tell the world about your favorite botb format!

my own fav is fsound, probably followed by channelf and ted.
why? i think its because fsound seems like simple 1channel-music made by typing some stuff into a texteditor at first, but once youre working with it more and try to work around the limits, it becomes a very powerful tool which supports custom samples and more. the fact that its kind of a "botb-exclusive"-tool just adds to the charm imo

i liēk allgaer because im too lazy to learn anything else

Fakechip/Wildbit is my favourite :D
Especially when it involves ye olde frequency modulation!

its gotta be wildchip bc seeing chiptune maxed out with other instruments will always be amazing to me

actually i like famitracker beacuse was the first tracker i learned :)

it's fsound because fsound
no further questions

jokes aside, adlib has been taking a good portion of my time because of how interesting opl2 has been to me
that and adlib tracker 2 has been generally fun to mess around with
though if i'd have to say what my be all favorite format is...i'd go with wildchip. sets me free and lets me do what i wanna do for today, and that's pretty neato.

other contenders
- nsf and friends
- fsound
- html
- pixel
- adlib

photomash because the results are always amusing
also i've not been as interested in sunvox recently but i have used it far longer than any other tracker and i'll still proselytize it
also s3xmodit because it's used as a remix category, but has a level playing field in terms of what people use for it

All things s3xmodit, it's my format of choice for fakebit/wildchip and I was already making XM tracks long before finding BotB.

SMS does get a mention, I love its cutesy sound and I really hope the SN7 chip gets more appearances in battles. It's one of my favorite formats that I learned through participating here, along with several others!

sexual intercouse modit is my favorite
no seriously, it is. tracking is just super fun for me. idk why but it just is.

although i mainly use ntfs these days, i still love me some fat32

channel f, followed in no particular order by anything else that's old and crappy, including tia, ted (actually ted is quite powerful but the more advanced tools are horrible to use), and of course vic20.

Why? uhh because I liek old and crappy, I guess.

4k

game boy because game boy

NSF+ is great attempt to make and challenging. My favorite
Otherwise was s3xmodit, SPC is hard to making MMLs and IT2SPC is very easy way.

As for the NSF I still using J0CC-FT for cool stuff

snibbetracker because i don't like clicking on things

NSF, TIA and POKEY

Shared place between NSF and Genesis, I really enjoy making
stuff with these little buggers, and I have no plan to stop.

Edit: I guess "MIDI" have a place close to my heart also, but it's not really MIDI itself, it's just fun to screw up the default Windows soundfont.

s3xmodit will always be my favorite :)

just plain tracking and samples! all i need in life

I've had a lot of difficulty making music in programs like FL Studio and Ableton Live, and even when using trackers like Renoise and OpenMPT, I feel I'm not really skilled enough to use the full potential of those programs. :c

Trackers are awesome, but my favourite would have to be jOCC-FamiTracker. With the limitations of the NES sound chips, I think I have a better chance of making cool music with it. It's fun trying to make the most out of each chip :D

EDIT: Sorry I forgot this is about peoples' favourite formats, mine are NSF+ and OCC.

Mariopaint, because it is the easiest and straight-forwardest to ohb and also the most well known and memorable; to me, I understand some people don't like it for its limitations, but that's just one thing that makes it more special.

mod

All nsf formats because they're the only ones I'm good at. I mean I can sing too, but...

no you can't

remix! it is basically what i do/did outside of botb.

and a close 2nd is s3xmodit, which is equivalent to what originally got me into composing back in the day (original Scream/Impulse Tracker user on DOS) :)

interestingly, you could have guessed this from what badges i have ;)
(a property that probably also holds true for other botbrs)

I'm between NSF and 0CC.

NSF because I have a special love for 2A03-only, but don't take my DPCM spamming away from me.

0CC, which is mostly like NSF+ but:
- No instrument overload problem from exporting
- You get to learn from other great BotBers' 0CC.
0CC>FT since I've not used vanilla or even Beta 5 since the stone age.

And because I'm too lazy to learn anything else.

And because it's the only one I'm good at.

mptm, obviously

#1 - nsf because i'm a normie
#2 - channelf. it gets me feeling some sorta way and idk why

DOS module because it's the only one I don't feel completely lost with.

AYM because I got an Atari ST when I was 10 and it became my first composition tool, using Quartet (which can be converted to .MOD if anybody wants to try something stupid) and Protracker. Tried programming the YM with Sidsound Designer but it was too difficult to handle without any knowledge of English or music. In my days .MOD were not called chip music and botb would've awarded mixist points, not chipist. I mean, it's just fucking samples! </rant>
So, I got into YM to take revenge on my teen years, I needed to use that magnificent sound.
2nd reason, the YM is way deeper than the engineers designed it to be with its 3 square channels and the noise generator: the envelope used as audio oscillator with its approximate tuning, the ST-specific faux SID sounds, the 4-bits sample playback, there is a lot of room for experimentation with this chip and I'm still not bored of it :)

That being said, my favourite chip to listen to on botb is probably the 2A03, so nsf is definitively a fave too, there is so much fantastic music on this chip, with our without expansions, and its triangle wins everybody's

goin' outside smellin' the flowres and birds cuz already wasted past 15 yrs of my life famitrackin'

flowres ^^

.sid bc c64 was our second computer we got as kids and the first that could actually produce some serious music (plus the game tracks of the days were awesome) and i use Deflemask for that. Don't use the goat tracker cos its needlessly pain in the butt plus there's no mobile version;
.sunvox bc it actually made me learn and think about how the sound actually is made, plus it's the best DAW/tracker that works and sound the same on any platform;
.ft2 bc i used to do a lot of module music back in the nineties and i only had a PC beeper. Now i can't stand anything that has samples in it...go figure.
...and yeah, I'm ashamed to say but i feel I've wasted my life playing games and listening to chip music so I'm beginning to hate it for some reason... maybe it's just a phase, who knows...i most certainly don't hate composing,tho，but i don't enjoy it as i used to. I think I'm getting old rD
NOTE: and i don't like the sound of consoles (8bit and 16bit) cos i never had any >:-D

