kethinov

Kanthos, two things. First, I'm not trying to be antagonistic, I'm just trying to create a cleaner user experience for first time users. The remixers on this site do great work and I want casual users to become regular users. Calm down and quit hurling insults at me. It's not getting either of us anywhere. Second, for now, I'm only going to focus on one key point. We can get back to the rest later if necessary. Here goes. The problem here is you're arguing for the vocal minority: the hardcore OCRemix community. And I'm arguing for the silent majority: the casual user of the site. The casual user (the silent majority) comes here to find remixes of video game music. The casual user has no idea who zicron, djpretzel, or bLiNd are. That's why they'll never (initially) want to group mixes by the mixer. When the casual user comes to the site, they go to the music section, pick their favorite game, and download a bunch of stuff from that game. Then when they load it up in their music player they're bombarded with a dozen different artists. This is quite objectively a poor user experience for two principal reasons: 1. The id3 tag experience doesn't match the site experience at all. If the user comes here and groups mixes by game, then the id3 tags aren't grouped that way, it's inconsistent. 2. The addition of dozens or so artists when the user was only expecting to add one (for the game) is overwhelming, especially when the music is moved directly to a portable mp3 player. Try listening to every Super Mario World remix on an iPod! This necessitates the user having to either 1. retag everything or 2. create playlists. Forcing the user to do this when you don't have to is a poor user experience. Before we can discuss any of the rest of the issues raised here, we've got to get past this one. Because if I can't get you past this one, then there's no point talking about the rest. Thanks, Kethinov

Thanks for the replies everyone! But I remain unconvinced. This thinking is exactly the problem. The site is favoring giving as much credit as possible to the remixer over the quality of the user experience. Having to use the search feature of iTunes just to listen to every Super Mario World remix in sequence is a terrible user experience. And most portables don't even have such a feature which absolutely necessitates a manual retag by the user, also a terrible user experience. Greater exposure for the remixer at the expense of the user experience is not a legitimate tradeoff. Besides, I wouldn't call moving the remixer's name into the song title an obscuration. It's still a highly visible field. Semantically, the remixer is even less the artist than the game. They didn't write the song. It's a cover. A derivative work. As you said, the composer doesn't belong in the artist field either, so the best candidate for the artist is the game. Besides, users are more likely to want to sort by game, not by remixer. I don't really care whether zicron, or djpretzel, or bLiNd did a remix. That's not a logical grouping. What game the remix comes from is a logical grouping. That's why OCRemix releases arranged albums for specific games, not arranged albums for specific remixers. Sorry, but this is just false. Let's step through it logically, assuming a music player like iTunes. Current system: - To sort by game: do a search for the game. - To sort by remixer: sort by artists. My proposed system: - To sort by game: sort by artists. - To sort by remixer: do a search for the remixer. Both scenarios still work and the more logical grouping of the game, something more users are going to want, is the easier target. That's why I said comma separated list. Toss everything that fits in the genre field and let the users vote to determine a consensus by popular tags. Give me access to the database, set me loose on the server side scripting, and I'll do the work myself. I have a great deal of experience with this sort of programming and I'd love to contribute something useful to a site I've enjoyed for years.

I love OCR but I've always been very irritated by the system used to tag songs here. The basic problem is setting the artist to the remixer and putting the game in the song title leads to some pretty chaotic organization in common music players and especially on portable devices. For example, downloading every remix on OCR for a single game, e.g. FF6, leads to the addition of dozens of new artists to your library. The current system works like this: Artist: zicron Title: Super Mario World Monstrous Turtles! OC ReMix Composer: Koji Kondo (this is good as is, original composer Koji Kondo doesn't belong in either Artist or Title) I believe it should be set like this instead: Artist: Super Mario World Title: Monstrous Turtles!, remixed by zicron Composer: Koji Kondo Reasons this is better: - Groups all remixes by original game using the artist field. - Moves remixer into the title so every remixer doesn't create a new artist entry in a user's library. - Eliminates redundant "OC ReMix" in the title. It's already in the album, so it isn't necessary here. I've literally been manually retagging every remix I download from this site to conform to this system for years. So I decided to finally share it with everyone along with my reasoning for it. Other, less important suggestions: - Don't set genre to "game". Set genre to a comma separated list of genres the song could fit into, such as "Jazz, Swing, Instrumental" or "Opera, Orchestra, Symphony". Whatever fits the song. Maybe even let users tag them on the site and let the most popular ones be the consensus. - Set track number to the ID# of the song in the database. Finally: zicron, your Monstrous Turtles remix is amazing. Thanks for your incredible work, along with dozens of other fantastic artists on here. So many of you have done an excellent job. The fact that OCRemixes make up hundreds of songs in my library is a testament to all of your skill! Thanks for reading. Keep up the awesome work everyone. Kethinov