Leaderboard

As much as I hate to admit it, if people are percieving that it's slowed down then there's something that we need to fix or address. I can personally say it's considerably faster nowadays than it was a year ago (save for last month since as mentioned earlier an influx of projects slowed us down a bit - you can personally verify this, Rozovian :P), but if people can't tell this is the case then we need to do something about that. Updating the judging process thread is definitely one step toward that, which we've talked about here and will fix soon (if not someone else, I'll update it within the week). Of course, the problem with that is it's a manual process prone to staff just... not updating the thread. It's a lower priority item on the list of things to do, so it happens. Anyone have any ideas of how to make people more aware of the pace of the judge's panel? I might share a few ideas behind the scenes on how to address this (that starts getting into the mechanics of the site, though, which I don't think I should share on here atm), but if people want to share some ideas I would be very much appreciative. Interesting question, and while it's not the EXACT topic of the thread it's related. There's no official number on the rates of passes and rejections as of late (the numbers shown on the FAQ section of the site is not up-to-date), but I can give a pretty solid estimation based on what I've inboxed over the last year since I archive the tracks on my own hard drive. There will be some direct rejections that I didn't archive since those tracks were either soundcloud tracks without a D/L link, or the tracks were 404'd, so there's probably 20% more direct rejections than I'm giving credit for on here. Be aware. Out of ~370 tracks I've inboxed over the last eleven months that I have on record: 22% are direct rejections (rejected via e-mail, the track doesn't make it to the panel). 8% are direct posts (passes on the spot, the track doesn't make it to the panel unless the judges object). The rest (70%) are sent to the panel. Of those panel'd, I can use my basic memory of what passed and what didn't pass and give a solid estimate of the panel's current pass rate. I could check everything on the site and get a 100% accurate number, but that would be incredibly time consuming - I hope y'all understand. Crunching the numbers, about 50% of what gets to the panel gets rejected. ... Yeah, that number sounds unbelievable to me too, but that's what number crunching every track that I've panel'd comes up to. Since it's based on my memory of the tracks passing or being rejected it's a good idea to say that this is +/- 10%, so the worst case I can conceive of is that the panel's pass/rejection rate is 60/40 in one direction or another (probably 40% YES, 60% NO, which makes sense when you look in the Judges Decisions forum). That's surprisingly uplifting - I didn't expect that when I started crunching numbers. Based on that, of all the tracks submit in the inbox that I've handled over the last year about 40% ultimately passed on to the front page, with the most conservative estimates being closer to 30% (a far cry from the 10-15% mentioned in the FAQ). Damn, we're a bunch of softies on the panel, what the hell. Do take these numbers with more than a grain of salt, though: this was a quick numbers-crunch from what I have access to, just to give the public an idea of how things are in the panel nowadays.

Only checking this out while prepping it for posting, but congratulations on producing what sounds like a super-authentic Japanese arrange album piece. Excellent sound to the guitar in particular for setting that tone, IMO, and all of the performances and part-writing were on point. A bit cluttered, but the space was filled up well, and certainly nothing dinging this on any meaningful level. Beautiful work, gentlemen! YES

I'm a little late to the party here, but here's my two bits. (Gee, Hoboka, you must be ready to start a small business with all the change you have off this thread ) IMO, there is nothing currently wrong with OCR's panel. The OCR submission guidelines are fairly good at laying out what OCR expects from submissions for posting; of course, like any organization, they have certain subjective expectations (genre, precedent, etc.) for the material they choose to endorse and it is up to them to determine whether it fits their standard or it doesn't. If you want something posted here, you have to play by their rules, period - and if their standard doesn't fit yours, there are lots of other places you can go to advertise or show off your music. Likewise, as ACO implied, just because you're rejected by OCR doesn't immediately mean to the world "YOU SUCK" or "FO" or "we don't like your kind here" - it just means it doesn't currently fit OCR's standard. Some folks might be aware that I had a project I'm working on rejected by OCR in the not-too-distant past; sure, some of the things said stung and perhaps I didn't agree with all the feedback, but these are simply folks telling me where the tracks are and what is needed to bring them closer to the standard - so I could have chosen to pack my ball up and go home, but I've chosen to continue the project (despite some absences due to life stuff) and use the feedback to improve the album. I've also had folks reach out to me to offer help and advice if necessary in light of the rejection, which is one of the things I love most about this site. 'No skill in mixing? No problem, let's ask ___ for some help. No good string samples? No problem, let's see if ___ has an opening in their schedule. No good distortion pedals for your guitar? No problem, let's see if ____ has the sound you're looking for.' This community is full of folks who want to help and they are NOT hard to find. Personally, I'm fine with the standard and I don't care how long it takes for the panel to review - I respect the time it takes for judging, I respect the opinion of the panel, accept that it is an opinion, and use it as an indicator of where my tracks are and where they need to go to fit that standard. Given Gario's comment on repetition that started this whole thing, has anyone thought to just add a bit of variation in harmony, bass, percussion, or maybe all three? Or, if you're attached to the repetition, asked Gario how you could keep the copy pasta but add enough variation to be accepted by judges? I just think it's pretty clear what wait time was expected and what the reasons for rejection were, so maybe the solution is to address the concerns and resubmit instead of jumping on the judges for how they do what they do. Plus, if you don't want to wait for the panel, I'm sure either Gario or Rozovian would be willing to take a look at things in shorter order to give you an idea of how it would go on the panel. Heck, I'm sure there's lots of other folks reading this willing to give you a hand too, if that's what you think you need. I don't know how much easier they could make it for us. Just my opinion. Another wall of text for the, er, wall.

