ASK A JUDGE: While we're busy NOT voting - your questions, we want 'em

You guys do that often? Personally help people to pass? Or is that only for certain (white + rich) people?

Wow, aren't you the biggest a-hole by just thinking this.

And it's not like you're white as snow either.

You guys do that often? Personally help people to pass? Or is that only for certain (white + rich) people?

i think the idea was that the person clearly was almost there and just needed a bump to get over the hump. zircon helped me with my super dodge ball track several years ago with the same thing.

also, in4 racist ban.

I guess "taking a joke" is also reserved for a certain group I'm not a part of.

I guess "taking a joke" is also reserved for a certain group I'm not a part of.

Wasn't funny to me. Let's just move on to more questions when they come in.

Wasn't funny to me. Let's just move on to more questions when they come in.

Seems pretty clear that a lot of people didn't find that funny. So I am sorry.

I will leave and let ya'll get on with the questions

Srsly brandon. We can take a joke. The problem here is your joke severely lacking taste.

Here is a list of lols reasons for judge bias (that are funny cause they have genuinely been used):

casual bribery

genre bias

omg cool club

girls on the internet

etc

And for some unfathomable reason you decide calling us racists is funny in any way? OA goes out of his way to help a remixer get posted and this is his reward :/.

EDIT: I see I've been apology sniped, but I feel this is future joke advice worth leaving here.

boomtiss is the only acceptable judge bias.

Will next week's TBJ thread update reach the actual date?

Will next week's TBJ thread update reach the actual date?

I sure hope not, cause then I owe them booze and food! Me and my big mouth.

What kind of administrative/ behind the scenes work goes into releasing an album?

*curious*

I'm greatly impressed by the significant boost in Judge's Evaluation queue recently. Excellent job guys.

One quick question (probably asked a 100 times before so sorry about that):

How many NOs are required for a rejection and how many YESs are required for an acceptance? (just curious as to me, it looks like at least 3 for NO and 4 for YES, correct?)

What kind of administrative/ behind the scenes work goes into releasing an album?

*curious*

A lot. We have one on the horizon (that you contributed to!), so I'm too busy to answer your question, as fate would have it.

EDIT: Luckily, I'm not the only one on staff (see below!)

I'm greatly impressed by the significant boost in Judge's Evaluation queue recently. Excellent job guys.

One quick question (probably asked a 100 times before so sorry about that):

How many NOs are required for a rejection and how many YESs are required for an acceptance? (just curious as to me, it looks like at least 3 for NO and 4 for YES, correct?)

When it's uncontested, 3 NOs or 4 YESs. If the vote is split, it's usually a difference of 3 votes to close it (e.g. 4Y/1N, 1Y/4N). If it's closer than that, we usually bug every judge who will vote, then resolve if it seems no new POVs are coming in.

What kind of administrative/ behind the scenes work goes into releasing an album?

*curious*

I can take a stab at it, but for the most part I'm not involved in these tasks, I just hear about them.

After staff has evaluated and decided the album is on the level of quality we want to release (which is a huge amount of work but not really administrative), we make sure all songs are in WAV format and have no errors, like we do for all songs released on the site; if there are, we request new versions from the project director or remixer. MP3s are encoded from those WAVs and are tagged with our standard album tagging. If there's lyrics, that goes in there too. Staff will try to double-check all of that. The album is entered into our database, a torrent is created. If no website exists, we have to make one; if one does exist, we have to make sure it looks and works ok. djp picks songs to post to the front page, and those have all the work of a usual mix post (entered into db, youtube created and uploaded). Finally, there's a lot of social media-related things that happen before and afterward, to publicize the album. I'm SURE I didn't cover everything, but it is a lot of work.

What kind of administrative/ behind the scenes work goes into releasing an album?

*curious*

I can chime in on this one, it's actually a TON of work. Hope I'm not stepping on any judge's toes here, but since I'm staff and a project director/coordinator/assistant multiple times over, I think I can speak to this a bit.

Once all of the music for a project is completed, the whole album needs to go through the whole evaluation phase first, where it's basically looked at by a panel of staff to see if it's up to the OCR quality bar. Nothing really can move forward officially without passing eval. Also, staff needs to ensure that every artist on the album contributes a content policy agreement or else their songs can't be released on the album.

Once it's approved, some things involved in the release process include creating a fully-functional website with mirrors and a torrent for all artwork and music. The music all needs to be tagged and properly encoded to Larry's stringent standards in FLAC and MP3 formats. This is super in-depth.

Someone also needs to create an associated Facebook page for everybody to like. There's also the trailer and, eventually, uploading all of the individual tracks to Youtube and sometimes other sites like last.fm.

Somebody's also got to draft up a press release as well as arranging any promotional pimpage to other websites as far as interviews or pre-release reviews go.

Also, prepping any mixflood posts to accompany the album launch must be done, which entails a writeup by djp and separate OCR-format tagging for each song.

All of this needs to be pretty tightly coordinated on release day to make sure everything goes smoothly, i.e. the torrent is properly seeded, there's no typos on any of the release materials, tags, or the website, and that all of the songs are properly encoded and ready to be unleashed on the world.

