Meteo Xavier

Perhaps that level of perfectionism should be recognized as the very lofty goal it is and not pursued any further. You're NEVER going to get something to sound 100% like whatever it is you're trying to sound like. Best you can do is the best you can do with what's currently available. Additionally, I recommend getting the XV-5050 since it's a higher quality XV-5080 with even some Fantom sounds in it and can be found at half the cost of an XV-5080. The only real drawback is that it also has half the polyphony, but with a quality audio interface and some recording know-how, that problem can be worked out.

Umm, PS1 and N64 didn't really have generated/generic chip sounds/samples like the 8-bit/16-bit stuff did (that's the simple way of saying it, a more accurate and detailed assessment I'm not learned on). PS1 had everything from the Roland Sound Canvas to the sort of real studio music you can get in games today, and N64 also used a lot of Roland Sound Canvas-grade romplers for generating samples. I'd say if you're looking to get the "1998" sound or something, get you the Roland virtual Sound Canvas software (or the real thing, they're easily available) and the Korg Legacy M1 software since a lot of games even by the 32bit era were still using the M1. That will be more than a good starting place by then.

Confusion satisfied. Thank you!

Dropping it to... the same price? I'm confused.

Just restructure the theme of the album so it's not a 20th-anniversary album. Make it like a "PS1 Hidden Gems" album or something that focuses more on the themes being overlooked. You don't have to kill the entire project just because it's not the 20th anniversary anymore.

I didn't see anyone post on this, so I wanted to post it. Saw it first when George Sanger posted it on Facebook. https://www.gofundme.com/bobby-prince-medical-fund-2vs94pg This goes towards Bobby Prince's medical bills as he gets retreated for cologne cancer. The good news is the goal amount is already 85% of the way there.

It bothers me that a music maker with your level of knowledge in this line of work seems to have ignored the part where not everyone is even physically capable of singing, much less has the proper talent for it. Things like autotune exist to help people in that capacity and unless you quit doing music via software and are using hardware only, don't argue it back. Something more helpful - MIDI is a universal electronic language that lets you automate music, effects, knobs, etc. between software, hardware, and much more. It's a bigger subject than I could really delve into here, but a good, specific starting point for you is that NO, you do not need a MIDI keyboard. Your audio software should be very equipped to let you program MIDI language, so you just need to learn how your software let you go in to edit MIDI data, learn how your autotune software is set up to accept MIDI data (they're all different in my experience, you just need to refer to the manual) and get to practicing on it. An example: In FL Studio I have a plugin called "MIDI OUT" that goes into the same list as the instruments I have loaded up. In another instrument, I have to go to a window, have it assign a MIDI channel, go to MIDI OUT and set it for that same channel and now I can control things for that instrument. There are virtual knobs on MIDI OUT and I can assign them (via a universal code set called CC numbers) volume, panning, vibrato and a lot of other things. I program the MIDI language by drawing shapes in a specifically assigned window in FL Studio, like having a song fade in or fade out. If I have described that simply enough, you have a starting point for how MIDI works in a capacity that is relevant to you. MIDI is kind of a pain in the ass, but if I can learn how to do it, you can. It just takes some practice and memorizing where to assign things. Consult your manual, look up some tutorials on Youtube and practice it. You'll get it.

You should have more hope than that - it's in the process of being mastered on a $150,000 mastering console by someone who's basically volunteering professional grade skill and equipment for the project (as in for free). So, like everything else in this project, it's taking some time, but that time will be worth it. I'll check on the goings on for that here soon. Everyone's been busy for the last 6 weeks. I myself have been battling a relapse into clinical depressiveness and that's been gumming up my schedule (which is already at 56 work hours a week to help pay the $4,000 I lost in car damages and more over the summer) and frequently annoying me with existential confusion and distraction. I've had to take whatever breaks I can to ease down on stress while the meds do their job, otherwise it gets worse, but with Halloween over and my personal surroundings improving, I'm getting back into a functional state where I can devote more direct effort to this project again. Such is life, but the bottom line is that things are still moving forward, nothing's stopped, just slow goings.

