Play online: Chip Player JS. Feature requests? Create an issue.
- Support popular game console formats and tracker formats (not exhaustive)
- Advanced sound control (channel volume, panning, etc.) like NotSoFatso's stereo and bandlimiting controls
- Built-in online music library like Chipmachine
- Simple music management (at least the ability to save favorites) like Winamp/Spotify
- High-quality MIDI playback with JS wavetable synthesis
- Bonus: user-selectable soundbanks
- Track sequencer with player controls and shuffle mode
- Media key support in Chrome
- High performance
- Time-to-audio under 500 ms (i.e. https://mmontag.github.io/chip-player-js/?play=ModArchives/aryx.s3m)
- Instant search results
- CPU usage under 25% in most circumstances
This project was bootstrapped with Create React App.
The player engines come from C/C++ libraries such as game-music-emu and libxmp, compiled to JS with Emscripten. Where possible, these projects are incorporated using git subtree.
The C/C++ code is compiled by scripts/build-chip-core.js. This file also defines the list of exports that will be available to the JavaScript program. Components that go into this build are as follows:
- Manually selected cpp sources from game-music-emu.
- For libraries with their own build system like LibXMP and Fluidlite (detailed below):
- Build a static library with Emscripten (i.e. using emconfigure, emmake)
- Link the static library in build-chip-core.js
- tinyplayer.c: a super light MIDI file reader/player
- showcqtbar.c: a modified FFMPEG plugin providing lovely constant Q spectrum analysis for the visualizer.
The music catalog is created by scripts/build-catalog.js. This script looks for a ./catalog folder to build a music index. This location is untracked, so put a symlink here that points to your local music archive. TODO: Document the corresponding public location (CATALOG_PREFIX).
Prerequisites: yarn, cmake, emsdk.
- Clone the repository.
- Run
yarn install.
In building the subprojects, we ultimately invoke emmake make instead of make to yield an object file that Emscripten can link to in the final build.
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Install the Emscripten SDK (emsdk).
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The build script in package.json looks for the emsdk in
~/src/emsdk. Modify this line to match your emsdk install location if necessary:"build-chip-core": "source ~/src/emsdk/emsdk_env.sh; node scripts/build-chip-core.js",
The project is currently set up to deploy to Github Pages. The deploy and deploy-lite NPM scripts invoke the gh-pages NPM module.
If you wish to deploy to your own Github Pages account, change the "homepage" field in package.json.
User account management is provided through Firebase Cloud Firestore. You must obtain your own Google Firebase credentials and update src/config/firebaseConfig.js with these credentials. This file is not tracked. Without these credentials, Login/Favorites functionality won't work.
Our goal is to produce libxmp/libxmp-lite-stagedir/lib/libxmp-lite.a. Build libxmp (uses GNU make):
cd chip-player-js/libxmp/ # navigate to libxmp root
source ~/src/emsdk/emsdk_env.sh # load the emscripten environment variables
autoconf
emconfigure ./configure
emmake makeProceed to build libxmp-lite:
emmake make -f Makefile.lite # this will have some errors, but they can be ignored
cd libxmp-lite-stagedir/
autoconf
emconfigure ./configure --enable-static --disable-shared
emmake makeOur goal is to produce fluidlite/build/libfluidlite.a. Build fluidlite (uses Cmake):
cd chip-player-js/fluidlite/ # navigate to fluidlite root
source ~/src/emsdk/emsdk_env.sh # load the emscripten environment variables
mkdir build # create a build folder for Cmake output
cd build
emcmake cmake -DDISABLE_SF3=1 .. # Cmake will generate a Makefile by default
# Problems here? Try deleting CMake cache files
emmake make fluidlite-staticOur goal is to produce psflib/libpsflib.a and lazyusf2/liblazyusf.a. These use a special Emscripten.Makefile (loosely based on Jeurgen Wothke's webn64 .bat script).
Build psflib:
cd chip-player-js/psflib/
source ~/src/emsdk/emsdk_env.sh # load the emscripten environment variables
emmake make -f Emscripten.Makefile libpsflib.aBuild liblazyusf:
cd ../lazyusf2/
emmake make -f Emscripten.Makefile liblazyusf.aOur goal is to produce libvgm/build/bin/libvgm-emu.a, libvgm/build/bin/libvgm-player.a, and libvgm/build/bin/libvgm-util.a.
cd chip-player-js/libvgm/
source ~/src/emsdk/emsdk_env.sh # load the emscripten environment variables
mkdir build # create a build folder for Cmake output
cd build
emcmake cmake ..
emmake makeTo reconfigure the build-enabled sound chips with CMake UI, run emcmake ccmake .. from the build folder. Make desired changes to build flags, then c to configure and g to generate new Makefile. Then run emmake make. Optionally, commit the same changes back to CMakeLists.txt in libvgm parent folder.