If I knew the answer to this question I probably wouldn’t have tried so many

Seksmodit and MT-32 because yes!
EDIT: Forgot OPLx (Adlib)

pc-x801 because not a single ohb has been hosted so far without some sort of problem happening

srsly tho, pcx801 and midi are my favorite overall even if I haven't done much of the latter

sgen because every other one is too hard

Obviously nsf/nsf+/famitracker/any variant of that, simply because it's the first format/tracker I became competent at, and it was hard for me to learn new things around that time so I just stuck with what I knew. Also, I like using simple voices since it puts more of a focus on composition, so I was able to polish my composition skills that way. I guess that goes for any chiptune format, though.

remixxx babeyyyyy

and renoiseee babeyyyyy

s3xmodit is also acceptable. cus its basically a remix

Amigamod! Even though I never submitted an amigamod :O If I have to have submitted something, it would be Draw =w=

it's hard to choose an "ultimate favourite" though it would be somewhere between:

adlib::: my fav chipist format and I personally really like the sound of the opl chips, plus I kinda like adlib tracker 2 (controversial lol). specifically the opl3 is the best chip with 18-20 channels, extra waveforms and other cool stuff.

pure data::: the graphical programming language bit is pretty cool even if it's "quirky", instead of normal text programming, having everything there on the screen laid out as crazily as you like is kinda nice. making my own abstractions, giving them an interface and using them feels like making a whole new environment for audio stuff, really cool. definitely want to do more with it down the line.

vcv rack::: not quite in the position to be buying really expensive modules so this is the closest to an actual modular that I'm gonna get atm. definitely a bit weirder than actual modular because you can dupe as many modules as you want and stuff but overall it's a pretty fun, creative and novel approach for musics (even if recording from it is a bit more annoying).

renoise::: I'm not big on vsts so having a polished lovely bit of audio software with a fantastic built-in sampler is really nice. there are so many ways to get cool sound designs, tons of options for modulations and effects so I rarely feel like a sample is completely unusable (like sometimes happens with s3xmodit).

Reviving this thread cause I've thought of asking this question as well, and as a bonus, I'll be including my current fav song from each format

- At The Speed Of Snow by Tobikomi
- Approaching a Spaceship by kleeder
- Modo by kleeder
- upshore by coda
- B Select by kleeder
- 플로프 by kleeder

I tend to prefer formats that are very limited, because I love to see how far you can push them to their limits. They also work really well for me, because I easily get overwhelmed with more complex formats, so these sorts of limitations can help me figure out how I should approach my tracks.

my favorite format is remix because
a) sample packs are fun to work with and offer easy, instant inspiration,
b) it's as diverse as how many different kinds of samples you can throw together (anything from little vgm or synth wave samples to whole chunks of full songs),
c) listening through and talking about the entries is especially fun because you can see what everyone else did with [specific sample] which rules, and
d) any tools are valid which is good for participation and track diversity too

i will pretty much always do a midi or spc format too, i love those a lot... but remix is bread and butter. when i first joined botb and learned about hosting, remix is what i wanted to host.

svg, because it's a xml-based format very close to those good old postscript specifications, so this format can be used on anything related to vectorial drawing

Commodore 64, the 8580 SID CHIP DUAL SID. Oh YeAa! tHats Why!

no one else mentioned it so I am here once again to say that I love pxtone

I swing between the MIDI formats (MSGS/XG/MT32) and some of the tracker formats (s3xmodit/24-,32-,48-,64kmod).
Those are at home.

But close up is many of the 16-bit video-game formats like SNES, Genesis and the format for those crossovers; wildchip.

My fav is allgear, personally unless the sole purpose of the battle is to encourage a certain format, I think all gear should be an acceptable format for every battle. Its very flexible and for some people, like me who dont have tons of ecxperience with trackers its more inclusive! but thats just me

I going to say that my favorite format is MOD but i don't like much the amiga 4ch limit so, MPTM

there is an mml-like format that was fielded for testing here once but never saw enough development to become usable (and therefore get official format status on botb) which i am obligated to shill, called "kpmml"

however, i need to finish the new version of the "compiler". the original "compiler" is broken as hell, apparently doesn't work on windows, and hasn't been touched by anyone (especially me) since like 2017. the new ver ive repeatedly lost progress by forgetting to put new changes on the git repo for it on github, which has hampered my will to finish it. at one point i finished a loop unroll + macro insertion routine within it (loop unrolling is fine in this case since loops cannot be infinite in kpmml), but i lost all of that code and im back to really early.

visuall bc it gets me into practicing

any minimal simple 1 bit beep electronics system

Wild chip or Fakebit because you can create it like an allgear song, just make sure all your instruments are the same synth/soundfont. So it restricts you enough to allow for lots of creativity without restricting too much.

TIA, because aTari 2600 Is Awesome

I enjoy OpenMPT the most. It's a fun format, especially with the 2-op FM stuff shoehorned in from s3m.
S3XMODIT is another favorite. I do wish the module size limit was a little higher, but that's what munch.py is for...

SPC for me. A combination of a decent featureset (and samples) with a side of memory limitations to look out for. The main limitation is that you may have to program it yourself...