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Oh boy, this might be my first experience with being a jdgfgt on the forums. Almost makes me feel like I'm a legit judge now. I'm so happy this day has come. Considering the circumstances, I would like a moment to address a few topics that came up on here. Wasn't able to do much yesterday other than snipe one or two points on the FB thread due to work, so consider this a more overarching response. I don't hand these walls of text out too often anymore, so enjoy! First and foremost, OCR is most certainly not the end all, be all of video game remixes; the kind of music posted on here is clearly stated on DjP's mission statement. There is great music that can't be posted on OCR due to his personal vision for the site, so if someone says that something amazing didn't get posted on OCR I will absolutely believe you. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, either; it's his site, and great things certainly has come from it. I feel sometimes people forget this point on both sides of the aisle; a few more passionate members sometimes say something isn't good if it doesn't pass OCR's muster while others state OCR judges hate good music when a song doesn't pass. Neither of these things are true, and on my word I can say I've known the current staff long enough to say they understand that, as well. At the risk of sounding like I'm strawmanning, if anyone makes these bad faith assumptions about the staff they should reconsider their opinion. Okay, just wanted to get that out there on full display. Second, I've seen a few posts on here upset at the time it takes to judge a track. While last month was admittedly slow likely due to more than one album being evaluated and posted on here (Sinphony and Candy Corn II, baby - we actually do have to judge every track on albums, which takes time), overall I'm a bit hurt that no one really acknowledges the process has sped up over the last year, with the topic of this thread being a great example. Y'all know that the time between submission (as in, he sent it to the inbox) and judgement was literally eight days at most, right? Like, he posted in the thread that he was submitting it soon on May 26th, and the judgment was completed on June 3rd, right? I'm calling bologna on this complaint; I've personally worked my ass off to get the inbox and panel to the point that the wait for judgment is on average three months at the moment (again, slow down happened last month due to an influx of albums - it used to be closer to two months from submission to judgment on average, save for tough tracks on the panel), so I take particular offense to this blindness on the improved judgment speed, here. There's likely no better time to put your music on OCR to get more timely feedback, so please stop saying it takes over a year to get evaluated on average on here. Everything that was submitted in 2016 or earlier has been judged (with a single exception, for those astute enough to check). We're in a pretty good spot as far as inbox and judgment speed goes; it'd be nice for people to start recognizing that. Thirdly, specifically on this submission... I can see why some may be upset at my judgment, but there's another half to the story that'd be missed if you didn't know I was personally involved in the WIP thread helping him out. Being that I act as both a judge and a somewhat active workshop evaluator (less so nowadays, much to Rozo's chagrin, I bet) I sometimes make reference to what I've said in my evaluation in my judgments. Whether or not that's bad practice is debatable (the confusion in this thread being a decent case against this), but in my view the artist is the most important one to understand the feedback; generally no one else has easy access to the music so no one else needs to understand it. I've seen a complaint or two on this discussion saying that I shouldn't consider the flute at all in my judgment, and you're absolutely correct - I shouldn't. If you feel judges should never consider personal taste in music when judging something then be vindicated in the fact that you're correct! The catch is that I made absolutely clear in my WIP evaluation that this was personal taste and would in no way impact the judgment; Brynolf actually requested comments specifically on the flute, so I gave him my opinion on it. In the judgment I acknowledge that his track overall improved from when I eval'd it, even while teasing that he didn't make any changes to the flute. My vote had nothing to do with the flute in his track, and everything to do with the copy/paste of about a third of his track (which I missed when I eval'd it - that was a mistake on my part, and I still feel bad about that). You can disagree that the copy/paste is a problem, but I stick by this decision. Anyone can feel free to argue this point either via PM, FB or Discord with me if they'd like since I don't want to crowd this thread too much on my reasoning (in fact I'd love to do that; there's some interesting reasoning behind why this is an issue). That's not to say I dislike that song at all - far from it. I personally really enjoyed this track in every other aspect, and still hope that he resubmits it with some minor changes made to address the issue as it would be a wonderful addition to OCR's front page. I can't drop the QC aspect of my judgments just because I like a track, though; it's one of the larger downsides of the job, to be honest. Finally, on the consistency in judgment brought up in here... yeah, it can be a little inconsistent from time to time. That's because of two aspects: we're humans on the panel, and there's nine of us on there with varying experiences and opinions. On the first point, humans ain't perfect, and with anything that involves judgment of anything our imperfections will play into it. This applies to literally everything, not just OCR; for example, apparently you never want to be judged in court prior to lunch, because when everyone is hungry they're more likely to rush the verdict against the accused. To mitigate this aspect, there are many of us on there to cover one another's mistakes; more people means there's more chance that judges will catch each other's mistakes. Of course, this also means that different people will vote on different tracks, which unfortunately means there will be some variation in judgments due to different people voting on different tracks; that can't be helped. Those are my $0.50 on the topic at hand; hopefully it's a somewhat informative wall o' text. No hate to Hoboka for the thread or anyone else involved, either - we coo'.

FWIW, I rarely check remixer names before judging. If I do, it's after I've written my evaluation or because it was very hard to miss in the post when I have to click the link. I don't really care about who you are, and in fact I don't think the other judges do either. Joel is my best buddy and if he has to say NO to one of my tracks, he does, as he should, and as he has. I don't really care if it's djp himself sending a track in. I'd actually say, when the remixer's name and past is considered, the panel is harder on established remixers because we expect them to be at a certain level.

