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Been ages since I did any compos here. I'm in. 1. MM2- Metal man 2. MM8 Tengu Man (Sega Saturn Version) 3. MM9 Magma Man

@timaeus222 I think you're going in a perceived loudness direction which is a little more advanced than the kind of issue BloomingLate has. The issue here is simply that OP doesn't understand the dB scale, which is the "absolute loudness" measurement he's looking for. BloomingLate, you can raise the master track of your song up to 0 dB FS, which is the digital limit for clipping. You should always mix to 0 dB because that's the standard for mastering. 0 dB is marked at the top of the loudness meter in your DAW software. The dB number has absolutely no bearing on the perceived sound energy without a consideration of dynamic range (you can still have soft music where its loudest peak is 0 dB). If you don't like a high amount of sound energy, mix to 0 dB but avoid any master compression or limiting so that nothing goes over. In other words, avoiding 0 dB doesn't mean you're avoiding making the music sound too loud, you're just annoyingly making people raise their volume knobs relative to all the other music they listen to. To explain your own example, trance music isn't loud because it's at 0 dB (the "red" part), it's loud because it's very compressed with little dynamic range, so the sound energy over time is packed and you feel it harder in your ears. For a practical solution to your problem, you can also render your mix so it never hits 0 dB (to truly avoid the need any master compression and limiting) and then just Normalize it. This will make your music at least hit the same peak that other music does, and shouldn't require the listeners to vastly pump up the volume to hear. However, I would wager that without any compression whatsoever, people will still be raising their volumes. Most music is compressed in some form nowadays, and I can't remember the last album I saw with full dynamic range (besides classical music, which is impossible to listen to in environments like the car because of said dynamic range). As for the volume levels of your devices (headphones, laptops, stereo), none of that stuff matters at all. If someone's listening device is quiet and they need to dial it to 70% to hear anything, that's their problem. If your music is mixed to the same standards as everyone else, then it will sound the same on their system as any other music they listen to, and that's what you shoot for. This is the 0 dB thing I was talking about before. How loud it sounds is a matter of handling dynamic range using stuff like compression, and that's what Timaeus is talking about with referencing a track to match the perceived loudness. That stuff is its own rabbithole and takes a lot of learning and experience to understand how to do properly. tl;dr If you mix it so that you go up to but never cross 0 dB, you will never blow out speakers/headphones and your signal won't distort. This is one of those things that should just be automatic for every piece of music you create.

That 1st round matchup between you and TGH was the toughest one to vote on! You both deserved to progress in the compo!

Yeah, it's legit one of my favorite MM songs to arrange; it has a lot of potential for expansion, with it's constant mixture of major & minor. Here's hoping I get more than one arrangement out of this compo, too (assuming I get Wind Man, of course).

We have 12, which technically can work because it will give us a three-way battle at the end. It would be nice to have 16 but if 4 more people don't sign up in the next couple of days, we'll roll with this.

Sounds good, but I don't get how this is all laid out. I don't recognize most of those songs... then they have a little block that are just the boss songs? Curious to say the least.

Alright, so sorry for taking so long to get to this after your request, Audiomancer; work has given me little space to work with. EVAL Dragonquest - a classic series that doesn't get enough love, that's for sure. I'll say this first: for the most part, the production is fairly good. The mixing is generally where it needs to be, and I don't hear too much crowding, so nice work on that. The arrangement would probably cause some issues for an OCR submission, since this sounds like two very different songs put together rather than a single, cohesive experience, and I don't think the songs are expansive enough to count as individual arrangements in their own right (really just playing through one loop of the source each, if I'm not mistaken). I hate to come down on instrument quality since understandably not everyone has the money to fork for better instruments, but I can't deny that many of the instruments in this are too low quality to pass the panel. The organ is pretty solid, the choir can work and the square waves are... well, square waves (they're fine), but the other instruments definitely felt low quality. One can still make them work with a LOT of envelope manipulation (e.g. automating the attack, delay, reverb, levels, etc., to make them sound more "real"), but it would be crushingly difficult to do so. What you have here is really cool, but it's difficult to write orchestral music with cheap or free instruments. It's not impossible (Darkesword does a pretty good job with free soundfonts, iirc), but it's very tough, so be prepare to learn how to automate the envelopes of your samplers in order to get the most out of your instruments, if you want to keep going down this route. Alternatively, you can take a more hybrid approach (which is how I like to do things, personally), and utilize more synths and such - make something sound intentionally fake rather than emulating reality. More than one way to approach this, but yeah, if the arrangement didn't hold this back the instrument quality would get this rejected on the panel. Again, though, the production quality (clipping, mixing, etc.) is pretty good here, so I think you show off some solid skills with this. This wouldn't pass on the panel, but it does help illuminate what does and doesn't work, as well as why. I do hope to hear more from you sometime, even if it isn't this track, per se. Hope this helps!

Well, for one, at least start your mixing on headphones, and not your laptop speakers. They are certainly not designed for mixing, and you know they have no bass, and so they will not sound right anyway... ----- There is no exactly correct loudness, but you can get close to what is too loud for you. I probably listen to music about 3 dB louder than other people, but it allows me to hear more detail, it still doesn't hurt my ears, and I still write music with consistent loudnesses. YMMV. I have a loudness reference that I like to use. This song is about as loud as I would listen to before I don't want to turn it up any higher. Try it when your ears are cleared, on your system when using the headphones specifically, and turn the internal system volume up until you want to turn it down, and find that balance (if you are using "Audio Enhancements" or whatever it is on your OS, turn that off, it messes with you). Establish a consistent perceived loudness for your different listening scenarios for the same song, that ALSO uses the same internal system volume. That is, try to make the same song feel about as loud across the board... but keep the internal system volume the same to make it easier on yourself. To further adjust volumes on speakers, turn the knob on the hardware, instead of changing the internal system volume. That way you are at least keeping one setting constant across your comparisons.

