Chris's journey of making the intro music is used as a backdrop to

explore how to make music in Milkytracker,a FOSS program for making tracker music, as well as to explore a bitof sound theory, what chiptunes and tracker music are, and even a bitof exploring what it's like to learn something new even when youaren't necessarily very good yet.

Links:

• Milkytracker

• sfxr

• drpetter's sound theory and synthesis page

• musagi and the

  musagi tutorial

• The Impulse Project

• The Commodore 64

  computer and its famous SID chip

• c64.com, an archive of Commodore 64 games/programs

  (pretty much all proprietary though).
  Many of these have interesting cracked demos that are as interesting as
  the programs themselves.

• Monty on the Run

  with its music by the famous Commodore 64 composer,
  Rob Hubbard

  • Listen to the Monty on the Run main theme

  • Rob Hubbard's Music: Disassembled, Commented and Explained

  • Not shown in the podcast but you really also ought to listen to the

    Commando theme for the Commodore 64

• Moments by Mr. Lou (mp3)

  and the original XM file (zipped)
  Really worth listening to the XM in Milkytracker so you can see
  how things work.

• More cool music on the bottom of

  Milkytracker's downloads page
  and especially on The Mod Archive.

• The demoscene

• Chiptunes

• Music trackers

• Famitracker

  (Free software so why the heck is it Windows-only still?
  Someone finish porting it!)

• Milkytracker's documentation page

  has of course its own manual
  but also a number of interesting historical music tracking guides

• Brandon Walsh's milkytracker / chiptune tutorials

  (Content warning in that he does say an ablist slur somewhere in those videos.)

• Music theory stuff

  • Open Music Theory

  • 8-bit Music Theory

  • Learn music theory in half an hour

    (well, some of it)

• freesound, amazing commons of useful samples

  for your music composition needs

• I guess maybe you want to look at Chris's sound file sources (but probably not)

  (All CC BY-SA 3.0, like the show)

  • Conversations with a Computer

  • Dollhouse

  • Ecto House

  • the arpeggio example shown in the show

  • And yes, the FOSS and Crafts intro theme

Made it all the way to the end of the podcast and this blogpost?

I guess you really did stay awhile...