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Well to get started, you may look into the US legal system's definitions of "Fair Use", which allows for the use of material if it's used for educational purposes, parody, or sufficiently transformative, AND if there is no profit involved in redistributing the material. It's not a bulletproof, anything-goes silver bullet for all things remixing, but it is often the justification used for the distribution of rearranged music on OCR. If you have questions about the whole process, the basic wiki for fair use (and it's links) are a fair place to start, as well as looking at OCR's FAQ section and our content policy section (OCR has a lot of experience dealing with this very issue!). Again, there is no silver bullet, and honestly things are resolved on a case-by-case basis, but in general that's the blanket justification for arranging VG music, which most companies understand and silently comply with. As far as the asshat who is stealing YOUR music, there is no fair use justification for stealing your material and claiming it as their own. You made it, you have a defacto copyright on the material, so if you want to go through the effort you could get Soundcloud to remove it. Up to you, but yeah, that guy has no right to take your music as-is and simply claim it's his.

Guess what came in?

This is a killer track. I'm really not feeling the complaints about the repetition. The percussion stays fresh, the syncopation rocks, and I dig the whole texture with the strings and synths. I will co-sign one complaint though: that fadeout is no good. I use fadeouts all the time and I will go on the record in saying that this is the wrong way to do a fadeout. Let's break it down: The fadeout is only 4-bars long. This is really bad in a song that relies a lot on groove. It's just too short of a fadeout. The volume drops significantly, right on the downbeat. It sounds like it's just a single-curve with no adjustment to the tension (i.e. it's just...linear). Despite the song fading out, you can still hear when it ends. Why fadeout at all? Here's how I'd fix it: a song like this needs a fadeout of at least 8 bars. I would do 12. Use a double-curve with the tension adjusted so that the fadeout is VERY gradual when it starts, then drops out faster, and then returns to a gradual fade into silence. In FLStudio it looks like this: And while the fadeout is happening, just solo/doodle in your lead over your vamping rhythm section. This gives the impression that the song is continuing, but ALSO that it's not REALLY important to hear the rest. I wanna vote YES on this but I'm gonna say NO. That fadeout is really jarring. Let's fix it up and get this resubbed, fast-tracked, and posted.

Off the bat, the EPiano sounds stiffly sequenced and all the elements sound pretty dry and upfront (like the acoustic kit). This pretty much becomes a non-issue as it switches gears into a nice glitchy dnb style. I 100% agree with MindWanderer here. I will agree, though, that some of the sounds are a bit bland/vanilla sounding. I wasn't really feeling the synth at 4:51, which is pretty loud, esp in the 2khz or so range. I actually wasn't a big fan of the guitar that followed as the fakey sample is pretty exposed with upfront it is. I agree the string stabs aren't really cutting it here, but they (and the piano near the end), could at the very least be helped by some reverb to soften the tones and help them blend better. Gonna reiterate that all of the sound effects have to be removed before we can post this, for which I also share the concern that they are being depended on at times to stretch the length of some sections. You may want to consider trimming a bit if this proves true. Actually, now that I write this, I'm also concerned that some of the synths used in this mix are actually sampled from the original, including the main bass synth used throughout. Warning, somewhat useless background info incoming So, back in the day, Alexander Brandon did his pc game soundtracks in a .umx soundtrack. This was true for Unreal Tournament and the original Deus Ex. I remember in the early 2000's using a Mod tracker to listen to and mess with the Unreal Tournament soundtrack, because it allowed you to access & isolate (perhaps even edit?) individual sounds used within the songs. In all, I'm pretty sure the main bass synth (used throughout) is sampled from :13 & 1:03 of the original. Also, the phased pad at 1:03 appears to be sampled from :01 of the OST. I Initially thought the synth at 2:45 sounds like it's taken from :38 of the OST, though it plays some different notes, so it's probably just a similar tone. TLDR; beyond the fact that Square Enix content needs to be removed anyway, it's worth noting that large portions of the track that connect to the OST are likely sampled from the original audio. NO