Review: chipsynth MD from Plogue

If you love creating music inspired by the chiptunes of yesteryear, then you might already know who Plogue is. Plogue is the developer of chipsounds, chipcrusher, and many more. Until the release of chipsynth PortaFM, an emulation of the YM2413 FM chip cores found in the Yamaha PSS series of synthesizers, they released chiptune plugins that were only sampled-based. With chipsynth MD, you have the power of the sound chip found inside of the SEGA Mega Drive, also known as Genesis, in your DAW and as a standalone application for Windows and macOS based systems.

Plogue kindly sent us a copy of chipsynth MD for us to review and check out. Thanks, guys!

A Bit-Accurate Experience

chipsynth MD weighs in at just only 32mb and works with every major DAW, including Pro Tools and Logic Pro X (AAX & Audio Units, respectively). It supports Native Instruments’ NKS (Native Kontrol Standard) format, which means you can do some pretty neat stuff if you own Maschine or any Kontrol S-Series keyboard. You can also use it as a standalone application, which is useful if you want to perform live with a laptop and MIDI controller.

Here’s what Plogue has to say about chipsynth MD:

“MD features a bit accurate OPN2 (YM2612) emulator. We combined it with a SN76489-compatible square wave core (SPSG) and a special emulation of the very crunchy sample playback found in games, and we multiplied all of this by 6 to make it polyphonic in every situation imaginable. A complimentary VGM file player allows you to audition hundreds of vintage soundtracks just like they were meant to be heard.

Plogue’s reverse-engineering team worked very hard to make sure that even the rarest corner-cases involving the special features of the OPN2 chip are emulated bit-perfectly, backed by large amounts of testing on special hardware rigs. Add the DAC and impulse-response emulation to that, and you get a degree of realism that has never been reached before!

Oh, and as always, it is done how it should: without using samples!”

As someone who uses trackers like DefleMask to create chiptunes, it’s nice to finally have that kind of sound inside of my DAW. With this emulation, I can go above and beyond the editing and synthesis capabilities of a tracker. Admittedly, FM synthesis isn’t my forte, but I still like to tweak settings around to create something unique that fits my style of music creation. With that said, there are plenty of presets to explore and expand upon.

I want to highlight the VGM player that’s built into the plugin. Not only can you listen to your favorite soundtracks, but you can also extract the synthesis data from individual channels and use them in your productions. That means you can use that iconic FM bass used in the Sonic games without having to make it yourself! That was one of the reasons why I purchased FMDrive by Aly James Lab because it can extract synthesis data from vgm files. However, unlike FMDrive, chipsynth MD doesn’t require bridging software like JBridge to work in a 64bit environment. Moreover, the editing capabilities are vastly superior.

You also have the ability to import your own samples. Something magical happens when a sample is processed through this plugin. You can set the jitter amount, resolution depth, or have chipsynth MD automatically slice up the sample and map it to your keys. My favorite type of samples to process are kick drums and snares!

Find out more and buy chipsynth MD