My response is going to come off rude, but I'm just confused by your question and not trying to be snide: you know there's quite a lot of indie-retro videogames all over the place these days, right? STEAM, GOG, Xbox Arcade, PS Indies, Nintendo eStore and many other places feature a lot of games that aren't AAA and have/want soundtracks to match. Now is it easier to get into that market than it is to do realistic sounding music? Probably not, but there is a very existent market for chiptunes and music that doesn't need to sound realistic to work.

Not sure how one would capture that vibe in only 15 seconds. At that point, it's more of a fanfare you're looking for than something like a battle track. That might be what I suggest as a direction.

On the other hand, children are potential gaming buddies you literally make. Kids still like to game, don't they? Throwing this out there because the subject of being a parent on OCR tends to skew towards "Ugh, don't have kids, they always take time away from games/hobbies." - It's not that bad. Parents find time to play games too, they just have to sacrifice some of it and work-around it so they can also have the deeply life-enriching experience of building a family. Certainly your parents still had hobbies when you were growing up, right? They didn't just split all their time between working and taking care of you.

It happens in your 30s. You just keep looking around local and online as best you can and fill it up where you can. Get outside the box and try things you probably wouldn't have tried before. Pretty hard to be more specific as to what things those are from there, but with the will to move can inevitably reveal the path to get there.

120 piece orchestra according to Wikipedia.

Yessir, that would be a particularly sharp/dirty sounding Saw Lead with some monophonic glide and vibrato modulation on it. A lot of major synth VSTs will have something like it - Synth 1, Zebra 2, Omnisphere, z3ta 2... Particularly, I think you'll want to get Zebra 2 for that because someone here made some Zebra 2 presets that were based on some of the later Mega Man games and one was a particularly dirty bendy Saw Lead that sounded pretty close to what you're looking for there. Not the pinpoint answer you deserve, but hopefully that will get you closer to what you seek.

Challenge accepted.

Yeah we dove off Cape Rational in this topic some time ago. When it comes to VGM composers and $0.37 being owed, you just can't fuckin' reason with'em. #truth

Probably the same reason artists pissed off about missing out on $0.17 worth of royalties and saying Ocremix is suddenly NOW doing something illegal and immoral are staying to argue it and the moral tenements of OCR instead of leaving. If you can call that a "reason".

That you guys flipping your shit over this are grossly unrealistic over how you think you're supposed to be compensated for work you've done here. You don't actually know the value of your work, but you want it compensated anyway. You had no agreement to be paid for what you did, but you want it compensated anyway. You didn't even do the work hoping to be directly compensated for it, but you want it compensated anyway. And any reminder of how unrealistic this is is called "nihilistic" and "defeatist". The point I'm trying to prove is that the level of criticism here is unreasonable. The response to it seems to amount only to, "All I'm hearing is I'm not getting paid and I won't listen to anything else until I am!" It's like, well, damn, not sure what else to tell you then. Any answers to any follow up questions or responses you might have are already here in the topic, I'll refer you to them.

I can agree with you it probably should've had a proper announcement, though this conversation and its potential fallout would've happened anyway. It STILL ignores that that money only goes back to site costs, not to the administration staff. It's a NON-PROFIT, that means no one profits from it - not them, not I, not you. Really, you should be directing your complaints to the site itself, but since it's not a living entity, it's going to be kinda hard to get anywhere doing that.

Fair call. I didn't see the part where they said they didn't want to share much. Made the appropriate edit.

It might have something to do with the fact that artists are not being commissioned or contracted to provide that work, they are doing so of their own volition, submitting them to a site that is well known to be entirely a passion project for VGM instead of a marketplace for artists. You have to have an agreement for payment of work to take place. You can't just start something, put it somewhere, expect money to come in and then complain to the nearest possible administration when it doesn't. It doesn't work that way. It never has. Why is this so hard for artists to understand? Better question, why is pointing things like this out considered "nihilistic" and "defeatist"? My lord.