Once these are in place we can build the parent project. Our goal is to produce public/chip-core.wasm.
cd chip-player-js/
yarn run build-chip-coreThis will use object files created in the previous steps and link them into chip-core.wasm. If you change some C/C++ component of the subprojects, you'll need to redo this process. Once we have chip-core.wasm, we can proceed to develop JavaScript interactively on localhost:
yarn startBuild the entire project:
yarn buildOr deploy to Github Pages:
yarn deployDeploy to Github Pages without rebuilding chip-core.wasm:
yarn deploy-litehttp://sasq64.github.io/chipmachine/
Chipmachine is a multiplatform player supporting an enormous number of formats. Downloads music from an impressive variety of external sources. Most of these come from HTTP sources without CORS headers, not feasible for direct playback.
Muki, by Tomás Pollak, is a polished JS player pulling together Timidity (MIDI), Munt (MT-32), libopenmpt (instead of libxmp), game-music-emu, Wildmidi, Adplug, Adlmidi (OPL3), mdxmini, and sc68. The music is a collection of PC game music.
https://github.com/wothke?tab=repositories
Jeurgen Wothke's collection of chipmusic projects ported to the web with Emscripten. He's beaten me to it, but with a rudimentary player and no built-in music collection. http://www.wothke.ch/blaster
http://gamemusic.multimedia.cx/about
SaltyGME is a GME-based web player targeting Google Chrome NaCl. (Deprecated)
https://github.com/multimediamike/cirrusretro-players
Cirrusretro is an updated version of SaltyGME compiled with Emscripten. Self-hosted file archive.
https://www.bannister.org/software/ao.htm
Audio Overload is a multiplatform player supporting 33 formats.
One of the first examples of GME compiled with Emscripten. Music collection is a self-hosted mirror of Famicompo entries.
https://github.com/osmose/moseamp
MoseAmp is a multiplatform player built with Electron. Some nice game console icons: https://www.deviantart.com/jaffacakelover/art/Pixel-Gaming-Machine-Icons-413704203
The best modern option for playing MIDI is probably using a well-designed GM SoundFont bank with a good SoundFont 2.01 implementation like FluidSynth.
- SF2 Overview: https://schristiancollins.wordpress.com/2016/03/02/using-soundfonts-in-2016/
- Timidity compiled by Emscripten: https://bitmidi.com/
- MIDI file library: https://github.com/craigsapp/midifile
- FluidSynth Lite, supports SF3: https://github.com/divideconcept/FluidLite
- Compress SF2 to SF3: https://github.com/cognitone/sf2convert
Diverse and usable GM SoundFonts.
- GeneralUser SF2 sound bank: http://schristiancollins.com/generaluser.php
- Many excellent piano SoundFonts: https://sites.google.com/site/soundfonts4u
- The Ultimate Megadrive SoundFont: https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/24
- NTONYX SoundFont: http://ntonyx.com/sf_f.htm
- SoundFonts at MuseScore: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/soundfonts-and-sfz-files#list
- SoundFonts at Woolyss: https://woolyss.com/chipmusic-soundfonts.php
- MIDI
- Lakh MIDI Dataset: Colin Raffel's thesis work on MIDI alignment. About 20,000 cleaned popular music MIDI files.
- Colin Raffel. "Learning-Based Methods for Comparing Sequences, with Applications to Audio-to-MIDI Alignment and Matching". PhD Thesis, 2016.
- Sound Canvas MIDI Collection: https://archive.org/details/sound_canvas_midi_collection
- Piano E-Competition MIDI: http://www.piano-e-competition.com/midiinstructions.asp
- Lakh MIDI Dataset: Colin Raffel's thesis work on MIDI alignment. About 20,000 cleaned popular music MIDI files.
- Video Games
- VGM Rips: https://vgmrips.net • VGMRips full download packs
- VGMusic.com: https://www.vgmusic.com • VGMusic.com 2018 Archive
- Zophar's Domain: https://www.zophar.net/music
- Mirsoft World of Game MIDs/MODs: http://mirsoft.info • Mirsoft July 2021 Torrent
- The Mod Archive: https://modarchive.org
- OPL Archive: http://opl.wafflenet.com
- Modland: https://modland.com/pub/modules
- Famicompo NSF Competition: https://mini.famicompo.com/compo/top.html • Famicompo NSFE Archive
A word about licensing: chip-player-js represents the hard work of many individuals because it is built upon several open-source projects. Each of these projects carries their own license restrictions, and chip-player-js as a whole must adhere to the most restrictive licenses among these. Therefore, chip-player-js is generally licensed under GPLv3.
However, each subdirectory in this project may contain additional, more specific license info that pertains to files contained therein. For example, the code under src/ is written by me and is more permissively MIT licensed.