There's probably more that I'm forgetting but that's just a sampling of all the stuff that needs to happen for an album to release. It's a huge amount of effort; I think a lot of folks start up projects assuming that it's just a matter of finding some quality remixers and getting a tracklist down, but it goes beyond that. Bottom line is, if you're not willing to be an integral part in making a lot of this happen, don't start a project in the first place. Getting claims and nice-sounding songs is often the easy part, but all of the non-music stuff really piles up. Staff will usually do as much as possible to help facilitate this but it requires commitment and effort from the director first and foremost to get there. This goes especially for big projects, as I'm finding out myself while tackling administrative/last-leg work for DKC3 and Maverick Rising at the same time It's totally doable and actually quite a bit of fun at times, but I don't think a lot of people are really aware of the time investment and effort required to do it right.

Hope that answers your question to some extent!

I can chime in on this one, it's actually a TON of work. Hope I'm not stepping on any judge's toes here, but since I'm staff and a project director/coordinator/assistant multiple times over, I think I can speak to this a bit.

Once all of the music for a project is completed, the whole album needs to go through the whole evaluation phase first, where it's basically looked at by a panel of staff to see if it's up to the OCR quality bar. Nothing really can move forward officially without passing eval. Also, staff needs to ensure that every artist on the album contributes a content policy agreement or else their songs can't be released on the album.

Once it's approved, some things involved in the release process include creating a fully-functional website with mirrors and a torrent for all artwork and music. The music all needs to be tagged and properly encoded to Larry's stringent standards in FLAC and MP3 formats. This is super in-depth.

Someone also needs to create an associated Facebook page for everybody to like. There's also the trailer and, eventually, uploading all of the individual tracks to Youtube and sometimes other sites like last.fm.

Somebody's also got to draft up a press release as well as arranging any promotional pimpage to other websites as far as interviews or pre-release reviews go.

Also, prepping any mixflood posts to accompany the album launch must be done, which entails a writeup by djp and separate OCR-format tagging for each song.

All of this needs to be pretty tightly coordinated on release day to make sure everything goes smoothly, i.e. the torrent is properly seeded, there's no typos on any of the release materials, tags, or the website, and that all of the songs are properly encoded and ready to be unleashed on the world.

There's probably more that I'm forgetting but that's just a sampling of all the stuff that needs to happen for an album to release. It's a huge amount of effort; I think a lot of folks start up projects assuming that it's just a matter of finding some quality remixers and getting a tracklist down, but it goes beyond that. Bottom line is, if you're not willing to be an integral part in making a lot of this happen, don't start a project in the first place. Getting claims and nice-sounding songs is often the easy part, but all of the non-music stuff really piles up. Staff will usually do as much as possible to help facilitate this but it requires commitment and effort from the director first and foremost to get there. This goes especially for big projects, as I'm finding out myself while tackling administrative/last-leg work for DKC3 and Maverick Rising at the same time It's totally doable and actually quite a bit of fun at times, but I don't think a lot of people are really aware of the time investment and effort required to do it right.

Hope that answers your question to some extent!

Yeah, this is but a small smattering of what goes on behind the scenes. With NiGHTS coming out imminently, I can tell you for a fact that there are so many things you have to think of and tackle ahead of time for a good and smooth release. I've been prepping for release for about three months, and even then I'm still finding things that need to be done. It is very easy for some things to slip through the cracks because of how much is going on at the same time, which is why we normally try to avoid specific release dates.

But hey, for all that work, the results are worth it!

Why are some of my final fantasy songs labeled with numbers, and others with roman numerals? I'll have one "Final Fantasy 7" and another "Final Fantasy VII"

Where exactly do you see this? Larry prefers the numbers, so we usually go that way (but I like the Roman numerals, so I usually remember, but....)

Why are some of my final fantasy songs labeled with numbers, and others with roman numerals? I'll have one "Final Fantasy 7" and another "Final Fantasy VII"

Is this in the MP3 tags? That's one inconsistency Larry is working on fixing with the new tag versions.

I noticed that. Another example is between songs named as Zelda 3 or A Link to the Past

Yea, when I scroll through songs on my MP3 player, the song titles are labeled with both roman numerals and numbers. So the songs from a particular game are split up.

Yes, the older stuff has inconsistent tagging. We know.

Where have y'all been? When we do the updated torrents this year, all that will be corrected.

http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=20433

Yes, the older stuff has inconsistent tagging. We know.

Where have y'all been? When we do the updated torrents this year, all that will be corrected.

http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=20433

Surely you are not suggesting we re-download everything...

Surely you are not suggesting we re-download everything...

That's exactly what he's saying. And don't call me Shirley.

Surely you are not suggesting we re-download everything...

Well, what can they do? It's not like they can hack into our mp3 players and computers and change the title on every one that has ever been downloaded.

Well, what can they do? It's not like they can hack into our mp3 players and computers and change the title on every one that has ever been downloaded.

That project's coming in 2021.