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You already know Josh and I are down - we’ll be mashing AQA from Fusion with Heart of Fire from Castlevania Aria of Sorrow

(Bit late, but The Coop had a point.) 🦇 Ahhhhhhh, yes. . . 'Tis the time, my children -- The Witching Hour *(GMT)! 🦇 Gather 'round!--for the Oogie Boogie Man has come to me bearing gifts on this eventful All Hallows' Eve! 🎃 It is (a)live, my darlings! The first ever 'Unofficial' An OverClocked Halloween, Volume I! 🪦 https://overclockedhalloween.boo/ 🪦 Get it now while it's *F R E S H* from the witches' brew, empowered by the fires of Hell and Brimstone!!! 😈 Have it in the background for your sordid partying affairs! Groove away the blasted day on-through till the dead of night with these wonderful tunes! I'd like to thank everyone who believed in this project: helped out, made the website, endorsed it, made their tracks for it (and placed them trustingly and lovingly into my claws to help produce and master), AND (lastly but not least-ly) those of **YOU** who're downloading the .zip folder *RIGHT NOW* and partaking of the treats (and tricks) this marvelous day! 🧡🌹 Thank you so, so much, from the bottom of my hearts (all three of them!!); have a lovely Halloween, and I look forward to spreading the spooky cheer next autumnal season, October 2026! ENJOY--and remember kids: "don't ever invite a vampire into your house, you silly [humans]. It renders you powerless!" 💀

Interesting chord options in that sample. I suppose I should've been a little more clear on my approach. I'm going more into a direction of non-functional harmony. I'm trying to get a blend of diatonic and non-diatonic, hence the A♮ in my composition. But I will consider the options you provided. That third chord sounds the most promising to me. It's unfortunate, though, because the E and E♭ is a bit jarring. But even with open voicings, I was hoping that it'd sound a little more pleasant. I'm trying to create a "desert" theme, but without going the stereotypical route. Anyway, thank you for your input. I appreciate it.

Hey all, this is a rework of my previous Metroid Fusion album/EP idea. Plan is for it to be an "official" OCR album, but wanted to put feelers out to make sure there was interest first. The idea is that every track uses a Fusion source and a secondary source, meaning the Fusion remixes from Game Set Mash 2 would all be eligible. Round 1 / Round 2 / Round 3 It doesn't have to be a literal back-and-forth; "pastiche" tracks (like something in the style of John Williams or Gorillaz) are acceptable as long as they follow the usual OCR submission guidelines. I'm hoping for about 8-15 tracks; there are 6 that would be eligible from Game Set Mash and then at least one I want to do personally. For release time we'd shoot for Fusion's 25th anniversary, so either November 2027 or we could do February 14 2028 if we needed an extension for some reason. EDIT: Also meant to mention Fusion sources can be used more than once. If you want to do AQA Depths three times, go for it!

Has anyone got any advice for getting back into the remix game after a 15 year absence? 😂 https://ocremix.org/artist/4705/random-hero For the first time ever, (my old computer was horribly underpowered 15 years ago, let alone now) I have a computer powerful enough to properly run my music software. But it’s been over a decade! Does that muscle even exist anymore? At times, it felt like those 5 years or so when I was active on this site were like me catching lightening in a bottle. Can I do it again, with new, more user friendly tools? I’m gonna find out! So to shake off some of the creative rust, I made this. I guess you could call it ‘The Angels of Hell: 15th Anniversary Re-Remix’ https://drive.google.com/file/d/14bPcavUvStgJAfFU_TtcKjWRj1_i1Qzd/view?usp=drive_link I used the sample pack from the original. Compared to what’s out there now, it might show its age a little (like me) It’s the same song structurally with a few additions, subtractions, alterations and substitutions with a way better mix. Wish me luck! RH (Ryan)

I didn’t come back to OCR after a 15-year hiatus (not unless you want to count a direct rejection from Larry himself), but I did come back to arranging VGM after a 10-year hiatus along with @pixelseph and joined OCR in so doing. I did the same thing you’ve already done: revisit and old completed project and do it again, only with better tools and more experience. In our case, Seph had done a few tracks with Team Dogfight for Homestuck, I took audio production courses in community college, and the two of us played in a few bands between 2012 and 2022, even did some studio recording time. We had a massive knowledge gap holding us back that we needed to fill before we felt comfortable coming to the community and revisiting old material got us back in the saddle, so to speak. Snappleman shared some wisdom in the Discord and I’m inclined to agree: if you’ve got any old backburner projects you didn’t finish, you could pick one of those up and see if you can complete it now.

