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I tried to keep this brief, but as you might know, that's not my forte. FIRST, the facts... On October 28th I informed staff that I was stepping down from my role as president/admin/owner/etc. of OverClocked ReMix, and on November 1st I also stepped down from the board of Game Music Initiative, the 501c3 non-profit organization that funds OCR. In short, I no longer feel I have the bandwidth to do these roles justice and to not only maintain, but advance, the missions of both projects. I will be working with Shariq Ansari (DarkeSword) to transition my responsibilities and ensure continuity of operations. The (excellent!) mix posted on Halloween was published without my direct involvement, subsequent posts up to the milestone #OCR04500 have been superbly executed, and I am confident that staff will continue the work necessary to operate - and evolve - OCR in my absence. I will be even less available than I have been, lately, so I apologize in advance for any lack of responsiveness. THEN, the feels... Where to even begin? It's hard to encapsulate over two decades of history; omissions are inevitable. What began as a neat side project I started in my parents' basement in 1999 snowballed into something far beyond my wildest expectations, due to the blood, sweat, tears, and unbridled, rampant creativity that thousands of you have contributed. Much of this happened before social media was even a thing and before the platforms/services we now heavily associate with the modern internet had come into being; it was a frontier, and we were on it, and we took it pretty seriously because we knew how amazing VGM is, how creative arrangements could effectively convey and explore that vast musical landscape, and how a small fandom communicating via email, IRC, & forums could collaborate to build mighty, new things. We took it seriously, often too seriously, but we ALSO played more than a few rounds of Shaq-Fu at conventions, made some truly ridiculous (but always musical!) joke mixes, and developed internal circles of lore with our own memes & jargon. NOT in strictly chronological order: there was some drama with now-legendary composer Jake Kaufman; VGMix entered the fray; we added a judges panel so it wasn't just me making stuff up; we released our first community album; the unmoderated forum birthed its own sort of... subculture; the site itself evolved to be database-driven and not just two giant dropdowns sorted by game/date; we posted mixes submitted by composers George "The Fat Man" Sanger and Jeremy Soule; we met/interviewed Hiroki Kikuta and Nobuo Uematsu; our album trailers by the incomparable José the Bronx Rican started blowing minds; we started appearing in person at Otakon, PAX, MAG, others - much love to all for having us; we bumped into Leeroy Jenkins at ROFLcon and gave him a hoodie; we started hosting from our own server and managing the technical side of things ourselves; thanks to Mr. Shael Riley (among others!), we got to remix the music for an actual Street Fighter game (!!); we released fifteen more albums... ...and then we turned ten, on December 11th of 2009. Quite a first decade, and I missed hundreds of things I shouldn't have. Hundreds of firsts, some tragic lasts, and millions of memories that can't quite be conjured by words. In 2011, we stood up for Fair Use at World’s Fair Use Day, an event organized by the non-profit Public Knowledge. In 2012, we launched our kickstarter for Final Fantasy VI: Balance and Ruin, it was taken down, we talked with Square lawyers directly for a couple hours and made the non-profit project structure clear & contractual, and we relaunched a successful kickstarter. That's not always how those things go! We launched Game Music Initiative in 2016, creating an official 501c3 charity to formalize the finances around OCR and potentially support other VGM-related projects, too. On a related note, I’ve absolutely loved seeing OC ReMixes featured by charity speedrunners Games Done Quick (GDQ) - it’s exactly the type of thing I always wanted to see, that synergy. Things do start getting a little quieter from then on out, and I think there are a ton of reasons for that, but it has been an incredible and improbable journey that I wouldn't have missed for the world. Thank you ALL for making it possible; OCR was always yours, I aspired only to stewardship of something I wanted to exist for everyone. FINALLY, the future… It's time - some would say past time - for OverClocked ReMix itself to be ReMixed. That's the point, right? Infinite permutation; endless possibility. You don't always know the day, month, or even year when your influence on something starts holding it back, or when the waning amount of time and energy you can dedicate becomes a liability. That type of certainty is often elusive; it can be a difficult diagnosis to even contemplate, and you need to look for & listen to signs. In addition to just being too much of a single point of failure for OCR (sorry, engineering mindset), the last year I've been asking myself whether it was time to let go, and I think the answer is sometimes in the asking. I have been stretched thin, like butter scraped over too much bread, and that's when you leave the Shire. Beyond representing what I genuinely believe is best for the future of OCR, I absolutely confess a personal wish to redirect reclaimed time & energy to my family and my own music. Being a husband to my wife Anna and being a father to our daughters Esther and Sarah is my meaning; I have always put them first, but now I can put them even MORE first. Esther just started learning trombone, so in a few years, expect a collab! Sarah is building her confidence learning piano & makes me proud every day. I want to write new music for them, and with them, and that requires more time than I've had. I believe the principles that have driven us - embracing all games & all styles of music, emphasizing interpretation & creativity, offering both curation and critique, and providing a non-commercial platform for those who seek it - are truly timeless, but there are many ways to honor them. I look to the new leadership/staff to galvanize, streamline, diversify, and re-imagine, within that immense space. I'll be leaving them with some ideas of my own; please let them know yours. I ask the community to support them, embrace change, provide guidance, and be patient; I believe it will be worth it! Thanks, - djpretzel