It IS pretty shocking because it gloriously overlooks a lot of key points that goes into that for this context. You guys just see it as black and white and call it protecting your work and its value, I call it chasing windmills and confusing a stubborn attitude for a principle. Let's figure out how a completely subjective item should be determined an objective value that also somehow has no limit for how high that value should be: 1. What is the value of a single remix you've done? What is the value of your time spent working on this based on your lifestyle expenses and spending habits? 2. What is the estimated value of the tools you used to work on this? 3. What is the estimated value of its potential of exposure? 4. How many times has your remix been played on Youtube? 5. What is the value per video view? 6. Has it directly contributed to additional album sales or music commissions? 7. Have you signed an appropriate tax form relating to your work on OCR? 8. Are you paying taxes or taking tax incentives from your work on OCR? 9. Have the companies you have re-interpreted IP from commissioned you to do so? 10. If YES to 9, what were the contractually agreed-upon payments you are expecting from them? 11. What was the final rating of quality for your work as agreed by committee of the OCR judges and conglomerated public perception? Now take the sum total of that and apply your state's current income tax percentage. Go ahead and work on the math there - in the meantime you can answer why you seem to think just doing work itself deserves to be rewarded without any additional context to that point and why you deserve to be paid for work you were not commissioned or contracted or to do and did completely on your own compulsion for a website that was well known to not provide financial incentives for doing so in lieu of simply being a popular passion project for celebrating VGM.

Non-profit is not the same thing as a charity. The money being made only goes back to administrative costs and, again, it's really not that much to start with. DJP has paid more out of his own pocket to keep OCR running all this time than anyone else has been owed anything resulting from it, so again I remain unimpressed with the criticism of it.

I'm late to the conversation, but I feel compelled to comment anyway. I'm baffled at the extreme reactions this topic brought out in people, particularly those of you getting panties rocketed up the wazoo over not making money for your fan remixes of music. This line sticks out to me particularly. "Great, instead it goes to the publisher and probably some to YouTube - who can make money off a totally for fun fan arrangement I made. [...] If there is going to be money involved in fan arrangements, I'd just not bother with OCR or YouTube and licence the tracks myself." Good lord, dude. Go check your couch cushion, you'll find your royalties there. These things, from my continued experience and reference, really don't generate people much money. You're not missing hundreds of dollars here, more likely, you're missing hundreds of cents. It's not worth getting upset over. I'm also baffled why so many of you are opposed to Youtube's ads from a financial point of view anyway. Youtube is in the running for the most important, most used and most influential website since time began on planet Earth and has billions upon billions of videos, data exchange and much more that it never asked a penny from you to provide unless you yourself were purchasing advertising on there. Did you really think Google is doing all that for free? If Youtube wasn't doing things like that, there wouldn't be a Youtube where you'd be complaining about your lost royalties in the first place. It's taking a fair amount of restraint for me to remain civil instead of diving into more far biting, sardonic criticism I feel is better owed to this sense of entitlement from grown ***damn adults with college-level educations. I don't get why you did something for free, without the idea it was going to directly make you money, and then suddenly change that mindset when something changes to make you think you could've directly made (not much) money from it or where that chump change is going. Is it the principle of the thing? That's just something people say when they do something knowing it's not really logical or reasonable in the first place and still want to complain. If it's copyright, Nintendo and Square-Enix and CAPCOM and Konami and NAMCO et al all know how to get a hold of us if they want. If you're worried about copyright, you best stop doing fan remixes in the first place - it's potential infringement from the first note on. In short, I feel nothing about this warrants the criticism it's receiving. I feel this has at least some to do with my overarching thesis that composers these days are adopting an irrational, ironclad, black-and-white financial defense mechanism for any audio they do no matter the scale or how trivial it is. Very little has actually changed, so very big critical backlashes for it are unwarranted.

Edit: Nevermind, I missed the part where you requested some details be kept private. I wonder if I see a doctor about this because I keep missing details as I read things.