Demoscene musician Yerzmyey has created an entire chiptune music album on a humble Raspberry Pi.

The album is called RPI Zwei.

Chiptune music made with Raspberry Pi

Yerzmyey’s music is as full and complex as any track you’d hear on the radio or Spotify. Yerzmyey tells us that “The most complex song on the album has 26 independent channels of digi-music” and even says the Raspberry Pi “could surely manage more.”

As Yerzmyey explains, the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have a DAC (a digital-to-analogue converter) so instead you have to record music on the processor itself. This limits the audio to 11-bit, 40 MHz, but that doesn’t seem to have held Yerzmyey back.

Making chiptune music note by note

Having first started creating ‘demoscene’ music on a ZX Spectrum in the 1980s, Yerzmyey used MilkyTracker to “program all [the] notes one-by-one… Otherwise I use loops only when it comes to drum ‘n’ bass” and instruments such as guitar. Layering notes and loops, Yerzmyey “composed the music on the Pi and then recorded it all directly from the ‘jack’ output.”

You can listen to RPI Zwei here.