What this is
whatchiptune finds the original tune behind chip music you hear somewhere: in a video, on an old tape, in a song that samples it, or in a file with no name. Record a few seconds or upload a clip.
Why this exists
This began with a Commodore 64: three voices, a few kilobytes of code, and tunes that stay in your head for thirty years. The same goes for the NES, the Amiga, the Game Boy and the rest — music written under limits so tight that every note had to earn its place.
The trouble starts with old recordings. A tape from a friend, a video someone put online, a track built on top of a game tune: the chip music is right there under the vocals, and nothing will tell you which tune it is. The everyday music-recognition apps listen for commercial releases, not for a SID tune from a 1988 game. Asking in a forum sometimes works, and sometimes the thread goes quiet.
So this site listens for the tune itself. It compares your recording against fingerprints of hundreds of thousands of tunes kept alive by the people who preserve this music, and usually answers in a few seconds, with a link to where you can hear the original.
How it works
Every tune in the collections has been played back once and turned into a fingerprint: a list of numbers describing where the strongest notes and sounds fall in time. Your recording gets a fingerprint the same way, and the search looks for tunes whose fingerprints line up with it, even with vocals, guitars or noise on top.
- confirmed: the tune is clearly heard in several separate parts of your recording.
- weak: some evidence and a clear lead over other tunes, but not enough to be sure. Listen before trusting it.
- unconfirmed: best guesses only.
What is searched
C64 · NES · Sega · Amiga · SNES · Game Boy · Atari 8-bit · Spectrum · PC trackers
If a tune isn't in these collections, it can't be found yet. A chip part that is very quiet in the mix may also be missed. Recordings played back faster or slower than the original aren't searched on this site.
What is in the index
418,204 tunes, fingerprinted from the collections below and counted from the indexes this site is searching right now. These are tunes that can actually be found: a file often declares more pieces than it really holds, and those extras play as silence, leave no fingerprint and are not counted here.
| C64 | 85,236 tunes |
|---|---|
| NES | 137,474 tunes |
| Sega | 14,304 tunes |
| Amiga | 85,919 tunes |
| SNES | 34,690 tunes |
| Game Boy | 16,108 tunes |
| Atari 8-bit | 3,562 tunes |
| Spectrum | 2,170 tunes |
| PC trackers | 38,741 tunes |
A tune here is one piece of music: a single file often holds dozens, one per level or screen, and each is fingerprinted on its own.
What this costs
A search reads up to 20 million fingerprint entries per collection, so the site runs on a dedicated machine with fast disks and enough memory to keep about 67 GB of fingerprints close at hand. That machine, the backups of the indexes and the domain all cost money every month, and nothing here is paid for by ads or by selling what you search for.
Donations are not set up yet: this button is a placeholder while I decide where to put it.
Privacy
This site stores no music and plays none. When your browser can, the fingerprint is computed on your device and only that is sent; the audio never leaves it. Otherwise the clip is uploaded, used for the search and then dropped: clips and recordings are never kept. Results are held for a day so the results page can show them, then forgotten.
Two things are kept, and nothing else: the list of tunes it confirmed, with the time and the tune, and how many searches ran each day. Both are about the music, not about you. There are no addresses, no accounts, no cookies and no tracking, so there is nothing to tie a search to a person.
Credits
The fingerprints were made from the collections that preserve this music:
- the High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC), for C64 music
- patpend.net's NSF and SPC collections
- The NES Project NSF archive and MrNorbert's NSF collection, both preserved on archive.org
- Project2612, for Mega Drive/Genesis, and SMS Power!, for Master System and Game Gear VGM music
- Modland, for Amiga modules, SNES, Game Boy, Atari 8-bit and ZX Spectrum/Amstrad music
Results link out to places where the music can be heard, such as DeepSID and YouTube.