In the late 1980s and early 1990s, playing recorded audio on a computer was hard to do. Uncompressed audio required large storage, and decompressing audio used too many CPU cycles.
 
Most systems opted for a different way to play music. Instead of storing recorded audio, software would contain the sheet music for the songs included in the program.
 
These systems had special hardware which could produce a wide variety of sounds systematically, given a musical note as an input.
 
The software would read the sheet music and play certain notes at specific times using the sound hardware.
 
The Chromasound Nova is a music player that plays songs that are compatible with the ASCII MSX2 system. It uses the same sound hardware, and has some features of its own.
 
Original music can be composed using Chromasound Studio.