Digging up 40 years of tracker/chiptune formats (audio.1.sg)

For the past few years I’ve been doing something between digital archaeology and forensic anthropology, but for music formats. The hundreds of weird, half‑documented, tracker, chiptune, console, and game‑audio formats that accumulated from the 1980s through the 2000s.

Most of them were never documented. Many are awkward, many feature-incomplete. Many were one-off for, say, Amiga or Atari ST games, and at best only a couple players like UADE or NostalgicPlayer load them.

Some are just raw sound-chip register logs.

And yet they’re culturally important: they’re the DNA of the demoscene, early PC gaming, and entire ecosystems of trackers.

I wrote audio.1.sg for Detect-it-Easy that recognises files in those formats. That's over 400 retro/exotic audio with signature matching, header validation, pointer sanity checks, pattern parsing + sanity checks, chip-log decoding, format-specific heuristics. Not every one has everything (still some with just an extension detection!), but it's an ongoing project.

Some detections just had to be pretty shaky because of the simplicity of their design. ¯\(。⊿°)/¯

I've collected the attributions for each format, so it's easy to know who made what, and maybe easier to search in case of generic naming.

Try it on modland.com or your fav tracker/Speccy/Amiga/AtariST/MSX music collection, see what comes up!