Wow David. 21 years I've been coming to slash lurking on this site. Downloaded every SINGLE mix posted on this site between mid-2003 and mid-2009; like Hu said above, OC ReMix was absolutely the soundtrack of my high school and college years. I bought my first MP3 player years before the iPod to store more mixes than a CD could hold. This site has always been home to some incredible artists, and oh the memories. I remember when Jillian Aversa was Jillian Goldin. I downloaded Shariq's first mix the night it was posted... I was floored by Relics of the Chozo, had it on repeat for weeks. I remember unMod and I was there when it shut down. Years and YEARS of reading the Coop's 'Twas' every Christmas lol... Good times and bad lurking about for 2 decades. But I want to say in no uncertain terms that I think you, David, personally, have done some incredible work to not only legitimize game music as the art form it is, but to create a place where hundreds could find like minded people to hone their craft with. Danny Baranowsky, Big Giant Circles, Brandon Strader, Joshua Morse, Andy and Jill... the list of folks composing or involved in audio engineering and games specifically goes on and on. Not that any of them wouldn't have been successful without what you created here, but you were responsible for planting the seed that began this amazing community. I'm still not a musician, doubt I ever will be. But from the moment I downloaded your very own 'Sunken Suite' in 2002 and heard what could be done by musicians who loved a song as much as I did? That changed my life David, in some small way, it really did. Thank you for that. Thank you for 24 years of sharing your best with us, thank you for what you've created and the legacy you've started. Here's to you, your family, your free time and your next mix. We'll be waiting for it. Cheers brother. :)

It's funny - from an OCR fan's perspective who has been listening since ~2001 but not submitting music to the site until 2019, I kind of saw djp as this VGM Morpheus, the leader of a secret circle of super cool musicians/programmer people. I guess that's what the early Internet was like to a kid before social media. But obviously people are just people who are pulled in this direction and that throughout the chapters of their lives. Still, it was a surreal moment to finally see my first OCR mix posted 4 years ago with a cool writeup from the man himself. That was very exciting and very validating, even more validating than getting approved by the judges panel, if I'm being honest. A full-circle moment for me. I always appreciated the care that he put into his write-ups for each ReMix, going back the early-mid aughts when I started downloading every other track this site would publish (sometimes I would read them and not even listen to the song because I liked the writing that much). Very happy to hear that there will be no retirement from music. Even if that wound up being the case, the existing djp catalog would speak for itself. Some of those ReMixes were parts of my formative years of being a music listener, and years after I go deaf from mixing my mids too loud I will still be humming them in my head. I can recall listening to "Love Hurts" on a burned CD on the school bus in I think 9th or 10th grade. I think he set the standard for OCR music in terms of creativity and quality (along with a few others) very early on, which helped OCR legitimize itself. So, thank you for all of that.

thanks for all the stuff with the things

Hi there! I'm not really a remixer insofar as I've just barely dabbled in very basic audio programs; the extent of my canoodling with VGM comes from playing along to a track on the piano and messing around on the fly. But I've played piano and cello for decades and have always loved VGM, and I used to frequent this site without an account when I was younger. I still have fond memories of the first time I heard DaMonz and Trainbeat's "Tough It Out"; no other Kirby remix has come close in my mind. I've always been interested in the scene, even more so when insaneintherain and the 8-Bit Big Band came into prominence, and I hope that even with the limited free time I do have I can become a bit more familiar with the communities involved. (Magfest has always been a bucket list convention for me, lol) Neither here nor there, but I'm also still on a years-long crusade to figure out the identity of one remixer who had their work stolen by fairuzonss. To this day no one in the Kirby community that I've seen has figured it out and I do worry about the metadata becoming lost in the cracks of an ever-evolving mediascape. So if anyone wants to contribute info I'm all ears haha Thanks for being an inspiration all these years, OCRemix ❤️