Glad to see you wanting to get back into the swing of things musically. Don't forget to join the Discord server! https://discord.gg/ocremix - More folks are offering you advice there too. :-)

Random Hero! a name I havn't seen in ages (I LOVE your Squirrel Outta Hell Count Batula arrangement!) I only got in the mix game within the last 5 years ish, and my samples are terrible midi so I don't have much advice, just wanted to pop in and say I'm a fan!

Hey there old timer. The last time I did any serious music arrangement work regularly before the last couple of years was back in the first half of the '00s. I know where you're coming from. Technology now is at the point where I can make the kind of things I want to make easily and cheaply compared to 20+ years ago when it was all locked away in ivory towers and you couldn't just "go on YouTube to learn how to do something". If you still have a grasp of the arrangement fundamentals – and judging from your past contributions you did then and I doubt it's left you – you'll be fine. I have learned so much in the past few years through osmosis and from trying things out. That's the most important thing. Try things out. Like Zack said, join the Discord and hang out. There's usually a regular WIP commentary night called Office Hours on Wednesdays, but even outside of that, the #workshop is always active. Make stuff, see what others think.

Join the discord and mingle. Workshop is a great spot to rediscover yourself.

I was out of the arranging game for most of the last decade due to burnout and just not being able to harness any inspiration, and I'm back into it as hard as I ever was in the 2010s and I think I'm making my best stuff ever now. So yeah as long as the muse has grabbed you again you'll be fine!

I held off listening to any of the other tracks until after it was released. Lots of great stuff on this, and a fair bit of variety among them as well. Looking forward to participating next year as well.

I can literally smell a human sinner here. For this incredibly grave sin, you should regularly repent and synth hard! ... Dude, 15 years? Were you in a creative coma as a musician, snoring away comfortably like a huge Flemish Giant flopped into the cozy meadow, or were you somehow on the run from the Mafia or something? I mean, hey. I'm also kind of a pro at picking up an old remix from over 10 years ago and completely remixing it or rewriting the composition (simply because I've just started getting into music, composition, mixing and mastering around this time). But if you haven't done anything musically in all these years, you've really let yourself go and metaphorically left your passion in your bum bag. ... Nevertheless, welcome back to the club. ))

Just jumping in and writing is probably the best way. Work on the broad strokes of composition without focusing on details, making stuff you don't intend to polish to a 'finished product' to keep yourself familiar with tools, and possibly trying out ideas or techniques you are not as familiar with to stretch yourself. If you end up with something you particularly like the direction of, then maybe circle back to work more on it.

My understanding these days is the preferred way to emulate games on Linux is RetroArch (https://docs.libretro.com/guides/install-gnu/ ) which also integrates with really neat stuff like Retro Achievements.

Absolutely 100% agreed with Argle that this mix NEEDED to exist. Loved every second!

So i happened to find THIS absouletly SLAPPING metal orchestral Remix of the Cog Dancers song. Which is not only BEAUTIFUL but it just is like a Banger! So please find a way to get this song onto the site!

woah!!!

@Uffe von Lauterbach No problem. There are said to have been people who once tried to create soundscapes with dodecaphonic music. ;) But maybe let's approach it according to the rules of conventional harmony. You wrote that the piece is in E flat minor. This means that the following notes occur: Eb, F, Gb, Ab, Bb, Cb (B), Db. An Emaj13 chord contains the following 7 notes: E, G# (Ab), B, D# (Eb), F# (Gb), A, C# (Db). This means that only 5 of these 7 notes in the chord are part of the scale. And that obviously creates this brief dissonant interlude in the soundtrack. So you can either change the chord or the key to make this little passage sound more harmonious, although I would definitely modify the chord to match the key. I created an audio sample with 4 little piano chords for ya (everything arranged from the lower to the higher notes). Chord 1 >>> your Emaj13 chord that doesn't really fit your chosen scale (just for comparison) >>> notes: E, G# (Ab), H, D# (Eb), F# (Gb), A, C# (Db) Chord 2 >>> a highly depressing chord (but fitting your scale) >>> notes: Eb, Gb, Bb, Db, F, Ab, B Chord 3 >>> a little bit less depressing chord with a tiny spark of hope (fitting your scale) >>> notes: Eb, Gb, Bb, Db, F, Ab, Db+1 (1 octave higher than the previous D) Chord 4 >>> a rather inviting chord with a slightly eerie undertone of impending death (fitting your scale) >>> notes: F, Ab, B, Eb, Gb, Bb, D# It sounds like this: Piano Chords.mp3 Perhaps you should check whether one of these three chords would be more suitable for the critical part of your track. ... Have fun and good luck with your composing. ))

This will indeed become an annual album (classic, hopefully like AOCC). :) I will do my utmost to ensure it continues long after this year. ♡ Hope you enjoy it!