First, let's not confuse the terms evaluation and judging. Judging requires at least three people voting, and takes a lot longer, because those works are final when released. Eval usually takes one overworked and underappreciated person, concerns works in progress (that are considered finished for the time being, when eval is used correctly), and is at most indicative of how the judges might vote, never a guarantee. Second, by all means, discuss judging, discuss eval. Identify problems, suggest solutions. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one concerned about that stuff. Can't speak for the judges, but when it comes to eval, I think I'm allowed to say we've started a conversation about improving it.

Here's my 2 cents on this. I DO feel the panel has been faster lately, even if it's not obvious. The Decisions thread has indeed not been updated nearly as often as of late, but I know that the action is still happening behind the scenes because I remember how fast some of my own mixes have been moving through the queue (again, as everyone here ought to keep straight, independent of who I am, and 99% dependent on who's judging and what they choose to judge next [because y'all have lives and limited time]). I don't know if that's particularly satisfying as there is still an uncertainty as to the time between judged mixes and posted mixes, but I've honestly stopped staring at the Decisions thread a long time ago, and just let the decisions be made when they can be made. I suppose that's in part because I'm more picky than the Judges are (though I've been much less picky lately), and I've just stopped thinking, "will this make it?", and started thinking "what minor subjective differences am I going to see that ultimately don't affect the decision?". With time and practice, @HoboKa, you can become more confident in your abilities to churn out something that you're happy with, that you also know the Judges would pass. Just keep at it, and be self-aware, and in particular, honest with yourself. Again, just as @Gario and @AngelCityOutlaw have said or implied, the reasons the Judges have come up with had evolved over the years and have had proper rationale in them (though the standards are actually fairly low compared to so-called "modern production standards", as I think I've mentioned a few times before), and they do mean well. Whether or not that is well-conveyed is another story (as it may seem "black-box" to an ordinary bystander), but one can always make a topic (like this!) asking/ranting about it to get more of that rationale clarified. Any good Judge shouldn't feel openly offended anyways, right? (I'm being a bit cheeky.)

A fair point on that. For a while (beginning of this year, I think) it was being updated pretty regularly, but that's definitely slowed dow... Holy shit, last updated in JUNE?! Jesus. Okay, we should fix that like... right now. Sir_nutS was really on it for a while, but it seems to have stopped recently. I'm sure we'll update it soon. If not, I'll update it if necessary.

Epic wall of text is epic. And clarifying. I'll grant you guys that the eval process is quicker these days (as long as you keep in mind that eval might be quick but it might take a good amount of time to get it actually posted!) but for me as a poor ol' remixer that's a bit hard to see. Sure, tracks that get NO'ed end up quite quickly in the judge decision forum, but for tracks that are either YES'ed, under judgement or pending in the queue there's not a lot of visibility unless somebody takes up the (manual) chore of updating the 'Currently in the Judging Process' topic. Personally I think it'd be awesome to have this automated and more visible (and faster), but I'm not sure how feasible -or desirable- that is.

Liking the atmosphere of the intro. Piano used sounds off, texture-wise, sort of dull, while still sounding brittle to me. As important of a role as it plays, I would've liked it to feature a better tone. Probably could soften the 2-4khz-ish range (it sounds like it's fighting other stuff in this range) and add a bit more highs to get it airy enough to still cut through. Probably would need to tone down some of the highs on other elements to give it some space. Mastering is a bit loud, but not overly-so. Mixing is pretty clear between parts, but could be toned-down in the highs for some of the parts. There are some piercing freqs in places, mainly caused by some backing stabby stuff - resonant backing part at 3:00 and strings/other stuff at 3:38. Also, that last note at 4:21 - ouch. When strings come in prominently, they're noticeably dry against reverbed/delayed other elements. Also, that last note cut-off at 2:11, beyond being abrupt, left a bad impression, note-wise. Personally, I'm of the opinion that "natural" instruments used in a dance setting don't have to be realistic sounding. There could be an uncanny-valley, unhappy medium argument made in this case against that, I suppose, where you need to go more robo or more humanized. I feel like I may have been ok with this if the piano didn't play such an integral part holding down the main melody, relative to sample quality/production. It's close for me, and it wouldn't bother me if it had passed. If I were Nuts, though (and I almost am! See what I did there?), I'd want another shot at this to tighten things up. NO (borderline)

Also, just because we NO a track doesn't mean we think it's bad. We've sent back submissions that were great covers, or that would have been great as a part of a score for a game or movie, or that are standout pieces of music all around but don't tie in to the VGM enough or clearly enough. A NO is not necessarily a critique of the general quality of the submission and is never a statement about the artist in general. All it means is that it's not specifically what we look for as part of our curated and themed collection of remixes.

Quoted for agreement. On a trip and otherwise too busy to reply to this in depth, but the main thing I want to convey to Alex is to breathe and relax and ornate assume that any time someone complains about OCR or how the panel is run that you're somehow shunned, blacklisted, or ready to be banned. We're not touchy like that. Don't assume bad faith and overthink things to the point where you think we have it out for you. On the Facebook thread for this, zyko and The Coop pointed out how the track didn't have much going on dynamically. I haven't heard it, but that's a pretty reasonable and common reason stuff hasn't passed before.

Voted! Thank you both for the suggestions!

@HoboKa Stop double posting. You don't need to bump a thread whenever you edit your post.

Oh thank god. Cool alias btw, love the artwork too!

Yesterday I received the full album eval from staff. If you're an artist on the album, you should have received it in your inbox. The good news is that we're on track for release later this month. Even better is that we still have a bit of time to make the album even better than it already is Anyway, stay tuned!

I was updating it at least 2-3 times a week for the past year or more. But seems like people don't notice when things are working well I have a lot of responsibilities lately so I've slowed down with judging and updating that thread, I thought that since songs are judged quickly now, it wouldn't be an issue if that thread doesn't get updated much, so my bad.