Frequently Asked Questions

What is Chipamp?

Chipamp is a collection of Winamp plugins for playing chiptunes and tracker formats commonly used by video game consoles and older computers, specifically in games. It is designed to make finding the right plugin for the right format (and then installing it) far easier, bringing chiptunes to the masses. Even advanced users can save time keeping up with the latest releases of each plugin and reconciling incompatibilites between plugins by simply installing the latest Chipamp instead. Chipamp is one-stop shopping for Winamp chiptune plugins: Winamp + Chipamp = Nostalgia.

Why is it called 'Chipamp'?

Because it's a bundle of chiptune plugins for Winamp. Also, if you put in an 'm' before the first 'p', it becomes 'Chimpamp', and everybody loves chimps.

Who created Chipamp?

As Chipamp is nothing more (or less) than a bundle of existing plugins, many different people contribute to its existence; see the credits page for a complete listing. David W. Lloyd, aka djpretzel of www.ocremix.org, came up with the idea of combining many chiptune-related plugins into a single installer that also handled file associations and was easy for the average user to install, but the much, much, much harder work was coding the plugins in the first place.

Can I run Chipamp without Winamp?

No - since Chipamp is a collection of Winamp plugins, it requires Winamp, or a program that can execute Winamp plugins, to function.

What if I'm not running Windows?

Since Winamp is only for Windows, Chipamp isn't much good for Linux and Mac folk. Don't despair, however; there's alternatives to Chipamp on our links page that include options for most common operating systems.

OK, I installed Chipamp - where can I get some tunes?

See our links to chiptune archives for some great places to start.

Are chiptunes from commercial games... legal?

Technically, many chiptunes contain material that is essentially "extracted" from commercial games. There are no known instances of copyright owners (Nintendo, Sega, etc.) requesting that distribution of chiptunes cease, unlike the situation with emulators and ROMs, which are fully playable games, not just music, and have prompted legal action. While no known legal precedent has been set requesting the removal of chiptunes, like fan fiction, fan art, and a lot of other freely available material on the Internet, they fall into a gray(ish) territory.

Chipamp & OverClocked ReMix support the game music industry and strongly recommend purchasing official game soundtracks whenever they are available.

Chipamp doesn't work! There's an error! What should I do?!!

Don't panic. The most common problem associated with Chipamp is conflicts with other Winamp plugins, so one of the first things you might try is removing any plugins you're not using; Chipamp is tested on clean installs of Winamp to ensure that the plugins included work together, but other plugins can still cause problems. If you determine that a given plugin is incompatible with Chipamp, or have other questions about Chipamp errors, please let us know. If you experience errors/have questions regarding the functionality of a specific plugin, please contact that plugin's author, listed on the credits.

What license is Chipamp released under?

Chipamp is nothing more (or less) than a "fancy" repackaging of existing software; the individual plugins that comprise Chipamp are each released under their own individual license, usually the GPL or LGPL.

How is Chipamp created?

Chipamp is an NSIS installer and is maintained and compiled in Eclipse using the EclipseNSIS plugin. Eclipse rocks.