I use a pink noise generator. I set it to -12db, then mix relative to that. One track at a time I level them so that they can barely be heard over the pink noise. This makes the levels consistent, and most of the time it ends up putting the mix at between -9 and -6 depending on the project. 9/10 times that is actually a decent volume that isn't obnoxiously loud, but it also leaves a lot of headroom if for whatever reason the mix needs to be made louder.

I am thouroughly enjoying this.

Is there a consistent and objective authority on how loud an audio track should be? A little bit YES and NO. There's a whole world of debate on this subject (Google "Loudness Wars", just as an example) and is a very prominent audio subject for the absolute audio production masters to bring to the forefront of attention. You can get to a consistent standard of loudness based on numbers if you like, but there isn't really a universal standard that applies to audio production all throughout the world. You can build that consistency yourself, you can find an experienced audio professional to ask on that (maybe slip'm a few bucks to loosen their lips), or just pay a mastering engineer to handle it and use THAT as the example to go for. That's not a very concrete answer. Think of it like schools of martial arts. You can make up your own fighting style out of scratch, you can study under a strict discipline, you can do something in between and still potentially learn how to fight effectively, but there's no universal perfect answer for the question of how to learn martial arts. What I do is set my audio computer's standard volume at 61. THAT is the audio level that my personal taste and experience says is the perfect spot there. If the audio track I'm working on sounds too loud at 61, then I turn the entire track way down. If it's not loud enough at 61, I turn the whole track way up. But then, if I'm ready to publish the song or album, I do hire out for a mastering engineer to take care of it because I don't do mastering and just trust that they know what they're doing.

For old times' sake @WillRock (it took me a loooooong time to dig up and find this image)

Found this on https://www.sonicstadium.org/2018/07/sonic-mania-cheat-codes-discovered/. Figured it was worth sharing.

I've been on the panel for nearly 14 years at this point, so I've seen a lot and done a lot to guide this process. I can't vote on everything, so it has happened where I run into a case like this where a track gets rejected and I'm strongly against it. This is one of those times. A word of caution to any current or future Js reading this; provided you really think a submission is good, yet you're thinking the Standards are somehow against it, then the best way to make your case is to refer to and quote the Submissions Standards. That wasn't done here, and it seemed like the initial feelings questioning the dynamics and level of substance led the day, while missing the bigger picture of this arrangement's strengths. Before I get to a vote, let me say that I'll be updating the Judges Panel Wiki/FAQ page to note that we welcome artists telling us if they think we're substantially off-base and appealing a decision, because that's always been our policy even if we haven't spelled that out. If someone gripes in a different way than coming to us, we also will treat that as an appeal, because whenever we're challenged about a decision, we're always willing to revisit it. It doesn't matter whether the artist is calm or upset, and it isn't influenced by whether an artist will submit music in the future. That said, we do take the integrity and consistency of the process seriously. Situations like these can't 100% be avoided, but provided I see another posted ReMixer 3N'ed like this, I'll be more likely to check the track before moving out the decision thread. In this case, the original decision was in 2015, but that doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be reassessed, either due to stubbornness or how much time has elapsed since the decision. --------------------------------------- Onto the track itself... The track was 2:14-long, so I needed to hear the source tune used for at least 67 seconds for the VGM to be dominant within the arrangement. :20-:26, :29-:34, :36-1:07, 1:15-1:21, 1:23.5-1:28, 1:31-1:37, 1:39-1:54, 1:57.5-2:10 = 73.5 seconds or 54.8% overt source usage I'm likely shortchanging it, but I'm just timing it out to establish that I heard the Tornado Man theme in play for most of the performance. My rebuttal to the initial 3 NO votes: This is not too short. This is not too quiet or sparse. This is not lacking dynamics. I'm not sure how labeling this as quiet and sparse is justified; it's a solo piano piece with a pretty normal volume. Arrangement & interpretation-wise, you have a fast & upbeat 8-bit source tune adapted to solo piano, slowed down, switched to 3/4 time, given a genteel presentation with subtle tempo changes and, IMO, strong performance dynamics. The overall dynamic curve of this piece may be narrower, but there are clearly noticeably fuller (e.g. :21, 1:11) and softer sections (e.g. :00, 1:48) that show off this arrangement as an intimate piano performance. How is this piece not substantial enough when it comes to interpretation of the source tune? It's only 2:15-long, but there's 0 repetition as far as the presentation & performance dynamics, and we have plenty of sub-2:30-long arrangements, including 8 in the past 4 years. It could be longer, but it's not underdeveloped; saying it wasn't a substantive enough approach given what in fact was done is not cut-and-dry, so I'm pulling this back to the panel for more votes. I'm not saying anyone has to vote with me; this isn't me trying to browbeat a change in this vote. However, after hearing this piece, I feel like the panel made a mistake with this original vote and that the Standards weren't properly applied, so, once again, I'm flipping a table. While the original votes will stand, I am calling for the current panelists to weigh in, and requesting a full majority vote of 6 YESs or NOs (i.e. 9 current judges, factoring in the votes here of 2 past judges). YES