Oh... Woooooow, guys, this is super dope. Such folk tunes are always love-or-hate for me, and this one is certainly what I can listen, listen and listen repeatedly for a loooong time Very beatiful stuff with a smooth soothing vibe. Nailed it!

Oh, a newcomer! Welcome to OCR! Bringing over an Asgore arrangement for your first outing? Good choice - that was a great soundtrack, with this being a solid penultimate boss music track. You nail the notes, as far as I can tell, and I can hear some interesting things done with some of the textures in the background (like the guitar part). Sounds like you had some real fun with this one. The samples used, are they out of the box from FL studios? You probably know they sound stiff and unconvincing, but I'll mention it really quick once again. I'm personally terrible at handing out advice on this topic (being an oldschool Reason user, I never had to deal with VSTi's), but Zircon made a guide a while back that has some good advice on how to expand your music library on a budget (or free, even). You seem to know how to handle your instruments well enough to where expanding your library will be greatly beneficial (even with freely available tools). Thanks for sharing!

I have to agree with ACO here; usually big dreams start small and he brings up some other good points. You might want to reconsider your approach here. Also not sure when/if/how law should be involved here, of course the law firm has their own agenda (and bank account) and personally I would just try to inquire how, for example, OCR or Materia Collective did those albums and maybe release it there in stead of going full Indie on it. Just $0.02.

Honestly, you seem to have a great many of grand plans, but none pan out — just my observation. Perhaps you should take a moment to consider that the legal hurdles and the costs involved in producing a CD of video game remixes when no one even buys CDs anymore is a lofty goal that should maybe not be pursued further. I also don't see why one would want to do this when OCR produces FF albums pretty regularly that get tons of promotion, lots of listeners, etc. Why not just get on one of those or try and start up one? So yes, I think you're going about it the wrong way and dreaming to big compared to what you've proven you can do. Start small.

i actually killed my macbook that way. spilled a tiny amount of water in my bag and SIX MONTHS later it died and voided the warranty.

I was going to say the exact same thing, only referencing a different compo and Welcome to my Kastle. @Rozovian: Yeah, the last month or two have been slow. But most of this year has been vastly faster than it used to be. Pacing is always going to be irregular because we all have lives, but the days when the queue had multiple submissions in it that had been sent in a year or more ago are long gone.

Way back, there was an FL-based compo with that specific format, i.e. only using what was out of the box. It resulted in one of my personal favorites here, Rellik's Zelda II mix, "Mirror and Transparent".

