Renata — Chiptune Studio

Meet Renata

Renata is a chiptune studio for Windows. You write original music on real chip voices — the YM2149 from the Atari ST, the C64's SID, the NES and the Game Boy — and export it in the formats those machines actually used.

What it does

- Write.  A DAW built around chip voices rather than bolted onto them — arrangement and session views, a piano roll, 16 instruments of which 11 are chip voices, 9 effects, mixer routing and recording.

- Design sounds. Oscillators, filters, envelopes and macros on the chips themselves. Export a sound as a MIDI, WAV, FLAC, MP3  or keep it as a preset.

- Open and play almost anything. 230+ input formats: the chip formats natively, trackers through libxmp, and the exotic Amiga material through UADE — 175 players' worth of things almost nothing else opens.

- Convert and re-voice. Turn a tune into MIDI, pull it apart into separate channels, or play it back through a completely different chip.

- Export seven chip formats — `.ym`, `.vgm`, `.mod`, `.sid`, `.nsf`, `.gbs` and `.ay` — that play in a standard emulator. MIDI, WAV and MP3 as well.

- Nine themes, and over 2,400 automated tests behind it.

The composer is deterministic, not AI

The Song Generator is a rule-based composer with statistical tables fitted on public archives of real chiptunes. No neural model composes anything. The same seed and the same settings give you the same song every time, and you can open any part of it up and change it.

Being straight about where machine learning does appear: the MP3-to-MIDI importer uses a real model, and so does the sample classifier. Neither goes near the composer, or the play and convert path, which is deterministic register reading.

What you make is yours

Everything you compose in the Generator or the Studio is original work, free of anyone else's copyright, and yours to release, sell or put in a game.

One honest caveat, because I'd rather say it here than have you find out later: that covers what you create. It does not cover a tune you convert from someone else's file. A converted or re-voiced track is a derivative work, and it isn't yours to sell. The conversion tools are for listening, learning and sound design.

Before you buy

Windows only today. Mac and Linux are planned.

The chips are faithful software emulations, not hardware.

It runs entirely on your own machine and sends nothing anywhere. No account, no cloud, no telemetry, no licence key, and no update ping. 

One-time price. No subscription. Every future update is included.

Hear it first

I wrote a 75 free tracks with Renata, no email required: https://renatachiptune.itch.io/the-hundred

Built over nine months of evenings and weekends by one person. More free tracks and information is all at https://renatachiptune.com