Chipsound

What is Chipsound?

A lightweight in-browser player for the tracker music formats that powered the demoscene, the Amiga, and a generation of PC games (.mod, .s3m, .xm, .it). Open a URL or drop a module on the page and it plays. No install, no upload, no account. Everything runs client-side, every color is CSS, every visualization is real-time.

Under the hood: Chipsound doesn't decode anything itself. libopenmpt (compiled to WebAssembly via Chiptune.js) does the audio, and this project reads the playback state — channel volumes, current order/row, instrument data — to draw the pattern view, the off-thread per-channel visualizations, the mute/solo overlays, and the subsong picker. Add to that the themes, shareable ?load=<url> links, keyboard shortcuts, and the performance work to keep everything running without glitching the audio.

Who is it for?

• Demoscene fans revisiting Future Crew, Purple Motion, Skaven, Necros, and the rest of the crew
• Retro gamers who remember when MS-DOS games shipped a .s3m soundtrack on the install disk
• Tracker music collectors with a folder of .mod files that just need to play in one tab
• Mobile listeners who want a tracker player that doesn't need an app store
• Developers looking for a zero-dependency, themeable, embeddable player they can host themselves

   

_{No module handy? Jump into a sample track: 2nd_pm.s3m · inside_out.s3m · MINIMUM.S3M}

Why Chipsound?

	Chipsound	Other Players
Install	None — open the URL	Download + install, often Windows-only
Formats	MOD, S3M, XM, IT	Often format-specific
Mobile	Touch + responsive	Rarely
Themes	Fully themeable via CSS	Usually fixed
Visualizations	Real-time, per-channel	Limited or none
Privacy	All client-side	Varies
Cost	Free	Free or paid
Open-source	MIT	Mixed

Other things worth mentioning:

• Plays anything libopenmpt can decode (MOD, S3M, XM, IT and their variants)
• Drag a module onto the page and it auto-plays
• Press T to cycle themes, V to cycle visualizations
• Click a channel header to mute it; Ctrl-click to solo
• Subsong picker for modules that ship multiple subsongs
• ? opens the full keyboard shortcut list

Quick start

Try it now: chipsound.com/player.html to jump straight to the player.

Drop a .mod, .s3m, .xm, or .it file on the page and it plays. Tens of thousands of free tracker modules are at The Mod Archive.

Run it locally

The app is pure static HTML/CSS/JS in src/. Browsers require AudioWorklets to be served over HTTP from localhost (not file://), so pick any static server:

# Python 3
cd src && python -m http.server 8765

# Node + npx
npx http-server src -p 8765 -c-1

# Docker + Caddy
docker build -t chipsound . && docker run --rm -p 8765:80 chipsound

Then open http://localhost:8765/.

Want to open it from another device (phone, tablet, second computer)? You'll need HTTPS, put the server behind a reverse proxy or a tunnel.

Python's server caches aggressively. Hard-reload with Ctrl + Shift + R, or use npx http-server -c-1 which sets Cache-Control: no-store.

Themes & visualizations are auto-discovered from directory listings. On startup the player fetches ./css/themes/ and ./js/visualizations/ and parses the HTML index to find all *.css / *.js files. The three servers above all enable directory listings by default. If you deploy behind a static host that disables them (some CDNs, GitHub Pages with a hand-rolled config, certain nginx setups), the picker will fall back to a single built-in theme + visualization. Either enable directory listing for those two folders, or fork in a static manifest.

Load a module by URL

The player accepts a ?load=<url> query parameter pointing to any HTTP(S) URL:

https://chipsound.com/player.html?load=./tracks/awesome.s3m
https://chipsound.com/player.html?load=https://example.com/cool.mod
https://chipsound.com/player.html?load=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.modarchive.org%2Fdownloads.php%3Fmoduleid%3D212083

Loading from The Mod Archive. Modarchive's downloads.php endpoint sends the right CORS headers and works directly, but the ? inside the inner URL must be percent-encoded (%3F), otherwise the outer query parser splits the URL in two:

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	Action
Space / P	Play / Pause
S	Stop
L	Open file…
← / →	Previous / next order
E	Toggle effects (visualizations on/off)
V / Shift + V	Cycle visualization forward / backward
I	Toggle samples panel
T / Shift + T	Cycle theme forward / backward
?	Show this help
Esc	Close this help
Click header	Toggle channel mute
Ctrl + Click header	Solo channel (mute others)
Click grip icon in header	Toggle ALL channels
Drop file	Load and auto-play

License

MIT-licensed — free to use, modify, fork, embed, and redistribute. Copyright © 2026 Gamosoft.

The MIT license covers first-party code only. Bundled third-party components keep their own licenses:

• libopenmpt — BSD-3-Clause. See docs/third-party/libopenmpt-LICENSE.txt.
• Chiptune.js — MIT. See docs/third-party/chiptune-js-LICENSE.txt.
• Font Awesome Free 6.5.1 — Icons CC BY 4.0, fonts SIL OFL 1.1, code MIT. See docs/third-party/font-awesome-LICENSE.txt.

Full notice summary in NOTICE.

Credits

Chipsound is a UI shell on top of other open-source work:

• libopenmpt — the OpenMPT team's reference decoder, compiled to WebAssembly.
• Chiptune.js — the WebAudio wrapper around libopenmpt by DrSnuggles (and originally chiptune2.js by deskjet).
• Font Awesome — the icon set used throughout the UI.