Choose 8-bit game sound effects in Chip Pops and export them as WAV

A small game needs a coin when the player grabs one, a jump when they leave the ground, and a laser when they fire. Searching for “free 8-bit sound effects” turns up packs with a license to read and filenames that don’t say what the sound is.

Chip Pops is a Mac app with about 6,000 8-bit effects, made with jsfxr. The Game group is the set for this: coin, power up, jump, laser, explosion and hit. You listen, then export a 16-bit WAV. Chip Pops is a paid app, $20 once. The sounds you export are royalty-free, and you can use them in anything, including a commercial game, with no credit needed.

The other Chip Pops walkthrough, add a button sound, stays in the Interface sounds and plays one file from an HTML button. This one stays in the Game group and ends with WAV files in a game folder.

What you need

Chip Pops runs on macOS 14 or later, on Apple silicon and on Intel. After purchasing it, download the app from your Polar receipt. Unzip it and drag Chip Pops.app to your Applications folder.

The first time you open it, click Generate the Library. Chip Pops builds every sound on your Mac in under half a minute. The library is about 300 MB. There’s no account.

Choose Install Command Line Tool… from the Chip Pops menu to install blips. It usually lands in ~/.local/bin. You’ll use blips to list, play and export. You can also drag a sound out of the window.

Start in the Game group

The sidebar has four groups.

Interface is clicks, toggles, success chimes and errors. That’s the button tutorial.

Game is what a game asks for:

• coin
• power up
• jump
• laser
• explosion
• hit

Combos stack two sounds, like a coin on a power-up. Jingles are short tunes, like a fanfare or a game over. Leave those until the game has the six above.

Open coin. Click a sound to hear it. The arrow keys move to the next one and play it, so you can step through the category without reaching for the mouse each time. The inspector shows the waveform and the pitch over time, which is what separates one 8-bit coin from the next.

Chip Pops keeps a new sound only when it’s different enough from the ones already in that category. A category ends when it runs out of new sounds. That’s why there are 77 coins and 400 explosions. If the coins start to sound alike, try explosion or hit.

Choose a coin, a jump and a laser

Pick one job at a time. Coin first.

blips list --category coin --json

The list gives you an ID for each sound. Play two or three before you keep one. Use IDs returned by your own library: the same ID gives the same sound only when the library seed matches. Library → Generate… → New Sounds changes that seed.

blips play coin-003 coin-004

Do the same for jump and laser:

blips list --category jump --json
blips list --category laser --json
blips play jump-003 laser-003

The Power Up category uses powerup in the CLI. Run blips categories to see the exact names available in your library, then blips list --category powerup. Explosion and hit use --category explosion and --category hit.

Export each one as a WAV

Make a folder for the game’s sounds and export the ids from your list. The commands below keep example ids so you can see the shape. Swap in yours.

mkdir -p sounds
blips export coin-003 --to sounds --name coin.wav
blips export jump-003 --to sounds --name jump.wav
blips export laser-003 --to sounds --name laser.wav

You should now have sounds/coin.wav, sounds/jump.wav and sounds/laser.wav. Each file is a 16-bit WAV, mastered to the same loudness as the rest of the library.

If a file with that name is already in sounds, export replaces it. Name the file after the job, coin.wav, so a later swap keeps the same name inside the game.

Write the ids down next to the files, for example in sounds/sources.txt:

coin.wav    coin-003
jump.wav    jump-003
laser.wav   laser-003

Record the library seed beside those IDs. blips show coin-003 prints it, and the app shows it in the sidebar. The ID and seed together identify your choice; an ID alone is ambiguous after you generate a different library. Use blips export --seed when you want export to reject a mismatched library.

You can skip the command for a single sound. Select it, then drag it into the Finder, or press ⌘C and paste the file. The export command is the one that sets the name to coin.wav as it writes.

Drop the files into the game

Put the sounds folder in the game project, next to the rest of the assets, with sources.txt. The game only needs the WAV files at runtime, so players don’t need Chip Pops or blips.

A coin sound that works once can get tiring when the player collects ten coins in a row, and rapid laser shots can stack up loud. Try the effects in a small scene, and set their volume in the game while the music and other effects are playing.

In Phaser, playing a sound is a separate step from finding the file. Phaser: Playing sounds preloads with this.load.audio(), adds the sound, and calls play() when the player jumps or collects the coin. That post loads mp3 and ogg as well as a single file, because not every browser plays every format. Chip Pops exports WAV, which works in a Mac app, an iOS app, or a web page with the HTML audio tag. Keep the WAV when your game plays WAV. When that Phaser setup asks for another format, convert the file you already exported.

A jump sound should start from the key press. The Phaser post covers why a sound at startup often stays silent.

If you don’t hear anything

If the shell says blips: command not found, install the command again from the Chip Pops menu, and check that ~/.local/bin is on your PATH.

If a category is empty, or blips list has nothing to print, the library hasn’t been generated. Click Generate the Library in the app, then list again.

If --category power up fails, use --category powerup. blips categories lists the CLI names.

If blips play is silent and the app plays the same sound, check the Mac output volume and that the command you ran is the blips you installed. blips play uses the built-in afplay command, so a muted output device mutes it too.

If the game is silent, confirm the WAV is at the path the game loads. A 404 on sounds/coin.wav means the game is looking in the wrong place. For a web game, also check the tab isn’t muted.

Get Chip Pops

Find and export about 6,000 8-bit sound effects for apps and games. Includes a Mac app, the blips command and full MIT source code.

See Chip Pops → · Read the docs · $20 including tax, with full source code.

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