I'll provide my thoughts on this. I've been following the thread since it started, but as it concerns judging, I don't think my position as an evaluator (on vacation) is all that relevant. But I have some insight into what goes on in staff, and tend to get posted when I sub something. So here goes. *Make the panel faster - my current perception, without access to the judges' forum, is that things have slowed down significantly. The number of completed decisions threads dropped quite low during October, and the Currently in the Judging Process thread hasn't been updated since summer. For the record, I subbed something this summer, so the apparent state of things bugs me a bit for that reason too. I think the panel needs more judges. The biggest objection seems to concern breaking ties, but that can be resolved by just deciding that after 6 votes and still no majority, it'd get a formal "resub" response. When a resub isn't possible (live recording with live recording issues, lost project files etc), then it could be decided by a tiebreaker vote from djp. But the small active team vs. large team of less active people objection is valid too. I think that's a question of work ethic and perceived need for one's own effort, but that's a different conversation. *Scrutinize Yes votes - Not sure what can be done here. It would be nice to get some numbers on submissions vs. form rejections vs. NO vs. YES vs. direct posts, but that's numbers someone's gonna have to put together then. But that's not quite what's being asked for in this thread. *Valid criticisms - Yes there are. And you don't know what's being discussed (or what members of staff are trying to discuss) in staff forums and staff discord. And OCR has taught us all that criticism is useful. *Nice writeups - This has been addressed. For me, when I do an eval, I first want to listen to the remix (and source), and if I don't understand what's going on, why it sounds a particular way and have an issue with it, then I might look for an answer in the first post or elsewhere in the thread. I'm of the opinion that things have to _sound_ intentional. A bad speaker/lofi radio sound intro has to be obvious. A chiptune section can't just be a section with super-simple synthwork. Intent doesn't matter there, writeups don't matter - sound does. Although it would be nice to see more people say what DAW and instruments they used. Were the really cool strings in a mix from a big, expensive strings library, or some free soundfont? Is that guitar live or shreddage or a piano soundfont with distortion on it? *Lower the bar slightly - Nah. But I would like to see some a remix compo where people only use the instruments and effects that came with the DAW. That would show what the basic tools are actually capable of in the hands of experienced and skilled remixers, which would give the clueless newbs and strugglings forum veterans something to learn from. Better yet if these compo mixes are submitted and pass the bar, because then it's official - what's in the box is good enough. For that set of genres and sounds, at least. *Reconsider links in rejections - Not likely. Remixer privacy is an issue. There was recently a case of a remixer who was upset that his name was included in the rejection. I can understand where he's coming from. So when it comes to rejected mixes floating around, I'd rather mine didn't. But there's always the option of telling the panel to leave the link in. This could be added to the submission information on the Submit page. Alex, dude, chill. You've got a good conversation going here. Don't derail your own thread by rushing unfiltered thoughts into it.

As can we all I know what you mean. I was a "Jack of all trades" type, but the problem was is that it's really expensive to get all the instruments or good virtual instruments to do a lot of different genres and there is a lot of esoteric knowledge involved in producing any kind of music. As such, I cheaped out on a lot of things and never spent enough time trying to get really good at anything in particular and I definitely paid for it...I'm also just never satisfied with my guitar sound and my passion for the instrument and metal music has died out, so I just play guitar for fun now and only occasionally feel like listening to rock. I spent the last year and some change working on improving my skills with composing contrapuntally, orchestration, cinematic sound design and buying quality libraries. As of one month ago, I at last have a template that I'm really happy with and it can easily play anything I throw at it and it sounds great. I may not be able to compose every genre of music, but what I can do I have a lot of fun with and always feel inspired to compose more and while those VSTis may have made my wallet cry, it really is awesome not having to surrender so many musical ideas to the mercy of mediocre samples.

I don't write purely symphonic/orchestral music because my computer is so terrible that my program shuts down when I try (it's a very poor computer nowadays) and I don't play guitar well enough to make metal music. I'm not withholding these genres for other's sake - I made this choice because I recognize these current limits. Being unable to make certain music due to what you have access to is a part of life for us poor peoples.

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'.

Welcome to the Bitwig geek circle. I love tracks like this, mellow, relaxing arrangement. The first 2 minutes were a bit repetitive, but the arrangement picks up and is very varied. I didn't like the interactions between the two leads at 2:08, they seemed to be overlapping each other somehow fighting for attention. I think they would've been better off panned to each side and avoiding falling on the same melodies too often. The trumpet was much nicer though. I think the mix isn't too great, felt a bit muddy but not so much as to make the different elements unclear. Nice Work. YES

Really chill mix of the original source. Great to see more obscure games getting represented. I enjoy the overall instrumentation you have here, the strings, the shuffling drums, the guitar is a little loud but otherwise nicely mixed. The breakdown at 1:49 is really nice and was needed. Changing the lead up to a violin here really strengthened this transition and made it feel like a different part, even though the other elements played very similarly. The horns after this also added some nice change of flavour to reused parts of your arrangement. This also closes out nicely too. I don't have any major crits with this. As said the guitar is a little loud, and after I listened through I thought the drums could've used some variation, but these niggles weren't major drawbacks for me. YES

Wow, this is a bit of an obscure track. It's very easy to pull the source out of this track regardless, and this arrangement transforms the source into something more light hearted and fun. The guitar part that comes in at various points in the track (such as at 0:10) is mixed a little too loud in the track, but otherwise I don't have much to critique on this one. It's a great little combination of instruments that just has a lot of fun with the source, and I love it. Short judgment, but there really isn't much to be said - it's great. YES

What a chill theme! You guys have definitely taken this to the max level of relaxation with some great instrumentation choices and very smooth performances. I enjoyed that there was a good changeup between the leads where nothing overstayed its welcome. I do think the duo between the violin and the harmonica at 2:06 feels a little awkward as they both take up similar space in the mix and feel a little bit 'clashy'. Nothing big enough to be a deal breaker, just a critique. Very nice! YES