Well, you've got about 49 days to get something done. If you believe you can do that, then welcome aboard.

I didn't touch any Windows system since 2008-2009, when my transition to GNU/Linux and free software programs began. The times when Ubuntu was still good, basically. Of course my situation is kinda different, since I was not interested in music production back then (I barely started on this around 2020-2021, or arguably late 2022 - mid 2023 if you count only the serious attempts). So I hadn't any problem with any of the creative subjects or programs I was active in at the moment, as I had a proper replacement working for pretty much all programs I was used to before the transition, even if some of these weren't the most convenient. And regarding user interfaces and customizability and all that I couldn't be happier. Used to hard-closed and walled gardens all felt so fresh and so much like "my own system" in comparision... With music making, however, I was already hearing/reading comments online about how the situation on GNU/Linux and free software was still pretty rough and many steps away from other systems. So when I got into this (by totally accidental ways) in 2020 I expected the worst, but to my surprise all was a lot easier than expected. Surely a lot of stuff improved and lots of new programs, plugins, etc making life easier in comparision to 1 decade earlier. And nowadays I know of a few examples of musician doing great stuff using exclusively free software and on GNU/Linux systems. The guitarist Daniel Bautista is a good example, if anyone knows him or is curious to check. Although totally experimental and bizarre stuff I wouldn't recomend to everyone, the avant-garde band Sebkha-Chott is another curious example that also relies purely on free software for their live shows and other related stuff. So definitively things can be done, and not even needing the privative DAWs everyone is used to. And still with Reaper having its own native version and Wine working pretty well to open Windows programs, Jack as low latency sound server, etc... probably easy to do stuff without even needing to migrate regarding your favorite DAW. It's weird, as a person who was long fleeing away from the many problems of Microsoft and other "big tech" companies, to see so many people joining such campaigns precisely now, but kinda optimistic about that. Hopefully will see similar steps happening regarding the situation with Youtube and the move to free and federated alternatives instead (already started prioritizing on Peertube myself).

In theory I would love to go to Linux because of the ethos and Microsoft sucks balls, but in practice I would need to see some extensive documented setup by someone who operates very similar to me and has installed all of my big heavy hitter stuff that I can't live without (Spectrasonics, Kontakt libraries + Native Access, iLok), and it works smoothly. Bringing up these issues seems to result in 2 responses, neither of which acceptable for me... a) tear your hair trying to get specific software to work and maybe suffer with a buggy, crippled workflow, or b) abandon your expensive paid Windows exclusives and switch to native FOSS solutions. For someone starting out who doesn't mind having access to the best of the best virtual instruments I think Linux is well worth a try, but someone with $10k of Windows-based software the cost-benefit just ain't there. That said I don't have to worry until 2032 because I'm using W10 LTSC IoT. I would LOVE for Linux to pop off before then. But then again the year of the Linux desktop has been coming every year for, what, the last 30 years? It's like cold fusion lol I would very much prefer to not ever touch Windows 11, which for my music production rig it's safe until 2032 (at which point whatever horror after W11 will make W11 look like the halcyon days haha). My gaming rig, I have until next October with that and then that's gonna be a reaaally interesting choice.

