembow Snare

Reggaeton Instruments (7 sounds!) - Research-based authentic synthesis

Reggaeton Bass: Deep 808-style bass with lo-fi character and pitch sweep
Latin Brass: Punchy brass stab with odd harmonics for authentic section feel
Guira: High-frequency metallic scrape (essential dembow "tsss-tsss")
Bongo: Membrane resonance with inharmonic overtones and hand slap
Timbale: Square-wave based with fast decay and metallic ring
Dembow 808: Lo-fi unpitched kick with fast pitch sweep (12-bit style)
Dembow Snare: Tight clap-like snare with 1-3kHz emphasis (no tail)

Visual Themes (10 themes)

Each theme defines its own colour and its own geometry - corner radius, border weight, grab size - so they differ in shape, not only in paint.

Stock: Clean dark theme (default)
Cyberpunk: Neon yellow, hot pink, electric blue with data streams and glitch effects
Synthwave: 80s retro with neon sunset, perspective grid, and color-cycling chasers
Matrix: Green on black with falling code animation and morphing characters
Frutiger Aero: Glossy Web 2.0 aesthetic with floating bubbles, clouds, and glass reflections
Minimal: Clean flat design with red accent, subtle geometric animations
Vaporwave: Pink/cyan retro-futurism with striped sunset, perspective grid, floating shapes
Retro Terminal: Authentic CRT simulation with scanlines, phosphor glow, screen curvature, and flicker
Game Boy DMG: The handheld's real four-shade green, with a dot-matrix grid
Daylight: A light theme, for working in a bright room
High-DPI scaling: All themes scale properly for 1440p, 4K, and ultrawide monitors

Sample Tracks (7 genres!)

Pre-made track templates to get you started:

Synthwave: Driving 80s beat at 118 BPM
Techno: Minimal techno groove at 130 BPM
Chiptune: NES-style 8-bit at 140 BPM
Hip Hop: Classic boom bap at 90 BPM
Trap: Dark trap beat at 140 BPM
House: Four-on-the-floor at 125 BPM
Reggaeton: Dembow beats (Perreo 95 BPM, Gasolina 100 BPM, Noche 90 BPM)

Editing

Piano Roll Editor: Visual note editing with zoom and scroll
Three edit modes: Draw, Select, Erase (hotkeys: D, S, E)
Box selection: Click and drag to select multiple notes
Multi-note drag: Select multiple notes and drag them together
Dynamic timeline: Grid automatically extends as you add notes
Paste preview: Ghost notes follow mouse for precise placement at any octave
Zoom controls: X/Y zoom sliders + Ctrl+Shift+Wheel for vertical zoom
Full undo/redo: 50 levels of history (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y)

Sound Palette

Expandable categories: Collapsible sections for Oscillators, Synths, Chords, Drums, and Reggaeton
Chord presets: 45 chords across 8 genres (Pop, Jazz, Rock, EDM, Hip Hop, Reggaeton, Synthwave, Chiptune)
Drum categories: Kicks, Snares, Hi-Hats, Toms, Cymbals, Percussion, Reggaeton
Duration variants: Each drum has Short (0.5x), Normal (1x), and Long (2x) options
Click to select: Choose a sound or chord, then click on piano roll to place

File Operations

Project save/load: Native .ctp format preserves all notes and settings
WAV export: Render your music to high-quality audio files
MP3 export: Render to MP3 (requires LAME or FFmpeg in PATH)
Windows file dialogs: Native save/open dialogs

Per-Note Effects (Tracker-style!)

Vibrato: Pitch wobble with adjustable depth and speed
Arpeggio: Classic tracker 0xy effect - cycles through base note + semitone offsets
- Presets: Major (4,7), Minor (3,7), Octave (12,0)
Portamento/Slide: Smooth pitch transitions between notes

Groove & Feel

Swing: Shift off-beat notes for groove (0-100%, 8th/16th/32nd grid)
Humanize: Random timing and velocity variation for natural feel

Tools Panel (9 Production Tools!)

Drum Pattern Generator: 6 genre presets (Synthwave, Outrun, Darksynth, Italo Disco, Techno, Retrowave)
Arpeggiator: Convert chords to arpeggiated patterns (Up, Down, Up-Down, Random)
Bass Pattern Generator: 4 styles (Octave Pulse, Root+Fifth, Walking, Arp)
Scale Lock + Highlighting: 7 scales with piano roll highlighting and snap-to-scale
Velocity Curve Painter: 4 curve types (Linear, Exponential, Logarithmic, S-Curve)
Fill Generator: 4 fill styles (Snare Roll, Tom Cascade, Cymbal Crash, Build-Up)
Pattern Variation: Randomize timing, velocity, or pitch for variations
Quick Layer: Layer sounds with octave offset and detuning
Humanize Selected: Add timing and velocity variation for natural feel
Hi-Hat Roll Generator: Quick fills and rolls with density and velocity control

Pattern Arrangement

Timeline view: Arrange multiple patterns into a full song
Drag & drop: Move clips between channels and positions
Visual editing: Double-click to add, right-click to delete
Context menu: Right-click empty space to add any pattern
Song length control: Set total song duration

Effects (per channel)

Bitcrusher
Distortion
Filter
Delay
Chorus
Phaser
Tremolo
Ring Modulator
Reverb (Schroeder-style algorithmic)
- 8 parallel comb filters + 4 series allpass filters
- Room Size, Damping, Mix controls
- Presets: Small Room, Hall, Cathedral, Plate
Sidechain Compression: Classic EDM pumping effect
- Duck any channel based on another (e.g., duck bass when kick plays)
- Presets: Subtle, Normal, Heavy, Pumping