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Your neat side project enabled some of the most impactful moments of my life. From life-affirming moments shared with a musical hero, to connecting with 4-year-olds over a picture of an SNES controller on my hoodie a dozen years later. Thanks for it all djp. Ya done good. Ya done real good.

never heard Everything Connected before but i love it. intro is very slow with some sfx and intentional artifacting. the initial riff with the aug 4 from FF8 is in the keys after the first big hit at 0:48, with the subsequent progressions weaving in and out of that pattern. the clock sfx is a nice addition around the time motif. we get a beat at 2:02 after a neat transition that might be a little heavy on highs, but it's still ticking through until it finally hits after some great sidechain action at 2:27. around the 2:50 mark, we finally get the first red wings cameo that i've heard. there's a drop at 3:15 or so, and we start getting some more off-time content which is a neat addition. this entire section from like 3:30 onward is really intense, there's a ton going on but it mostly stays audible throughout. there's the breakdown-rebuild section mentioned above, which is pretty neat, and then we're back into the melodic content at 4:16. this is still mostly compression of time, but there's definitely some red wings content in there. 5:04 is the last big hit (with a touch of distortion, not sure it's intentional). there's some significant falling action after this section. 5:30 or so is a significant shift - it's way slower, the beat is much more plodding intentionally, and the vibe is totally different. 6:07 is kind of the beginning of the end - it's a very clear shift away from tempo sync, with a lot more flexibility as the track finishes out. there's some very languid red wings motivic stuff in here but it's pretty stretchy. i cannot believe you did this in one week. the breadth of complexity is nuts here. there's certainly a bit of crunch in the mastering occasionally, but the quality of content in this track is incredible. you should probably stop doing this kind of stuff for free. YES edit 11/7: no complaints here. this song is a triumph.

Kweh! I didn't logged in here since the day I joined, so it's probably worth to finally say hello instead of leaving the profile in ghost mode. I'm Unknown Pseudoartist but many people calls me just "UPA" as abbreviation. Most likely no one ever heard of me here but I'm infamously known in Dwelling of Duels, a monthly videogame music contest, for invading that place with weird shitposts using a silly vocal style to replace the main melody/leads (a vocal style that eventually was called as "chocobo vocals" or "birb noises"). It wasn't my intention to actually get into music making in a serious way, but just ruining other people's works to make people laught and help making this world a funnier place for everyone. However, my pseudomusic was unexpectedly warmly welcome to that place and eventually, as I got the support of so many kind and talented artists, I discovered that I can also make my own arrangements and cool stuff with it, and so I started trying serious stuff too that goes far awary from that silly shitpost thing I started doing 3 years ago. So, among my many archievements in the VGM scene there's the invasion of DoD by a bunch of chocobos over arguably decent music and crawling a lot of people to do more of that same thing along with me, the release of a 3-part album with 30 tracks each that was released 3/3/23 featuring over 33 musicians after 3 years of experience on this thing, and now also getting my best serious/non-bird track rejected (in my honest opinion unfairly) in OCR including accusations of "anonymous troll". Anyways, I just though that maybe it's a good time to extend the birds invasion to OCR territory, and maybe people here will eventually have their brains and ears hurt enough to actually like that stuff, just like I succeded doing in DoD. If anyone is curious enough after reading that message, you can find most of my music stuff here: https://unknownpseudoartist.bandcamp.com/ For examples of both sides (shitpost and serious), here's the first/main part of that 3-discs album, including mostly VGM covers with that "chocobo vocal style" and a few serious/instrumental tracks in between: https://unknownpseudoartist.bandcamp.com/album/unknown-pseudoalbum And here's a mostly serious album that is basically a collection of VGM covers from old DBZ fighting games (all from the Butouden saga except the first one, from Ultimate Battle 22). All here is instrumental and serious except the latest 2 tracks and bonus tracks, so no need to be afraid of the birds . https://unknownpseudoartist.bandcamp.com/album/metal-dragons-a-tribute-to-dragon-ball-z-games Thanks in advance to anyone who dares to listen

noooooooo! plz dont leave !!!!!!!!!!!! NOOOOOOOO! WHERE CAN I DW ALL THE SONGS IN A SINGLE FILE__??!