Huh, WinBoat looks pretty slick. It does seem to be a full (partial?) Windows install running in a VM, with all the pros and cons of that. I wonder how on earth they manage licensing... For those of us for whom installing MS software is a complete no-go, there are some alternatives to Windows-in-a-VM, and here in the year of our lord 2025 things run surprisingly smoothly. Might be worth trying out these solutions first. Everything is based on WINE, of course, which is a Windows API emulation layer. You can use WINE by itself like a neanderthal, but it's much easier with a nice frontend. I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard good things about Bottles https://usebottles.com/ For games, the name of the game is proton, which is WINE + a DirectX translation layer. Again you can roll your own, but here you have a choice of a few frontends. If you're playing Steam games, just install Steam. Steam is Linux native and just works and so do 99% of games. By default Steam will only let you launch games that are "verified", but if you go to Settings -> Compatibility there is an option to enable Steam Play (what Valve has branded proton) for all titles. For some games you may or may not want to fiddle with running different the game with different versions of proton, but that is a game-specific setting. For non-steam games, first of all you can just add them as a Steam shortcut and run them that way. Works pretty great with things that are just distributed as a .exe inside a folder (I use it for Sonic fangames). But also, GoG, Epic, and Amazon storefronts have a frontend call Heroic Launcher which works incredibly well. It's how I played Baldur's Gate 3 and Witcher 3, both of which I have on GoG. There's also a miscellaneous game launcher called Lutris, but I haven't had much luck getting it to run anything successfully. In a certain sense that can never happen and in a certain sense it already has. We have to get our terminology straight a little. "Linux" the way we've been using it in this conversation is shorthand for a big glob of software, only one part is technically actually called "Linux". "Linux" is just the kernel of the OS, the very low-level part that talks to the hardware directly and provides APIs for applications to use computer resources (among other more technical duties like process scheduling and memory allocation). The rest of the OS is usually called "userland". Android is Linux in that it uses the Linux kernel, but the userland on top of Android is increasingly under Google's draconian control. They just announced new shenanigans about sideloading set to take place next year that people are actively protesting https://keepandroidopen.org/ In that sense, large companies have already taken over and displaced open-source software. Desktop Linux (what Stallman wants everyone to call GNU/Linux but that's also kind of not technically correct anymore) though has proven more resilient. Large corporations have tried shenanigans with desktop Linux, but every time they do, someone comes out of the woodwork and creates a new Linux distro without said shenanigans. A sort of "my own Linux, with blackjack and hookers" sort of strategy. The biggest threat to desktop Linux isn't so much corporate software meddling, but corporate hardware meddling. Microsoft continues to try to make Linux more and more difficult to install on your own hardware with "features" like Secure Boot. I worry that the almost-assuredly-impending mass migration to ARM-based PCs will be the opportunity that MS seizes to really lock down the hardware and make it impossible to install a non-Windows OS. (Even then there are companies like Raspberry Pi and Framework that will keep the torch going, but I worry that's not a self-sustaining ecosystem...)

We are three days out from Halloween! I am pleased to announce that almost everyone has approved of their final tracks, and the track-list itself has been approved, and I also have the front and back covers for Vol. 1 fully done! :D Now it's time to get that website done up! ♥

Yeah, the really good soundtracks in Dissidia alone would be reason enough to buy it. And as far as I remember, you could also use or unlock a kind of jukebox in the game, as well as additional music tracks. But basically, the soundtrack is just the icing on the cake of the game, which is partly a modern beat 'em up with interactive, destructible arenas and partly a very complex, extensive RPG with an atmospheric story - in other words, a really successful combination of game genres. ... Here you can get a tiny glimpse of how music, gameplay, and story come together in the second Dissidia game, Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy, for the PSP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKtTPeUk0yA And that's just the beginning of the game, which can offer over 500 hours of gameplay until you've unlocked all story parts, game modes, characters, music tracks, equipment, summons, items, and other secrets. ... Given the huge potential of this game, which is far superior even to the legendary Super Smash Bros. series, I'm already expecting a really big next-gen title for the Dissidia series, even if it's just a remake of the first two PSP games for now.

First one is "Bowser is Pissed" by PriZm https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01328 The second is "The Mother Is in Control" by Revolver Project https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01420 Both from OCR, both from 2005!

DJ Pretzel you are an amazing dude. I found OCRemix in the glorious heyday of my middle/highschool years, and I had endless fun hanging out with friends and "mining" cool new tracks that we would download and make mp3 cds from. The good old days when most of the music was techno, Hah! I am just rambling because I have been a casual explorer with no musical background for about 24 years here on the site, and wow, the love and passion of this project just oozes good vibes. One of my favorite things was DJ Pretzel's critiques. I did not have an ear for music at all, but the more I listened to his reviews/critiques/judgements and explanations of the music, I felt my own understanding and listening habits change. I began to notice little details and appreciate what the remixer was going for. As a non musician it's hard to put into words how much appreciation I have rooted in this little corner of the digital universe, even as a non contributor I have a warm feeling for this community and wish for continued success and music. Now time to go browse some old remixes from you OG admins back in the day. P.S. I am beginning my journey under a mentor to repair and play piano, so maybe one day, I will contribute to this community, or maybe my daughter when she's old enough to learn, will also be inspired by the music OCRemix has spread.