Sound Chip Targets

Chip	System	Channels
2A03	NES	2 pulse, 1 triangle, 1 noise, 1 DPCM
LR35902	Game Boy	2 pulse, 1 wave, 1 noise
SID	Commodore 64	3 voices with multiple waveforms
AY-3-8910	Various	3 square wave channels

Prerequisites

Compiler: MSVC 2019+, GCC 10+, or Clang 12+ with C++20 support
CMake: 3.20 or higher
OpenGL: 3.3+ compatible GPU

Required Libraries

miniaudio - Download miniaudio.h from miniaud.io
- Place in vendor/miniaudio/miniaudio.h
Dear ImGui - Clone from github.com/ocornut/imgui
- Copy these files to vendor/imgui/:
  - imgui.h, imgui.cpp
  - imgui_internal.h
  - imgui_draw.cpp, imgui_tables.cpp, imgui_widgets.cpp
  - imgui_demo.cpp
  - backends/imgui_impl_opengl3.h, backends/imgui_impl_opengl3.cpp
  - backends/imgui_impl_win32.h, backends/imgui_impl_win32.cpp

System Requirements

For End Users (Running the .exe)

Windows 10/11 (64-bit)
OpenGL 3.3+ compatible GPU
No VC++ Redistributable required - The executable is statically linked and fully standalone

Just download and run ChiptuneTracker.exe - no installation needed!

Optional

LAME or FFmpeg in PATH for MP3 export

Building

Windows (Visual Studio)

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64
cmake --build . --config Release

Windows (MinGW)

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -G "MinGW Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build .

Linux

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make -j$(nproc)

Quick Rebuild (when build directory exists)

For Windows with Visual Studio, from the project root:

cmake --build build --config Release

Output: build/bin/Release/ChiptuneTracker.exe

Note: If the app is running, close it first or the build will fail with a file lock error.

Usage

Run the executable from build/bin/:

./ChiptuneTracker

Quick Start

Select a sound from the Sound Palette (automatically enters Draw mode)
Click on the piano roll to place notes
Press Play to hear your music
Add drums for rhythm - they auto-adjust duration to BPM!
Save your project with the Save button or Ctrl+S
Export to WAV when you're happy with your creation

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
`D`	Draw mode
`S`	Select mode
`E`	Erase mode
`Ctrl+A`	Select all notes
`Ctrl+C`	Copy selected
`Ctrl+V`	Paste (shows preview - click to place)
`Ctrl+X`	Cut selected
`Ctrl+Z`	Undo
`Ctrl+Y`	Redo
`Delete`	Delete selected
`Escape`	Deselect / Cancel paste preview

Paste Preview Feature

When you press Ctrl+V, ghost notes appear following your mouse. This lets you:

Place notes at any position on the timeline
Transpose copied notes to different octaves
Click to confirm placement, Escape to cancel

What's new

v3.8.0 "Check" — a Project Check panel that finds settings switched on and doing nothing, and a genre focus that now covers the instrument engines.

v3.7.0 "Instruments" — five configurable engines (wavetable, six-operator FM, multisample sampler, granular, modelled drums), a modulation matrix, audio clips on the timeline, tempo and time-signature changes, and voice-to-notes.

Full history in CHANGELOG.md, and every release is on the releases page.

Roadmap

The full plan lives in docs/ROADMAP.md. The short version:

Done in 3.0

Instrument macros (volume, arpeggio, duty, pitch) with presets
Project format v2 - saves the mix, arrangement and every effect
Workspace layouts and a custom widget set
Headless test suite (1112 checks)
4-bit volume quantisation
Ten visual themes, applied to the editor as well as the chrome

Next

Chip modes as a real authoring constraint — fixed channel roles, pitch and volume quantised to the actual registers while you compose, so what you hear is what the hardware could do
PAL: the noise period table, the frame counter and the pitch scaling all differ from NTSC
Groove patterns (per-row speed lists) alongside the existing swing
MIDI import — vendor/midifile is already linked, and can read
A chord progression generator (the Euclidean one it would sit beside already exists)
FLAC export, and WAV at more than 16 bits

Done since this list was written — it had gone stale, and several of these had been shipped for a while:

Authentic noise: 15-bit LFSR, both taps, all 16 NES noise periods
Legato / tie notes and true tone portamento
Euclidean rhythm generator
Sample import, with three playback paths (sampler zones, timeline audio clips, granular)
Autosave and crash recovery

Not planned, and why — see docs/ROADMAP.md for the detail:

VGM export needs a register-level layer this program does not have, and the file would not sound like your project. (Also: the VGM format has no SID, in any version.)
NSF export needs a 6502 driver. FamiTracker ships ~5,800 lines of hand written assembly for the base chip alone.
A VST build is blocked on a licensing decision before the first line of code.

Documentation

Document	What is in it
CHANGELOG.md	Every release, what changed and what was fixed
docs/ROADMAP.md	What is planned next
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md	How it is built - audio threading, antialiasing, source layout
docs/TEST_PLAN.md	The three test layers, and an honest list of what is not covered
docs/ChiptuneTracker_Guide.html	The full in-app guide

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please:

Fork the repository
Create a feature branch
Submit a pull request

License

MIT License - See LICENSE file for details.

Acknowledgments

miniaudio - Excellent single-header audio library
Dear ImGui - Bloat-free immediate mode GUI
The demoscene community for keeping chiptune alive

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
.claude		.claude
assets		assets
docs		docs
src		src
tests		tests
tools		tools
vendor		vendor
.gitignore		.gitignore
CHANGELOG.md		CHANGELOG.md
CMakeLists.txt		CMakeLists.txt
README.md		README.md

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