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S'OK, we're not inherently against using pre-made loops/breaks/fills, BUT... I take back every nice thing I've ever said about you.

The sound design possibilities of this thing are totally worth the $150, in my opinion. I'd be plunking that down even if I wasn't part of the beta/preset team, knowing what I do about how useful it is!

This looks awesome! I hope an expansion pack shows up for it in the future!

UPDATE: OK so I've finally finished the album art (I think). Let me know your opinions! I'll be updating the banner with similar stuff soon. just as soon as I've tied down suitable dimensions.

I'm actually going to have to disagree a bit with the notion some have that a better sample library won't do you any good unless your orchestration skills are better first. It's hard to practice that unless you actually have a sample library that has a lot of articulations and is capable of making something realistic. For example, you will never be able to create a truly realistic sounding, expressive violin melody without legato, portamento, marcato, etc. Players generally don't play with just one articulation (a simple sustain in most crap libraries) throughout a phrase and playing with the envelope usually doesn't produce as satisfying results. If you know this, but your library only has something like sustains and staccatos, you will likely avoid writing melodies that use shorter notes because you'll notice the staccatos are too short and sound unnatural in your phrase - you need a detache, marcato or some other sort of short sample with a longer decay/release instead. I've never understood the idea that lots of people have that you should start with something low-end and garbage and then move your way up when a smarter financial decision is to buy something really good and improve yourself so that when you are good enough, you won't need to spend any more money.

Sounds quite nice after a frustrating night.

Deconstructing old sequenced music and listening to the separate components is one of the most interesting things you can do, and an extremly efficient learning tool. Not just for learning how chiptunes were made, but just growing and becoming a better musician in general. Elements that sound very simple and detached on their own but fuse to become more than the sum of their parts, or just knowing when to kill your darlings (like getting rid of the root note of a chord to save channel space, which the bass is already playing anyway) is not just a chiptune thing but also arrangement 101 and ultimately a means to getting a well balanced mix (since arrangement and mixing is largely intertwined). I feel as though it's a skillset that is becoming more and more rare in today's production climate. Top-tier arrangers do this kind of stuff all the time even when they're not beholden to technical limitations. I think it's worthwhile for any musician, no matter what genre, to dabble around with chiptunes. And by that I mean specifically working with getting the most out of these constraints and not just resorting to "bleeps and bloops" which is the usual reductive thinking applied to this type of music. It's such a great way of training yourself in these elements and really start thinking actively about them overall. I have provided 2 "stem" archives for some Genesis soundtracks I find technically interesting, by just isolating the channels and rendering them into .wavs so you can load them all up in a DAW and thoroughly analyze what's going on in them. You can do this yourself using the [url=http://www.smspower.org/Music/InVgm]in_vgm plugin for Winamp with anything from [url=http://project2612.org/]Project2612 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66640537/Thunder%20Force%20IV%20Stems.zip Notice how the rhythm guitar here is split up into 2 layers with different sounds. One for mids and one for treble. Then these are "dubbed" once again and panned (as well as detuned slightly for a chorus effect), taking up 4 channels in total to create this huge wall of guitars that is pretty much equivalent of a fully fledged studio metal production. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66640537/Devilish%20Intro%20Stems.zip I really like how the simple PSG squares synergize with the FM bells here to create a very vibrant sound. You can also hear how the "choirs" are really the same kind of synth string section you often hear on the system, but it just has this fast upwards pitch bend in the attack which adds this kind of formant quality to it that we usually associate with voices.